Wow, I typed all this up yesterday but it didn't post. I guess I got busy and never hit submit. Let's see if I can write it the same way I did yesterday:


In regards to deck building, in DotP 2013 specifically, I built my decks using the following process. This mainly revolved around the meta at the time when the game was the most up to date version available .

First thing I do is consider Goblin Gangland into the deck building. GG is the most powerful deck, and as such, it was the most common to run into. Some days, half my games were against GG. Every deck I built was built with that in mind. It needed to be able have a T5 win condition, and if there was a T4, that had to be in there as well. Barring that, the deck needed to be able to consistently win by T7. It would need cheap removal or cheap blockers, preferably with higher than normal Toughness, to disrupt GGs plans.

Now, the next logical step is, if I'm building my decks to optimize against the GG meta, then the other good players are too. Which means, beyond GG, the vast majority of decks I play against will have T4/T5 win conditions, consistently win by T7, and be able to remove or disrupt agro plans during T2-5.

As such, everything I built had the lowest possible curve while maintaining the ability to easily win by T7.

Obviously, there are exceptions to this rule. Control need not apply. Mana Mastery is also in another league, it plays by a different set of rules. However most of the decks in 2013 can be easily shoe-horned into a low curve agro deck. Take the example you brought up, Grinning Malice. This deck should top out at 4 5CMC cards with Demigod of Revenge. You do not need any other 5CMC card and you don't need anything in the decklist that costs more. All of your removal and all of the best creatures in the deck cost less.

If you take into consideration the fact that 2013 uses Hybrid mana you see why you don't need much mana fixing. Sure there are exceptions, IIRC the R/W deck has several cards that have funky casting costs, like WRR1 and that's a deck I would say needs 3 Fetchlands.

IF you build decks that way, you'll find that most of the builds you come up with fit within a deck that only uses 22-23 lands.

My most recent attempt at Grinning Malice:

Lands(24)
11 x Mountain
9 x Swamp
4 x Evolving Wilds

Creatures(23)
4 x Demigod of Revenge
3 x Ashenmoor Gouger
2 x Goblin Deathraiders
2 x Onyx Mage
2 x Sootstoke Kindler
2 x Blood Cultist
2 x Hissing Iguanar
2 x Ashenmoor Liege
2 x Hellhole Rats
1 x Spiteflame Witch
1 x Lyzolda, the Blood Witch

Other(13)
3 x Terminate
3 x Wrecking Ball
2 x Bituminous Blast
2 x Stabbing Pain
2 x Blightning
1 x Demonic Tutor
2x Maelstrom Pulse

Grinning Malice isn't a deck that ever really appealed to me. I didn't much like playing with or against it, so I didn't try very hard to make it work. The above list is a pile of cards with a decent curve, and is mostly designed to keep pushing through damage. We still have all 24 lands on account of six 5-CMC spells, and our mana can be surprisingly busy with a number of activated abilities.

A notable cut here is Blazing Specter. It's a very high quality card, but the damage just doesn't seem to be there, and we rarely get to take more than 1 card from them anyway.

I tried out Onyx Mage mostly as a curve filler, and it does good work an upgrade to Lyzolda and the Blood Cultists. We have precious few ways of generating appreciable on-board card advantage, and this combo is the only repeatable one (barring the 6-drop Deathbringer Thoctar). It's also a decent upgrade to Goblin Deathraiders, because deathtrouch and trample let you push through N-1 damage regardless of the size of the blocker.

While Maelstrom pulse is a powerful card, i'm not sure it's great in a R/B deck

I mix up Bituminous Blast and Maeltrom Pulse so often that I honestly didn't know what you were talking about.

Singletons bother me. Especially if multiple copies of it are available in the card pool. They're just as unreliable as a regular singleton, but it's much more... visually displeasing. If the deck is better for having a card in it, it should be better for having two of that card in it.

-1 Ophidian Eye
+1 Aven Mimeomancer

There, that eliminates 2 singletons.

It happens annoyingly often that my build of Aura Servants is stuck with no creatures below 5 mana. Ophidian Eye has a lot of utility in it, but its primary use is simply to enable Daybreak Coronet, a function we don't need it for as much since adding Lifelink and Gift of Granite in the 22-land experiment. We don't really need it to draw cards, and it's the weakest of our available combat tricks. All these things combine to be a neat card, but these neat corner cases are rarer than the ones with Flickerwisp, a card we're also not using. Adding a second Aven Mimeomancer on the other hand, gives us an extra body below 5 mana, and 3/1 Geists, Stalkers, and Spiritdancers that go the distance for us all the time.

Lands(22)
12 x Plains
8 x Island
2 x Evolving Wilds

Creatures(17)
4 x Invisible Stalker
4 x Kor Spiritdancer
2 x Auramancer
2 x Aven Mimeomancer
2 x Totem-Guide Hartebeest
2 x Sun Titan
1 x Geist of Saint Traft

Other(21)
2 x Winds of Rath
2 x Mind Control
2 x Narcolepsy
2 x Pacifism
2 x Daybreak Coronet
2 x Empyrial Armor
2 x Griffin Guide
2 x Mammoth Umbra
1 x Eel Umbra
1 x Triclopean Sight
1 x Lifelink
1 x Gift of Granite
1 x Pariah

One thing I want to do is make heavy use of a deck's unique attributes. Find something that this pile of cards can do better than the others, and try to press it for an advantage. Otherwise you can probably do whatever you're doing better with a different deck.

