MTGO: The Best Laid Plans...

So in my last post, I hinted at this card as the key to my next deck. And while it's true that the next deck I built was focused around Silence, and I still am tuning it to be more streamlined and competitive, in the process I came upon another deck idea which I liked EVEN MORE and I just could not put off building it and testing it out. So I will come back to my Silence deck if this one starts to falter or I lose interest, but I am just so excited that I've actually found a 'rogue' deck that so far has proved to be VERY competitive.

So, this deck started with two cards that I've been using in most of my other decks: Mimic Vat and Culling Dais. The Dais lets me force a creature under the Vat and at only 2 casting cost and 1 colorless to activate the draw, it's actually EXTREMELY efficient card advantage.

I was using that combo to power my Silence deck and the intent was to use the Vat to generate a Mnemonic Wall every turn to return Silence back to hand and effectively lock down the opponent. The problem with that deck was that I often was too low on life by the time I could cast the Mnemonic, sac it, and then start production. So I thought of adding some creatures that give me life when they come into play.

But once I thought of that, I immediately recalled a 'Tier 2' deck that was making the rounds back in the previous Standard - a Mono-white deck built around various creatures with life gainm or benefiting from life gain. While some of those cards rotated out with Scars of Mirrodin, what was added actually made it much more viable. Here is the decklist and a basic rundown of how the deck works afterwards.

3x Mimic Vat
2x Culling Dais
4x Ajani's Pridemate
4x Lone Missionary
4x Serra Ascendant
4x Soul's Attendant
3x Sun Titan
2x Survival Cache
2x Ajani Goldmane
3x Origin Spellbomb
4x Day of Judgment
2x Emeria, the Sky Ruin
4x Kabira Crossroads
19x Plains

So it's essentially using the Pridemate, Missionary, Ascendant, and Attendant which is the previously used lifegain engine to keep me alive and get me to either 30 life (to transform the Ascendant to a 6/6 flyer) or pump up the Pridemate enough to be formidable. What is so much nicer is that I can now use the Culling Dais and the Mimic Vat to have unlimited life gain creatures and with a single Lone Missionary under the Mimic Vat I can shut down almost any offense.

    

    

The Day of Judgment lets me reset the board and also lets me use the vat to copy my opponents creatures (Primeval Titan in monowhite!). The Sun Titan is an additional big finisher as well as lets me bring back my creatures in an alternate way (as well as the artifacts if they get destroyed). The Ajani is a late addition and I swapped him in for Baneslayers since he is cheaper and gives me a little bit more flexibility.

Survival Cache and Origin Spellbomb are mainly there as cantrips with benefits. And finally the Emeria, the Sky Ruin as a third option for bringing back my lifegain creatures.

    

As for the Sideboard, I am still tweaking it and it is still not perfect for the metagame but I feel like my options are a bit limited. What is in there right now can be broken down like this:

2x Journey to Nowhere - Eldrazi
3x Kor Firewalker - Red Deck Wins
3x Leonin Arbiter - Eldrazi and Titan/Valakut Ramp
1x Luminarch Ascension - Any blue control
2x Ratchet Bomb - Any weenie deck
2x Revoke Existence - White mystic artifact
2x Solemn Offering - White mystic artifact (more for Boros)

Now I know in previous articles I have said the 2-man Constructed Tournaments are a horrible option from a pure financial risk/reward standpoint, but I have been loving this deck and felt so confident in it and my schedule was so out of synch with the dailies that I threw caution to the wind and started playing in the 2-Mans. Needless to say, this deck rocked. While definitely not 'broken', it has won about 70% of the time, and I would say some of the earlier losses were due to need for refinement. That may simply be from complete surprise on my opponent's behalf but I'll just pretend it's cause my rogue deck is just that awesome.

At the moment, I'm 2-0 and waiting for round 3 in the Standard Constructed Daily, so I'm hoping this will be the rogue deck I had been trying to find!