Here is a 4 colour list that is close to the original but with better mana and planar cleansing.

I like this version over the Conflux version.

Yeah I completly agree, it closes games out quick enough so that suffer is nto necessary

I found a bad match-up for it but it's pretty irrelevent. a really dedicated land destruction deck owns Total Control. Total control can't get going quick enough and the counter magic isn't plentyful enough to stop constant land D cards and ramp. The burn isn't fast enough in the situation either and you can't get to 8 mana to cycle. it doesn't really matter though. that deck isn't very popular and it sucks otherwise. Total control can still beat most people running land D decks. I'm talking REALLY dedicated land D

Here is something I plan on messing with when I get the chance.



Should be pretty simple.

We play a bunch of 3 drops that have big bodies for their cost.

Cultivate and a bunch of 5 drops that have good bodies for their cost.

Drop Warstorm Surge and proceed to do tons of damage on the cheap with stuff like Species Gorger and Cloudshift.

Admittedly, we are a little short of ETB creatures for the usual Species Gorger/Cloudshift deck.

Keep in mind that with Warstorm Surge those undercosted fatties may as well have ETBs.

Woolly Thoctar becomes a Lava Axe for with Warstorm on the table and Cloudshift in hand, or a Lava Axe for with Warstorm and Species Gorger.

Will see if this can actually be something after I put it all together tonight and do some actual testing.

Needs Genesis Hydra.. other than that I like the list

I like it as a warstorm surge deck with cloudshift support.

Species Gorger just does not have many creatures to bounce. You can bounce the 2 drop cantrip creatures but that will slow down your board development until you can draw more mana. The bear's companion is also pretty underwhelming.

I do like the warden + shift + surge combo, 3 damage for 1 white mana is nice.

I am a sucker for battlegrace angel in this kind of deck. When you have huge undercosted beaters, giving them lifelink means token flood decks cannot outrace you.

Got to put the deck together and have played quite a few games over the past couple of nights.

The deck is an absolute blast to play!

After playing some, I made some changes (many of which closely mirror the suggestions from people here).

Species Gorger went bye-bye. In practice it was the most under-performing card in the deck. I slowly cut down on their numbers because I still wanted at least 1-2 of them around to work an an engine card, but the more and more I played the more I realized even as an engine card it wasn't really doing a whole lot for us.

Bear's Companion got the axe as well. They actually performed decently to be honest. They worked well with Cloudshift and Warstorm Surge. They usually ended up being used extremely defensively though, hanging back to block with Cloundshift support and the like. I ended up replacing them with some creatures I feel are a little easier to be aggressive with like Stormbreath Dragon. I may honestly replace Rafiq with a single copy just to have one around if Rafiq doesn't pan out as well as I am hoping he will in the deck.

Included 2x Genesis Hydra on Beasts suggestion, which I should have thought about to begin with. If we are running Warstorm Surge there really is no good reason NOT to run Hydra. Since he helps up fetch it up with his ability, and puts it on the table before he lands himself, often making Hydra a removal spell as well (Hydra for 8, hit Surge, do 8 damage with Surge and so on).

Wall of Omens was cut because it wasn't helping us be aggressive at all, and has even less value without Species Gorger in the deck.

As mentioned before, Stormbreath Dragon and Rafiq to help the deck be a bit more aggressive and both work decently well with Warstorm Surge. Stormbreath is a lock, not sure yet about Rafiq but I have high hopes.

I also included 2x Garruk's Packleader (prepares for snotty comment from Beast). We can ramp into them easily with Cultivate, they are another creature we can be aggressive with, almost everything in the deck triggers them, and they become even better when used in conjunction with Cloudshift.

The last changes were bumping up the numbers to run the 3rd copy of Warden of the Eye and the 4th copy of Cloudshift because even WITH all the undercosted aggressive creatures we run, the combo involving them is STILL the most powerful thing we can be doing. Not to mention the Warden is nice as well in that it can grab Warstorm Surge back for us from the yard should it get destroyed, and getting back Ground Assault over and over again in a Cultivate deck isn't terrible by any means.

Also some basic mana changes. We included some basic Plains to fetch up with Cultivate, and if you will notice, the basics are skewed towards Plains. This is for the exact reason above. The Warden combo. Once we get 1-2 land of each of our colors, basically every Cultivate you use should be used to draw out Plains. Seriously, this is how potentially powerful this combo is.

