Yeah okay, that makes sense. I guess I should have known, tbh. It works the same as the life gain concept, you can chump, and you're fine with it, because it just fills your GY for later. Duh, my bad.

I'm curious. Has anyone tried a less Janky build. Like for example, one that splashes blue into the standard lifegain/reanimator deck for maniac, and soothsayer. Also, what about Doubling Season to speed this up tremendously? Or is it fast enough already?

I'd have tried viewtopic.php?p=285266#p285266

-2 Doubling Season, -2 either PC or Rune Demon (maybe -1 each, but I hate decks like that)
+3 Soothsayer, +1 Maniac

It's already pretty fast. Games end around turn 8-12 for me.. the only reason they go.long is if someone nukes Seance.. and the only players that have done that are the 80-100 card fat stacks who you will beat anyway.

Gotcha.

Basically just an offshoot of my Abzan Seance list. Wanted to see if I could jam Sultai Soothsayer into the list, which also opened up Dinrova Horror.

Changes from my Abzan list (not including the mana changes).

-2 Saruli Gatekeepers because we no longer have the Gates to make them worthwhile.

-1 Armament Corps to make room for Sultai Soothsayer.

-1 Spider Spawning because 1 seems like the perfect number. We already have Seance, Sheoldred, Dead Reckoning, and Treasured Find actively working against it, and we almost never need to draw multiples (regardless of if we are using it early on to stall, or later on to set up a Craterhoof smash) because of Flashback. With all the cheap cantrips and the mill we see it pretty often still only being a singleton as well.

-1Dead Reckoning because I have found the deck doesn't often need it. I stuck with just a single Dead Reckoning because I really like having it around though. The deck has plenty of high end to make it decent removal, it functions as a 3rd copy of Treasured Find for Craterhoof/Sheoldred/Rune-Scarred. I also particularly love its interaction with Shadowborn Demon. Cast Demon, kill an opponents creature, next turn sac the Demon to itself, Dead Reckoning on the Demon to kill a second target of your opponents, next turn draw Demon and play it again to kill a third creature. I can draw into it pretty consistently when I need it as well even as a singleton, with all the cheap cantrips, Soothsayers, Rune-Scarred to fetch, and Treasured Find to pull it back should it get milled.

The additions were:

+3 Sultai Soothsayer because they are just too good not to be running in a GY based deck. The addition has certainly helped the deck keep the GY stocked (which it did at a much slower pace as Abzan because it ran off of just Satyr Wayfinder alone). They also block well, and work well with counters from Armament Corps. Not to mention the amazing potential they have for digging through your deck for whatever you may need at the time.

+2 Dinrova Horror because we are running now. These are mostly here because they function as an out to a lot of annoying threats this deck has no other real answers to. Artifacts and Enchantments mostly, but it still works well enough to bounce+discard a creature as removal. As usual the obvious Seance/Sheoldred synergy to abuse the ETB. Works decently well with Dead Reckoning as well to keep the removal train running.

Admittedly a bit different than what most people here are posting. Trust me when I say the deck may look very top-heavy (and it honestly is), but it has worked extremely well for me so far playing online, with little to no mana issues. All the cheap cantrips and Satyr/Soothsayer help you along nicely with mana, and I am not ashamed to admit I have actually fetched land with Rune-Scarred (usually via Seance) a couple times to hit the 3rd to play a Craterhoof Behemoth sitting in my hand waiting to win the game right there.

The deck doesn't run any outs to getting milled out, like Laboratory Maniac or Elixir of Immortality, but I don't feel this is a huge loss. Dedicated Mill decks (ones that try and Mill you) are extremely few and far between in the meta, and the few other decks that can actively try and mill you out likely are either too busy milling themselves to further their own game plan, or otherwise aren't going to try and mill you even if they can just to avoid doing your job for you and giving you even more gas.

As for stalling out and milling yourself out before you can actively close out a game. I have yet to actually have this happen to me. More often than not, by the time I get to the point I am going to mill myself out, I have already won via grinding out a ton of value with Seance/Sheoldred, set up a Spawning/Captain+Craterhoof win. The only place I may feel like this would be really vulnerable would be against something like a Turbo-Fog deck, but again, relatively few and far between in the meta.

Eon I think it is fine to run a build with satyr and oracle as the only self-mill. And there are ways to make a curve like that work. But the build looks to me like an uneasy compromise between turbo self mill, which can reliably hit seance, and a more conventional fatty deck with graveyard support.

