wickeddarkman

Gravedigger or any other card that can bring back a creature from the graveyard or into your hand.

No recursion loop for the nightmare ???

There's a new trick in town.
Playing fight spells on your obliterator.
People who have been doing that haven't figured out what to do if the opponent has no creatures.

I however remember forbidden orchard.
(Which provides both black and green mana).

Simple...
To complete the loop.

Lotus-eye mystic

It even supports both of the major themes

Those that you've got two of...

Yeah, pentad prism will be powerfull.
There's a bunch of black/blue proliferate designs out there, but I think wizards intended them to include white for sunscape Familiar so each spell just costs a black or a blue.

It's a longtime favourite of mine.
Each time there's a new set with counters I always return to it.

I love seeing pentad prism in proliferate designs, but I suspect oil counters will also be quite good.
There's that common elf that can untap depletion lands.

It's funny, but one day they will probably make a card that can both transfer and alter counters between different cards/players.
Transforming planeswalker points into poison counters, killing an opponents planeswalker to kill them too for example.

It's been a while since I've talked about [[fate transfer]]

In search of greatness always reminds me of the old birthing pod days.
You'll want to build up a manabase that can play out the deck naturally, then in games where you get the greatness you will see a speed up of the deck, but by putting the focus on the mana your deck will be able to compensate for games where you don't get it.

Talons First strike + deathtouch changeling should be an easy include.

40 forests ???
Must be a typo ;)

Your copy doubled...

You people already tried this scam.
It didn't work the last time.
Remember whose posts gary stopped, and stop yourself before making that same mistake all over again.

Besides, you were very much present at that timeline, and according to my notes one of the bad guys.

This is likely just a distraction from my work on mtggoldfish, but ain't going to work.

Indeed...
Some test more that others.

Haywire mite reminds me of caustic Caterpillar :)
The mites are pretty powercreep if you ask me...

You've got the illusion of control nailed down.
But in reality you got no control in here.
And so it all sort of "capsizes"
Perhaps another run to pick up the lose ends ? ;)

I remember that time too.
It was before it ended up in enduring renewal designs.

The key to use it is to have lots of cheap "enter the battlefield" effects where at least 1 is involving lifegain.
It's designs were also connected to familiar builds and in later days, like the shards of alara cycle, it saw some action again because of the focus on multicolor. Parasitic strix was the focus then.

These days I'd try out the Familiar version by digging deep in old decks for the esper familiars list and I'd throw in some powerfull stuff that can piggyback on that, like gray merchant.

You can always bounce the harpy which makes it very hard to stop, so the black and blue creatures you bounce must be resilient on their
Own.

The deck might be best as heavy multicolored just to gain a wide array of creatures with abilities.
I've been thinking of this card for about a month as I brewed one build last new year and was considering to revisit it by posting it again at the end of 2022 starting up a yearly "harpy new year" tradition with focus on harpies.

I might brew something with this soon.

A short look at black and blue at that time reveals a bunch:

Gravedigger, highway robber, Phyrexian rager, Rishadan cutpurse, scrivener.

Of all these, scrivener was the most powerfull. By using familiars you could cast it for cheap and replay instants like disenchant. Graveyard digger was a backup, and highway robber is a way to balance the life total, though access to scrivener and instants might have had other lifegain tools. Scrivener also brought counterspells back to the hand.

All of this was premodern. I'm pretty sure you'd be able to modernize it from here.

I once wrote an article about how a majority of winning decks contained 13 creatures.
It was based on at least 1000 decklists from top 8.

These days I suspect there are another type of reason behind most of top 8 containing around 13 creatures.

They ARE more fragile that way.

Wotc actually advises players to have 18 creatures, and they base it on their own collection of data.

Heh...
I'll give you a hand here ;)
Mothdust Changeling will power up silkbind faerie into a virtual tap-engine, demanding just 2 mana for each tap.

In general, wotc has become very supportive of most meme themes