This past weekend I managed to get some more games in with my friend, and did some serious playtesting. Not only did I find that the improvements to my deck were working wonders, I also found that it seemed that I could make a few more tweaks. The Aetherflux resevoir that I built this entire deck around wasn’t helping. He plays some pretty fast decks, so it was seeming that getting a life total of 50+ was going to be near impossible. That also meant scratching that other card I had thought about adding, mainly because its win condition of 40 life wasn’t going to be all that achieveable either. I also wanted to get copies of some of the singles I had, along with removing some of the cards that sounded cool but weren’t really doing all that much for me (like Angels).

I played two best of threes against my buddy, and used this White/Black deck the whole time. I easily destroyed his Blue/Green deck but that is his less powerful one. His deck that gave me the most trouble before, the Red/Black is fast, but my deck has enough sustain and slow down potential that it actually counters his aggro style. I managed to win that best of three as well. He was a little on the butthurt side, because he had played that deck against other friends and always won. Just goes to show that nearly anything can be countered given the time and resources. I’m also glad that it works against multiple types of decks.

Some additional tweaks have been made since. I’ve made sure that every card now either has some form of life gain, control or allows me to bring units back from the dead. I also managed to find more singles that fall in line with this deck though I wanted to buy another Angel of Invention and those are out of stock right now at Troll and Toad — very unfortunate. Here’s how my deck stands now (changes in bold):

Lands:
x2 Forsaken Sanctuary
x1 Unknown Shores
x1 Crumbling Vestige
x1 Blighted Steppe
x1 Warped Landscape
x8 Plains
x8 Swamp +1

Creatures:
x4 Aerial Responder +1
x4 Fairgrounds Warden +1
x2 Zulaport Cutthroat
x2 Restoration Gearsmith
x2 Lone Rider
x1 Demon of Dark Schemes
x1 Sengir Vampire
x2 Night Market Lookout +1
x1 Gonti, Lord of Luxury
x1 Kambal, Consul of Allocation
x1 Thalia, Heretic Cathar
x1 Thalia’s Lancers
x1 Sujugator Angel
x1 Angel of Invention
x1 Aegis Angel
x1 Serra Angel

Artifacts:
x1 Aetherflux Reservoir
x2 Scrapheap Scrounger
x2 Prakhata Pillar-Bug
x1 Noxious Gearhulk
x4 Filigree Familiar

Spells:
x2 Diabolic Tutor
x2 Shamble Back
x3 Fumigate +1
x2 Skywhaler’s Shot
x2 Authority of the Consuls
x3 Fortuitous Find +2
x1 Campaign of Vengeance
x1 Collective Effort
x1 Gideon’s Reproach

I’ve maintained the same sort of theme, but removed cards that wouldn’t give me some sort of life, and added a few that would. Many of the changes were for cards I already had in my stash, but I did spend another $10 on Troll and Toad for singles. I still want to add another Angel of Invention to the deck, and will as soon as one becomes available.

The next project is making more decks, and then attempting to do this process of elimination over again. I have a Red/Blue that is focusing on artifacts and control/burn spells. I also have a mono-Black zombie deck in the works. Trying to decide what to do with Green, as I have a planeswalker there, but don’t know if I want to do mono or dual colored. More to come as that happens. Thanks for reading!