With a curve like that the absence of at least cultivate is a bit confusing. Planar cleansing is IMO more desirable as a board reset than the small amount of lifegain from lone missionary. Moreover, you have this gap in your curve between 2 and 5 mana - why not add some rescue from the underworlds in order to get your RSDs online as quickly as possible?

Of course everything I said would probably require replacing a creature with a spell. It is obvious you are crafting your deck for maximum seance synergy, but if you are doing that then I would like to see more ways of getting seance back. Treasured find #3, maybe an archaeomancer, etc.

Treasured Find has been more than enough in practice to make sure I can stick a Seance when I need to, at least thus far (roughly 25 games so far with this new list).

As I said before, the curve looks absolutely atrocious, which is understandable, but it actually works better than you would expect. The deck has enough 2 drops to be able to play them out until you hit the 4-5 mana mark, at which point you usually get a Seance/Spawning/Soothsayer/Armament Corps, which is more often than enough to get you up to enough mana to start dropping 6-8 drops.

I personally don't feel like the Turbo-Mill strategy is worth it, at least in regards to Hedron Crab. It certainly is a good mill enabler, but outside of that and being a creature, it doesn't really do a whole lot for the deck. It doesn't particularly mesh well with Seance/Sheoldred because it lacks an ETB, and outside of being a creature for Spawning, really is just a completely dead card when milled (because it doesn't really do anything worthwhile with Seance/Sheoldred/Dead Reckoning).

The deck honestly doesn't even need the GY components to win games, which I think is where its real strength is. Turbo charging out the mill to keep a steady stream of gas for Seance or get a big early Spawning is nice, but this deck can get there off of stalling off of chumps and lifegain into huge bombs every turn. Captain of the Watch is an absolute monster with Craterhoof, and the two of them win me a ton of games with or without Seance.

Honestly the deck can get there off of just the 5 drops as well. I had one game last night where I won off of an Armament Corps putting counters on 2x Soothsayers. Two 3/6 Soothsayers and a 4/4 Corps finished out the game pretty quick.

At this point, the only change I would make to the deck would be maybe removing the single copy of Dead Reckoning for something else. A lot of options come to mind, Gravedigger or maybe the 3rd copy of Treasured Find as you suggested. As I mentioned before though, I like having at least a single copy around because having some sort of removal is nice, and it meshes well with our removal/ETB creatures like Shadowborn Demon and Dinrova Horror. It is certainly the weakest card in the deck though, so I could certainly see a push towards that 3rd Treasured Find if for nothing else than for consistency with Seance.

Edit: In this case, I think the gap between the 2 and 5 spots is actually beneficial to the deck. This deck REALLY needs to hit its colors on time to not be terrible, which requires running a glut of tap lands. I feel like the abundance of 2 drops and the lack of other cards in the curve help to alleviate this issue though. It allows us to do things like this.

T1: Tapland

T2: Forest/Plain/Swamp, Visionary/Satyr/Wall/Missionary

T3: Tapland, Visionary/Satyr/Wall/Missionary

T4: Forest/Plain/Swap, Seance or Visionary/Satyr/Wall/Missionary x2; or Tapland, Visionary/Satyr/Wall/Missionary.

T5+: Bombs away.

As for Missionary, I have found the Lifegain to be integral to staying alive a lot of times. The original Abzan build ran 2x Saruli Gatekeeper on top of the Missionaries/Wurms for the lifegain. The only reason I am not using them now is because the new mana and the lack of Gates. Having a 2 power chump blocker helps a lot early on as well. Remember here that our early game survival is based almost completely around chumping with stuff like Satyr/Visionary/Wall. Missionary provides that early game chumping ability, while also giving us some lifegain to offset decks that are able to work around our armies of weenies (like decks with a lot of early flying threats), and it trades up better than the rest of our early creatures. Missionary not only soaks up a single hit from Kiln Fiend from the lifegain for example, but also effectively trades with it, unlike the rest of our early cards, other examples abound such as Rabblemaster. They also obviously provide that Seance synergy by getting us more life out of the GY, and providing that same chumping/trading ability when Seanced in. They also work decently with Armament Corps as well. Getting 2-3 early Missionaries followed by an Armament Corps can actually allow a GY based deck like this to have some pretty damn quick and aggressive starts in the early game.

