4 Bottle Gnomes
3 Dross Harvester
3 Leonin Elder
4 Pentavus
3 Death Grasp
2 Diabolic Tutor
2 Grave Pact
4 Renewed Faith
2 Skeleton Shard
3 Test of Endurance
3 Well of Lost Dreams
12 Swamp
4 Ancient Den
4 Caves of Koilos
3 Tainted Field
4 Temple of the False God |
  Stay
Healthy - Stay Smart.
Description of deck by it's author
(quoted):
Ah yes. As I threatened, I'm going to dust off a deck from two
months ago. Oh, what a different place the world was then. Type 1 had
never been horror-stricken by Trinisphere. Standard had never been
horror-stricken by Skullclamp. I had never been horror-stricken by Uncle
Walter's Christmas fruitcake, otherwise known as Aunt Sally. I was in my
Pentavus phase. Pentavus inflamed my senses and invigorated my mind! It
did everything: It was a catalyst for repeated comes-into-play effects.
It was a catalyst for repeated leaves-play effects. It was a 5/5 fattie.
It spawned armies of flying weenies. It would let you block incoming
creatures indefinitely (pop out a token, block, sacrifice the token). It
was a floor cleaner and a dessert topping. I couldn't stop finding uses
for it. One of my favorite decks paired it with Dross Harvester. The
Harvester seems like a Suicide Black tool. But if you look closer, you
can see that it's actually an engine.
Imagine having a Pentavus, a Dross Harvester, and a Leonin Elder in
play. You pay , move a counter off Pentavus, create a Pentavite (or, in
my parlance, a “dude”), and gain 1 life. You then pay 1, sac the dude,
restore Pentavus to its intact 5/5 form, and gain 2 life. 2 mana = 3
life. You need to do this quite a lot to overcome the Harvester's
harvesting of 4 of your life each turn, but you clearly have at least 7
mana available or Pentavus wouldn't be on the table. What's the end
result of this? You're not futzing around with counters/tokens for your
health, are you? Well, actually, you are—and as your life total keeps
going up, up, up, a fine plan is to cap things off with a Test of
Endurance. Life-gain your way to victory!
At this point, various other parts of the deck adamantly suggested
themselves. A combo deck wants Tutors and card-drawing (at this point,
Phyrexian Arenas). A lifegain deck wants Renewed Faith and Death Grasp.
If Pentavus isn't around, the Bottle Gnomes/Skeleton Shard combo
provides some nice redundancy, and keeps the comes-into-play and
leaves-play triggers happy. And wherever you find sustainable
leaves-play effects in a black deck, you'll also find one of my favorite
cards, Grave Pact. That's a pretty tidy package that does some
unexpected things. Playing with Dross Harvester is walking a tightrope,
and it certainly acts differently than a conventional deck. (I scoff at
your boringness, Mr. Affinity Deck!)
But then there's Darksteel. It's my job to promote the new set, show off
how cool the new cards are, and get you all to buy boxes and boxes and
boxes of it. (Psst, hey you: Buy some Darksteel.) So I better find a way
to improve the deck with Darksteel, right? Right, because I found a way.
It's fourth from the end of the alphabetical spoiler, so I was nervous
there for a while, but Well of Lost Dreams seems like a very nice fit.
It replaces the Arenas, which ate away at the life total the deck
strives to increase—and the Arenas only let you draw one extra card a
turn anyway. What's up with that? Cycle a Renewed Faith with the Well in
play, and you've got a 3W uncounterable instant (yes, I'm ignoring
Stifle) that says, “Gain 2 life and draw 3 cards.” Sounds like a good
deal to me. The Well is friends with the Elder, with the Harvester, and
especially with the Gnomes. (Which is actually pretty strange—when's the
last time a Well ever showed up to your birthday party, or took care of
your cats while you were away? Puzzling, puzzling.)
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