If you stick a Warstorm Surge and a Warden, and you draw a Cloudshift you basically win the game. The combo may as well be the old "Infinite Turns" Time Warp combo because you basically gain that much control. You don't get to skip over your opponents turns, but in most cases you may as well be able to.

Warden+Shift+Surge becomes a Lightning Bolt for with infinite uses (unless your opponent removes Warden, which is unlikely because it isn't a common removal target to begin with).

Pay to Shift Warden, do 3 damage to target creature or player, get Shift back using Warden.

Repeat for every source you have on the table.

I won a game this way the night before last. On my opponents turn, on the turn they were going to kill me, during their combat phase. 18 damage to the face from Shifting Warden over and over.

I had another game where I stuck Warden AND Packleader and got the combo off. 3 damage to target creature or player AND draw 1 card for with an infinite number of uses. STUPID GOOD.

Shout outs to Inferno Titan too. He is another card that becomes stupid good with Cloudshift+Surge. 9 damage spread out among creatures or players for and that doesn't even include the damage he potentially does attacking each turn (and triggering his ability each turn by attacking).

Having a lot of fun with this deck so far!

I would keep at least one Gorger, it is a scary good combo with Gen Hydra and Surge. Beast showed me the error of my ways in it when he whooped me something good with me having no way to really stop it.

Eon your new deck looks like a blast to play. I like it better than the last version. One thing I am sure you are aware of that you didn't mention was the synergy between packleader and shiftwarden - drawing a card for 1W beats mentor, and packleader is well out of shock range.

The list looks pretty solid, but I do have some queries:
What do you do with excess cloudshifts? They are good as part of a late game combo but it will take some time to set up the pieces.
3 cultivates and 24 lands... I would be afraid of being stuck on 4 lands with this deck. There are some really solid 3 drops but the deck needs 5 to function.
No anger - almost everything in this deck survives anger and we have cultivate to hit RR. I would rather run anger than shock TBH. Anger kills warden, but I can see this deck winning without the use of the combo after a sweep.
Species gorger as a singleton may be OK.
White mana - ever find yourself wanting more plains?

Going to build this and take it for a few spins.

Hehe, I mentioned it, see.




As for Cloudshift, it has some uses even before we get to our end game combo. With 4x Cloudshift and 3x Warden it isn't completely terrible to blow a few Cloudshifts early because we can always start the combo from a Cloudshift in the yard using Warden if we have to. Shifting Visionaries early can help to soak up some early damage and help cycle into combo pieces or just more gas. It still works as basic removal protection, shifting stuff like Thoctar and whatnot in response to removal. It isn't terrible either as combat trick to untap stuff for surprise blocks.

As for the land count. I haven't had too many issues. The deck seems to get its colors easily enough, and we have tons of good 3 drops which can certainly help us get to that 5 mana should we stumble or get stuck. The previously mentioned Visionary+Cloudshift combo helps with this as well, giving us more room to cantrip into the mana we need.

Anger is a card I had considered back before I made the changes to the deck, and something I consider even now. The biggest issue I had is what to replace with Anger. You may be correct in that Shock is the answer.

Not sure if even a singleton Species Gorger is worth it. I ran with just a single one for awhile and I wasn't really impressed. 6/6 for 5 is nice, especially with Warstorm Surge, the biggest problem is, outside of bouncing Visionaries or Wardens (which is slow) the deck really just doesn't have a whole lot of synergy with it, that is unless we have Warstorm Surge, at which point we don't mind bouncing stuff like Thoctars and the like because then they are actually doing something beneficial for us.

As for white mana, I don't often find myself being too low on it. Usually by the time I have the combo assembled, I usually at least have 3-4 white mana on the table (as I said before, after I take care of the usual fixing, Cultivate becomes a tool to fetch up all the Plains you can get your hands on).

Even with just a couple white mana on the table the combo is very dangerous. because of how cheap the cost is. 3 White mana on the table can still potentially represent a Thoctar or War Monk (5 or 3 damage from Surge) and still get 2 activations off the Warden+Shift+Surge combo.

The reason this combo is so good IMO is that not only does it give you the potential to do a ton of damage and/or clear the board an essentially infinite number of times, but you can do so on the cheap, which means you don't have to be taking time off to do it and can still progress your side of the board. You can easily still be able to tap out for one of the decks 3, 5, or 6 drops and still often have 1-2 white mana floating around to activate the combo a couple of times the same turn.