Hedron Crab doesn't mesh well with Seance and Sheoldred? It feeds them at a ridiculous rate and doesn't set you back on mana. You just have to play your land for turn.

And it does absolutely squat if it gets milled itself, which is pretty likely to happen when you are running other stuff like Satyr and Soothsayer. It also does very little to help you stay alive in the early game, since you more often than not don't want to be chumping with it, unlike all of the rest of the other early plays (which gain you value as soon as they are played, chump to keep you alive, and then come back later to give you even more value with Seance/Sheoldred, and potentially chump again or at least dissuade an attack for a turn).

Edit: Oh, and it makes the mana more difficult because you ideally want to be able to hit on T1-2 to start getting their effect as early as possible.

The crab has been super good for me. Not everything has to have an ETB in a Seance deck.. as long as it has other synergies with the graveyard.. Sheoldred is a perfect example.

I also don't agree with the 'bad mana' argument AT ALL. Now that 12 taplands = 9 sources of everything in a 4 color deck.. janky mana is not an issue.

I think it would be easier to look at that list and offer a meaningful critique if you could tell us how you want the deck to function, how you designed it etc. You have tended to emphasize how well the deck works for you in actual play. That is fine, but it is easier for us to understand your choices if we know more about the deck.

It looks like you are trying to set up a self mill deck that does not use as many narrow combo only cards and generally has a robust board presence. For example, the crab really is the best self mill in the game. If you have crabs you will likely mill seance or RSD and can lean more heavily on that game plan.

Another way of looking at your deck is that it is a fatty deck with some graveyard support, which wouldn't want to devote slots to crab. With your high ratio of fat rescue from the underworld starts to look real good, you don't need so much self-mill if you are likely to mill a big fatty right off the bat.

Anyway the two previous examples were just meant to show ways that YOU could want your deck to work. You just posted your deck after a bunch of maniac builds, but it is clearly very different. An explanation is often more important than a decklist.

You make a good point. Alright, to better explain.

First I will start with the discussion on Hedron Crab.

In the list I posted (note that I am not saying Crab is bad, or that it doesn't work in a GY deck, or anything silly like that), but in the list I posted, it feels completely and totally unnecessary.

Now Crab can work extremely well in these types of builds, but keep in mind WHY Crab works well. Because it mills so quickly.

Now take a look at my list and really ask yourself. Why do we need to mill ourselves that quickly? The real advantage of being able to mill yourself extremely quick is in using cards that actually benefit heavily from doing so.

As much as having a GY that is brimming with creatures is a good thing for cards like Seance and Sheoldred, outside of giving you some more options in WHAT to bring back, it doesn't do you nearly as much good as other GY based cards would in the same situation. Having a GY stocked for Seance/Sheoldred is nice, but they still only pull creatures out one at a time. I don't feel the need to have 3/4th of my deck in the GY for fuel for Seance/Sheoldred because outside of having a larger choice on what to bring back, what real purpose does it serve? Having 20 creatures in the yard doesn't do a whole lot to make Seance/Sheoldred better than having 10 creatures in the yard, because at most all we can bring back is 1 card per turn. As long as I have enough mill to make sure I can consistently bring back a card a turn with Sheoldred, or Seance (preferably on the opponents turn to be able to chump with the token as well) then I don't feel the need to continue milling ourselves, because it really isn't providing any extra value, outside of a larger choice on WHAT to bring back. Having more choices on what to bring back is obviously beneficial, but I don't believe it is worth it enough to go so deep into the mill plan.

Compare that with cards such as Spider Spawning, Laboratory Maniac and Nemesis of Mortals these are the types of cards that REALLY benefit from the hyper mill plan. If I were running a deck based more around cards like these, then I probably WOULD be running Hedron Crab (and in fact, I have a Sultai self-mill deck that does). These are the types of cards that really benefit from milling yourself as quickly as possible. The difference between 10 and 20 creatures in the yard actually DOES make a huge difference with Spider Spawning, having 4 creatures instead of 2 makes a huge difference for Nemesis of Mortals, and of course milling yourself out quickly makes Lab Maniac a more reliable and consistent win-con.

We aren't running cards like that though. We also aren't going the traditional reanimator route with the deck where you cheat out fatties early and on the cheap using cards like Rescue from the Underworld where we want to make sure that we stick a fattie in the yard ASAP to be able to cheat it out early. As such, we are less reliant on that quick mill, because we aren't looking to mill a fattie by T5 so we can cheat it out with Rescue.

