Has the ability for infinite mana, infinite 1/1 Spirits, infinite life, infinite +1/+1 counters and infinite damage. Lots of ways to tutor the different creatures you need with Birthing Pod and various instants/sorceries for creatures or any other card you might need. Plenty of removal and a few ways of regenerating/protecting your creatures. Great synergy in the whole deck with tons of different ways to win.
Vizier of Remedies + Devoted Druid = Infinite mana
Archangel of Thune + Spike Feeder = Infinite +1/+1 counters & life
Walking Ballista in hand + Vizier of Remedies + Devoted Druid = Infinite Damage
Melira or Vizier of Remedies + Kitchen Finks + sac outlet (Viscera Seer, Cartel Aristocrat, Nantuko Husk, Varolz, the Scar-Striped) = Infinite life, scrys, or +2/+2 on Nantuko Husk. Add Abzan Ascendancy in play = Infinite 1/1 Spirits.
Mana combo + Duskwatch Recruiter lets you search your whole deck and pull out every single creature.
Mana combo + Nylea, God of the Hunt = Infinite +2/+2 activations for a lethal trampler.
Mana combo + Hangarback Walker in hand + sac outlet = Infinite 1/1 Thopters.
There are 14 different ways to tutor for creatures and 4 ways to search for any card. This doesn’t include Duskwatch Recruiter’s ability or the search we get from Ranger of Eos. We also have a few different ways of bringing any important creatures we may have lost back from our graveyard and directly onto the battlefield with Karmic Guide and Reveillark. Liliana, Heretical Healer can also bring back a creature with her first minus ability after she flips into a planeswalker. Which should happen relatively fast since we tend to be sacrificing our own creatures anyway.
Den Protector, Eternal Witness, Greenwarden of Murasa and Volrath’s Stronghold can get any card we choose back to our hands or into our library. The blink effect from Restoration Angel lets us do this more than once. So without graveyard hate in play, our cards are never fully lost.
For ramping, Gaea’s Cradle offers a lot of mana because of our high creature count and Cryptolith Rite turns all of our creatures into mana dorks. Rishkar in combination with all of our +1/+1 counters does the same thing and we have multiple ways to get those counters on all of our creatures. There’s also access to infinite mana as mentioned above if we can get a Devoted Druid and Vizier of Remedies in play. Keep in mind all the options available to search for any creature we need creates the possibility of comboing off early in the game and out of nowhere, creating a constant threat our opponent needs to be wary of.
For pumping our creatures with counters to go wide with multiple threats, the deck has a few ways of doing this. Mikaeus, the Lunarch is a good one, especially if you have a decent amount of mana to start with. You can pump our whole team with a counter every turn. Archangel of Thune places a counter on every creature with any life gain trigger. Meaning our Scavenging Ooze and Deathrite Shaman become even more useful.
Ajani, Mentor of Heroes is also great for counters. Giving us 3 every turn divided as we choose. He also gives us yet another way to filter through our deck for creatures we need. Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit will also keep growing our creatures with the bolster effect being triggered every time we have a creature come into play. Abzan Ascendancy will put a counter on all of our creatures as well, but timing is important as it will only do this once.
Gavony Township is another one and something to do with any free mana we have or if we don’t have any spells we want to cast that turn and it also beefs up the whole team. Remember, all of these counters while Rishkar, Peema Renegade is on the field turns all of our creatures into mana producers, giving us more gas to keep playing spells. Duskwatch Recruiter gives us a place to dump all that mana to find more creatures to play and if we find Walking Ballista, we use counters for damage to hit our opponent or their creatures.
Knight of the Reliquary makes sure we can tutor for any land we might want, while also producing a good amount of card draw thanks to Tireless Tracker, who also gets to be a large threat on his own in the process. Dark Confidant also provides good card draw and since we can sacrifice him after we get enough use, or if our life total becomes too low, he doesn’t turn into a liability.
With Whisperwood Elemental, Mother of Runes and Loxodon Hierarch, we have a few ways of protecting our creatures, adding resiliency and keeping our combo pieces on the board. Whisperwood Elemental is nice because it takes the creatures we do lose and turns them into manifested cards from our library. So we still end up with things on the board if we do get hit by a Wrath of God effect and are unable to protect ourselves with Loxodon Hierarch or Selfless Spirit post-sideboard.
Yavimaya Hollow also gives us a way to regenerate a single creature after spot removal or to protect something important from a sweep. Other lands we have include “manlands” (Hissing Quagmire, Shambling Vent and Stirring Wildwood) that give us more things to do with our free mana on an empty board and will make sure we aren’t left with nothing after a board sweep. Westvale Abbey adds another potential win condition if we can activate it to flip into it’s creature version with flying, lifelink, indestructibility and haste. Or it can produce tokens to chump block or sacrifice to scry with Viscera Seer.
For removal, there are 8 different cards for that, 5 of which will target any nonland permanent. So if we have some enchantment/artifact cards or even planeswalkers that are giving us trouble, we have the ability to remove them from the game. Aura Shards is a very useful card in our deck because of all the creatures we have so it’s not likely any artifacts or enchantments will stay on the board long regardless.
So with all of our combo options, versatility and creatures that can be good threats on their own, there are a lot of different angles of attack and I’ve seen this deck win out of nowhere. It works much like a classic Birthing Pod toolbox deck, making it fun to play and when you get the hang of your sequencing, it’s hard to stop. The weaknesses the deck has are mostly in the area of hand disruption and board wipes, which are usually large issues for most decks. Obviously control decks with a high number of counter spells make it difficult as well.
As far as other variables go, I think it has a good position on most things. It threatens combos more than other decks I’ve seen, it has the ability to go the long game as well as end it quickly if left unchecked and has answers to most things you’ll encounter. I’ve had tons of fun playing it and would recommend this or a deck similar to it for somebody looking to win a competition or stick it to the guys at your local game store.