Re: cloudshift, I am pretty comfortable with 4x cloudshift, but I wanted more draw to dig through excess combo pieces.

Here is what I did after some testing:
-1 island
-3 shock - in a deck with so many 4 toughness creatures, anger goes a long way.
-4 elvish visionaries - filler card, this deck plays a lot of taplands so I seldom played visionaries on turn 2. Dies to anger.
-1 Rafiq - he works well with the 3 drops but I don't like his 3 toughness with anger.
-1 Stormbreath - an excellent 5 mana bomb, but not much synergy with the rest of the deck, I prefer to focus on the combo

+1 forest - both of the 3 drop creatures and cultivate require green mana
+2 anger of the gods - so much better than shock. Deals with higher toughness creatures and exiles. It is more expensive, but going on the beatdown in the first 4-5 turns is not my priority with this deck.
+1 reprisal - sort of a filler removal, I wanted more than just 3 ground assaults to deal with big creatures. If it is good in a matchup you can recur it with warden
+1 cultivate - If you have extra cloudshifts in hand you often want to drop important creatures with one mana open to dodge removal. This deck is deceptively mana intensive
+3 inspiration - Dig deeper into your deck to find answers, key combo pieces, and land drops. Gives Warden more options to recur, helps a little with land flood
+1 packleader - Even without the warden combo this guy is amazing in this deck. I always want to draw him, plus he is a huge removal target. 1 mana for one card is just insane
+1 Pellaka wurm - Still testing. This deck can stabilize early fairly well so the lifegain is not crucial, but with all the ramp and draw I felt like I could afford one big curve topper.

Before these changes the deck could feel like a 4 color aggro deck stapled to a combo deck at the top of the curve. Shock, Rafiq and Stormbreath could close games out pretty rapidly, but I wanted more of a focus on the combo and less of a focus on beatdown, especially cards that were very focused on offense. You can still win games quickly off of powerful three drops and quality removal. Anger does add significant offensive potential, it allows your big guys to swing in without being chump blocked forever.

I no longer like Gorger in the list I run. The wardens and hydras are the only good bounce targets, and they are both so expensive that replaying them every turn would soak up huge quantities of mana. When I play Gorger I like having multiple creatures on the board with good EtBs so that a single removal spell can't force gorger back into my hand.

There is a downside of anger - it kills warden. Obviously he is a pretty important guy and we don't want to make this sacrifice willy-nilly, but usually I cast warden after sweeping. He can recur anger and kill himself - this hurts the combo, but in certain matchups it will hurt your opponent so much more that it is worth it.

And you are right about the mana efficiency. Surge is cheaper than wand and can have a huge impact immediately, it doesn't take several castings to build up charge counters. Warden/Packleader is the same.

The early game with war monk, thoctar and anger of the gods is pretty amazing. My tweaks are basically just intended to transition from the early game to the late game more smoothly.

Back when you all were brewing up monkeem project, I do recall a certain someone suggesting dropping black to move into white because it gives access to planar cleansing. You moved over eventually but didn't take advantage of planar. Glad to see you have come to your senses! (Though I am sure you did so now because the land has smoothed out a little bit more.)

Was still a stupid solid list then and I am sure it is still. (if not even better now!)

Yeah the new trilands made planar cleansing possible. Before that you struggled to get double white let alone triple white.

Losing 1 resounding thunder and 1 traumatic visions doesn't hurt the deck much either

I made the change to Anger last night. Got a few games in with it before I had to go to sleep. Seemed to work well.

My changes were a little bit different than yours though HenWen. Mostly because I don't feel comfortable dropping Shock. I feel like if we are going to drop Elvish Visionary completely for Anger than we are going to need Shock even more than we did previously. Without Visionary, we really have nothing we can contribute to the board until at least T3, and we preferably want to be casting Cultivate on 3 if given the choice.

I feel like relying on Anger (as a 2 of) as our only way to stem an early aggressive rush isn't going to be doing us any favors. As such I decided to keep the Shocks where they are.

The changes I made were:

-4 Elvish Visionary
-1 Rafiq

+2 Anger
+1 Banefire
+1 Cultivate
+1 Packleader

Seems to be working well so far.

The only thing really worth mentioning here is Banefire, which I am currently testing out because it seems like it could have a ton of upside here.