Hence why I don't believe the hyper mill plan is worthwhile for this particular deck (although I do believe it is worth it in other decks, more built around taking advantage of it) and my previous comments about Hedron Crab.

This list is pure and simple a value list. The deck isn't trying to go the tradition GY route, but instead uses the GY as another method of wringing out value. Basically everything we have gives us value in some form or another, be it getting played and chumping to go to the GY to be used later, or getting milled and pulled out to get value.

What this list (and lists like it) does best is the game of attrition. Because everything we have provides good value both when played, or when milled. This deck can literally stall all day long, even against large threats until it is able to set up the pieces it needs to just win on the spot.

While using the hyper mill strategy may provide us with a means of assembling those pieces somewhat faster/easier, it also cuts into our early game survival and the value in which we can get to carry us over into the late game.

I won't even begin to deny that when looking at the deck it looks like a total pile (mostly brought about by the curve being how it is), but I can promise you that if you put the deck together and take it online that you will be quite surprised by how well it actually does.

30 games so far with the deck online, and 27 wins.

The deck is literally a brick **** house when it comes to surviving through just about anything. So far the only issues I have had have come about from decks with a metric ton of cheap flyers which we have no real good defense against outside of trying to lifegain your way to dropping something like a Shadowborn/RSD to stabilize.

Keep in mind also that this deck originally spawned from my Abzan Seance deck, which would probably blow people mind to know uses Satyr Wayfinder as its only source of self-mill, and is still able to keep cards like Seance and Sheoldred fully stocked to be able to do their thing.

The deck is built around value, it may be a GY deck, but the GY really isn't being used much more than for another source of getting that value. We aren't running cards like Seance and Sheoldred because we are actively TRYING to be a GY deck, we run them because they basically double the potential value of almost literally everything we are already running in the deck.

To be honest, unlike more traditional GY decks, we DON'T want to be milling our self unless we have to. As long as we have enough stock in the GY to keep Sheoldred going every turn, or to activate Seance on each of our opponents turns (to gain value and provide another chump for us) then there really isn't a huge point to continue to mill yourself.

The deck is much better served by actually DRAWING those cards first, playing them out to get said value, chumping with them, and THEN bringing them back to gain more value and chump again.

While every card we mill may be more gas for Sheoldred/Seance, it is also essentially halving the potential value of the card. A milled Elvish Visionary will chump for us once and draw us a card. A drawn and played Elvish Visionary on the other hand will chump for us twice, and draw us 2 cards.

Now I obviously know that milling our self is still worthwhile to do even with the loss of potential value because of the immediate value is provides, which is often a worthwhile tradeoff.

The line comes with how much you mill yourself though. As I said before, the difference between having 10 and 20 creatures in the yard for Seance/Sheoldred isn't really anything outside of variety of choice, because they only function once a turn (so can at most only pull out 1 creature at a time). At that point all we are doing by milling ourselves is throwing away potential value by not allowing ourselves to draw into the cards and play them out first before we start with the GY antics.

A case could still be made in that super milling yourself allows you to see more cards, so it is better served as a means of pulling individual pieces out of the deck when you really need them (Shadowborn when you need removal, RSD to fetch Craterhoof, Craterhoof itself, etc) which is certainly true, and not something I can deny at all.

I can say that the limited amount of mill the deck has has been enough for me thus far to still be able to pick out useful targets from the yard when I need too. Which is part of the reason I am still stuck on that singleton copy of Dead Reckoning, since it functions for that exact purpose (and can be picked up with Treasured Find in situations where we mill it itself).

So far the 30 games I have played with this deck I have lost to 2 U/W Skies decks and a Golgari Spawning deck that Craterhoofed me literally the turn before my own Craterhoof came down.

I played a few games against the AI and Eon's deck performed pretty well. I had to mulligan a few hands that were filled with nothing but expensive fat, but I didn't have any real difficulty in hitting land drops. The deck was stable and performed well. As he notes, it does well in a war of attrition. The deck is very good at fighting a ground slog.

The best comparison I could make would be for Danno's shiftscape deck. Put filler cards at the bottom of your curve, then put big creatures with amazing EtBs at the top and squeeze extra value using seance / cloudshift. Danno had relatively low removal (2 reprisal and 2 cleansing vs 1 shadowborn demon and 2 dinrova horrors), but significant lifegain. His "I win" move was wand + shiftmancer, you have the craterhoof.

The deck performs pretty well even without seance, the wide variety of creature EtBs means you do have some control over the battlefield, and you will draw fat creature after fat creature pretty consistently.

I do think the deck has a few holes. Flying creatures is one of them... baneslayer angel is another. I guess there are two Dinrova Horrors to bounce her but unless they were topdecking they can just replay her next turn. I think this deck would still perform well if only 80% of creatures had solid EtBs.

Here are my thoughts on a few individual cards:
Armament corps - its ok at clogging up the ground but it generally isn't going to win the game. This card could be baneslayer angel...
Captain of the watch: its ok but usually when I draw it I wish it was spider spawning. It isn't that hard to set up spider spawning for 8 tokens, plus spawning has flashback. Seanced captain gives you three 1/1 tokens which is ok but not overwhelming. The 1/1 spawning/captain split does not make much sense to me, one or the other should be better as they are trying to do the same thing.
Dinrova horror - decent effect, decent body, but sometimes I want to kill the creature rather than just bounce it. I actually like dead reckoning here - especially if you are getting a significantly higher quality creature like RSD or sheoldred back.
Pellaka wurm / lone missionary- between this and lone missionary it almost feels like too much lifegain. If you really need the lifegain you can just reuse this card via dead reckoning or something. I would rather have a bit more flexibility than devote so many slots to lifegain.

So I would recommend -1 captain, -2 dinrova horror for +2 planar cleansing, +1 dead reckoning. I actually like dead reckoning a lot here as it provides removal + recursion in one card slot.

Yeah, flying creatures are the biggest hole in the entire deck. To be honest the Lifegain is usually enough to help you survive against the bigger flying threats in the meta that get dropped mid-late game (stuff like RSD and the like) until you can take over the game. The real issues comes about from decks with lots of cheap flyers. Sadly, I feel like this is a problem that we just have to deal with. We could make some changes here and there to help combat them, but most of them are still relatively slow and I don't feel like something like a single Baneslayer or Arbor Colossus is really going to do that much to help shore up that particular weakness in the long run (I mean, Baneslayer certainly does the job, but as a singleton at 5cmc I doubt it will be a consistent enough answer to really solve the problem itself).

As for your individual observations:

Armament Corps: The more and more I play with the deck the less and less important these guys feel. I could certainly see a push to remove maybe one or even both of them. On the other hand, I do like them for numerous reasons. They work great with certain other creatures in the deck to create a nice defensive wall. Corps puts Soothsayer up to a 3/6 or 4/7 and Wall of Omens up to a 1/5 or 2/6 both of which can be an absolute nightmare for certain decks to attack around. I also like the synergy with Captain of the Watch. Corps is a Soldier so it gets to Lord and Vigilance effect from Captain, and I quite like being able to slap counters on Captain itself. Captain is overall a removal magnet and being able to push him up to being a 5/5 can be pretty nice. They also work decently well with Lone Missionary, a couple early Missionaries followed by an Armament Corps can provide for some pretty aggressive starts. I can certainly see the logic behind getting rid of them though. The deck could easily lose one or even both of them without taking too much of a hit.

Captain of the Watch: This is an area where I have to disagree with you. There is a good reason why I run a 1/1 split between Captain and Spawning. Spawning is a great card, but also consider that we aren't as deep on the self-mill plan as other Seance decks. I originally ran 2 copies of Spider Spawning in the original Abzan build this spawned from, but I eventually cut down to just 1 copy. The biggest issue is that we are less deep on the mill plan and that we are made to abuse Seance. I often found that unless I drew Spider Spawning really early on, by the time I DID draw it, I had already depleted my GY a good amount with either Seance/Sheoldred activations. Sitting with Spawning in your hand/GY with like 3 creatures in the yard on turn 6+ just feels horrendous. Captain gives us tokens regardless of the current state of our GY which is a big plus. It also works pretty well with Armement Corps and is a significant threat on its own because of the lord effect and Vigilance. Captain is often all you really need to set up a Craterhoof smash resulting in a 39 point life swing with just what is provided by Captain and Craterhoof. Even when Seanced in where we don't get the benefit of Captain itself (and thus no lord effect) it is still a 28 point life swing with Craterhoof.