Banefire is more early game removal if we need it, but the real benefit I believe is that we are a Cultivate deck, so we tend to end up with a ton of mana on the table relatively quickly. Beyond this we have Warden floating around which can get us multiple uses out of a single Cultivate. I have already done this on occasion to finish getting me up to Surge/Titan mana, as well as setting up huge Genesis Hydras in the late game, and I don't feel like Banefire will operate much differently. It gives us another good target to get back with Warden as well. I feel like plenty of scenarios will come up where you Banefire the opponents face for like 8, follow up with a Warden the next turn, and then Banefire them again the next turn to close out the game.

I think you hit it right on the money re: banefire. I am dropping my third inspiration and pellaka wurm for banefire and one shock.

My removal choice is a result of the platform I play on. Very few people go wide on Steam, and Rhox/ Thoctar is a brick wall against most token strategies. I play proper aggro decks so infrequently on Steam that I just cannot justify 3x shocks here. Things may differ on your platform.

This deck is really really fun to play. I have not had a hard time finding a use for cloudshift, typically I drop my RhoxTars on curve, but important creatures above them on the curve get played with one white mana open. The slight delay is worth it in order to dodge the expensive removal necessary to kill our big creatures.

Just posting to get the updated version into a nice easily readable format, since I have made some changes since I last posted an actual list.

This is currently how it is looking.



To be honest, I feel a little funky running Shock as only a 2-of but I just can not bring myself to replace it. There is just so many situations where having it around is a huge help in the early game. Anger does a pretty decent job on its own of curbing the more aggressive decks, but I still feel like having Shock around is worthwhile for when we don't draw Anger, or for getting rid of stuff BEFORE it becomes a real threat.

One of the first games I played today was against a Selesnya Aura deck. T2 Hero of Iroas>T3 Ethereal Armor x2. Yup, that is totally an 8/8 creature punching me in the face on T3 as I sit there thinking to myself, "man, if I had only had a Shock on T2/T3".

I don't normally like to toot my own horn, but I really would suggest other people play this deck a little, especially those who are starting to get burnt out on the game as it slowly fades away into Origins land. Not even because I think it is good or great either, but rather because it is just tons of fun to play, has a lot of interesting lines that other decks don't, and because it makes excellent use of some cards that haven't really seen much spotlight so far (cards like Warden and Packleader, both of which are absolute all-stars in this deck).

Playing all the good multicolor 3 drops in the same deck is pretty fun just in and of itself.

It still doesn't compare to the feeling you get when you manage to assemble the Shift+Surge+Warden combo, Shift+Packleader+Warden combo, or both, and then either proceed to just take over the game, or outright win on the spot. Shift+Surge+Inferno Tits is another play that is just tons of fun to do. Hey look, I just did 18 unblockable damage to you in a single turn, lawl!

I still think the best game was the one I mentioned before in a previous post. Drawing into Cloudshift the turn before I was going to die, then using the Warden+Surge+Shift combo on the turn they would have killed me to do 18 damage (6 white sources on the table) to their face and win the game. The best part about it though was that I got a GG message from the person after the match, rather than the usual *insert profanity, homophobia, and ethnic/racial slurs here* stuff I normally get from people on Xbox. Not only did I feel awesome about winning in the way I did, it was even better in that the person wasn't a raging jerkhole like the majority of people around. Even played a rematch where he learned from his mistake and nuked Warden the minute he saw it hit the table XD

Wanted to build a deck around ridiculous spell-recursion. It's just a coarse draft for now, haven't played that many games with it yet. Basically just recur stuff with recurring recursion, and eventually you'll have planted some banefires to his face. Uhm. So it needs some nuancing.
Would probably like to include some edicts incase of nasty enchantments.

So I am of the opinion that you could cut some archeomancers and run sphynx bone-wand, planar clensing and edict cause the warden is just that good

I finally got around to updating this deck since I'm playing it later today and made the same two cuts that you did (Visions and Thunder) to fit in the Cleansings. My manabase was different, though, I came up with:

3 Mystic Monastery
3 Frontier Bivouac
2 Seaside Citadel
2 Jungle Shrine
1 Arcane Sanctum
1 Crumbling Necropolis
1 Nomad Outpost
5 Island
4 Mountain
2 Plains
1 Forest

That's 15 blue sources, 14 red sources, 11 white sources, 8 green sources, and 3 black sources compared to your 16/12/11/8/4. Pretty damn close.