Dinrova Horror: I actually really like Dinrova Horror because not only does it give the deck some form of pseudo-removal (the bounce+discard effect), but also gives the deck an out to many other threats the deck otherwise just can't touch. Hitting any type of permanent can be extremely useful for getting rid of things like Obelisk and opposing Seance and whatnot, as well as the usual suspects that Bounce is good against even if the Discard element is dead (Aura decks, stuff like Rockslide Elemental/Cloudfin Raptor/Chasm Skulker/etc which gain counters the longer they stick around). Coming back again with Seance to use its ETB again is of course always good. I feel like Horror is quite good with Dead Reckoning as well, with its 4/4 body it becomes decent removal and then is drawn again to be played for its ETB pseudo-removal effect.

Pelakka/Missionary: I don't feel like the deck could get by losing Missionary to be honest with you. The lifegain and body with 2 power are just too important as a buffer in certain matchups. On the other hand, I do see where you are coming from with Pelakka and the more and more I play the deck, the less and less I feel like I need 2 copies of the card. I honestly wouldn't cut both copies because the whole "7 life instantly" when played/Seanced thing has been extremely important in certain situations. This deck can often get into those situations where you have a Craterhoof in hand or in the GY and all you need to do is survive 1 more turn to be able to Cratersmash and win the game, being able to play/Seance in Pelakka in these situations for a huge life bump can often be just what you need to survive through those 2x RSD the opponent has staring you down (or whatever) for another turn to win out of nowhere the following turn with a Cratersmash. I feel like the deck could get by dropping down to 1 Wurm though, and I can understand wanting to go that route if for nothing else than to try and even out the curve a bit more.

To be honest with you, I am not a huge fan of Planar Cleansing in decks like this. It nukes our Seance, and sets back our board position just as much as our opponents (yeah, we have Seance and GY stuff to use our stuff from the GY so it is a net gain in the long run), I feel like this isn't the deck to do this with though because we rely so much on our board presence. While it may help in those scenarios where you are behind by a bunch and need to reset the board, how many times are we going to draw into it when we don't NEED to reset the board and thus is a dead draw. On the other hand, Planar Cleansing could potentially help to shore up the matchup against decks with a ton of cheap flying creatures which is currently the decks biggest weakness. How common are these decks though? I don't run into them often on the 360 so I am honestly not even sure if it is worthwhile to try and muck around with the deck too much to try and shore up that particular matchup.

Dead Reckoning certainly has more value in this deck than in a lot of other GY decks, mostly because we are running a glut of ETB creatures and we tend to be very top-heavy so having a creature in the yard with a high power to make it viable removal isn't uncommon.

I may muck around with going:

-1 Armament Corps
-1 Pelakka Wurm

+1 Dead Reckoning
+1 Baneslayer Angel

Just to see how it works out.

Good write up btw HenWen. Appreciate the feedback. The deck is decidedly different than most other GY based decks, which is part of why it appeals to me. Especially because against all odds, it actually works consistently and effectively.

I think the changes you proposed are positive. Planar cleansing may be partially a matter of personal preference. Sheoldred and Seance are engine cards that provide a huge amount of advantage, but they take time. Your deck's plan is generally to win through beats, but if that fails Sheoldred and Seance are there to win in a stall situation.

Cleansing the board and then dropping sheoldred makes me feel good. Alternatively, cleansing, dead reckoning targetting sheoldred on whatever they play next also makes me feel good.

Lifegain, recursion and self mill play very well with board wipes. Lifegain forces your opponent to put more stuff on the board in order to have an adequate clock, self mill is virtual card advantage that lasts through a board wipe, and recursion gets better and better the longer the game goes on.

Anyway, I do respect that Horror can temporarily remove any permanent, is good with seance, provides some board presence, and does not nuke your side of the board. Nonetheless, I would at least want to test cleansing.

Hoho! Haven't had this much fun with a deck in a while. Great creation!

Thanks, it was a forum effort really, you should check out Hakeem's you tube channel. He featured his version of the deck (3 cards different)

I'm getting a kick out of these Spider Seance decks.

Still not a fan of Seance in SS. It's self defeating. Your exiling the very thing you need in the graveyard for Spider Spawning.

Most of the time, your Seance target is Wayfinder or Assistant, which is usually a net gain in binned creatures. And past a point, the number of spiders becomes less important. I have played these lists a bunch lately and almost never cast SS for fewer than 8 spiders (and it's typically a lot more) unless I'm frantically trying to generate blockers against an early rush, in which case Seance is not involved. And one of the key targets for Seance is Craterhoof, and you probably need a minimum of 4 spiders to make that comfortably lethal at any stage of the game.