My Born of Flame build is basically mono-red control, which is adaptable and fun to play (because Magma Phoenix is one of my favorite cards ever), but tends to sit below mono-black control, which does most of the same things more reliably, and gains life while doing it.
One thing mono-red can do that mono-black can't, though, is multiply its damage, so that's what we've done below. Swapping sweepers 1-for-1 with burn amplification leaves us with the exact same mana curve and a lot more danger:

Lands(24)
24 x Mountain

Creatures(10)
3 x Chandra's Phoenix
2 x Obsidian Fireheart
2 x Fire Servant
2 x Hostility
1 x Chandra's Spitfire

Other(26)
4 x Chandra's Outrage
4 x Searing Spear
3 x Searing Blaze
2 x Flames of the Firebrand
2 x Red Sun's Zenith
2 x Ruby Medallion
2 x Flamebreak
1 x Earthquake
1 x Beacon of Destruction
1 x Rain of Embers
1 x Lightning Bolt
1 x Fireblast
1 x Blaze
1 x Furnace of Rath



Burn Amplification works so well on turn 4 off Chandra's Spitfire that I wanted to see what would happen if I used all of it. Overall it's very "red"; Faster, but riskier. A little worse against goblins, because Magma Phoenix and Inferno Titan were all-stars, but a little better against Azorius, because the magnitude of our direct damage can overwhelm even an active Daybreak Coronet. The cards have more synergy overall(minus some anti-synergy between the spitfire and Hostility), but the cards individually are a little weaker. Furnace of Rath works against us half the time, Fire Servant dies for no value, Hostility gets chumped all day and we just can't find any burn to go with them. But none of that matters, because every once in a while you turn a Fireblast into like fifty 3/1 hastes and swing for a billion out of nowhere.

What are the Ruby Medalion's for?

Good question.
I think I kept some in the black deck. Jet. Other than that there really isn't much need, especially in that red deck. Wonder if my decklists are still here somewhere. Sure they are and I haven't changed a thing. I should tear myself away from running my Drake/Fling deck in Arena and look for them.

I like being able to cast multiple spells when I have an opening. Buyback Chandra's Phoenix and recast it in the same turn, play Hostility and a Searing Spear at the same time, things like that. People are often concerned about land flood in mono-red, but I'm short on land far more often, and prefer to mitigate land flood with X-spells, which is why I'm running Blaze too. I've gone all-in on Chandra's Spitfire with both Red Sun's Zeniths and a Blaze while having only 3 lands in play thanks to Ruby Medallion. Without a medallion, that's a 2-point Blaze and a 4/3 Spitfire(6 damage), where I got three 1-point burn spells and a 10/3 Spitfire(13 damage).

They let us put a Fireheart roadblock down on turn 3 vs. Goblins, which is nice. Play Fireheart turn 3 vs. Crosswinds before they have Cancel mana available.

There aren't really any other cards I want maindeck(besides trying a different build entirely). Torch Fiend, Flame Slash, or Dragon Hatchling can come in depending on the matchup, but the Medallions seem solid against an unknown opponent.

Grim Procession has no promo cards, a lot of singletons, and a curve that can't really be made to be remotely aggressive given less than a dozen 2-drops, half of which aren't creatures. So I don't usually pay much attention to it.
Here's my current build:

Land(25)
11 x Plains
10 x Swamp
4 x Terramorphic Expanse

Creatures(23)
4 x Doomed Traveler
3 x Bloodhunter Bat
3 x Bloodgift Demon
2 x Mourning Thrull
2 x Onyx Mage
2 x Orzhov Guildmage
2 x Restless Apparition
2 x Voracious Hatchling
2 x Divinity of Pride
1 x Keening Banshee

Other(12)
4 x Pillory of the Sleepless
3 x Zealous Persecution
2 x Edge of the Divinity
2 x Debtors' Knell
1 x Vindicate


The card pool has a large quantity of high quality removal spells in it, but I personally feel that trading 1-for-1 and hoping to draw better than the opponent is a reliable way to lose a game of Magic, so we're only using about half of the available removal.
This build is a mix of things that are annoying and things that are dangerous. The idea here is that we harrow them with our life-sapping enchantments and little creatures that have to be killed twice, and then hit them with something big when they've exhausted their removal. Even the guildmage's abilities are dangerous when we've been plinking them to death for the last ten turns. We have card draw, tons of life manipulation, the best sweeper in the game, and inevitability in the form of those 7-mana Debtors' Knells.
There are going to be times when you'd prefer Unmake instead of the pillories, but the pillories do more to advance our gameplan. Likewise, you'll wish for a Castigate here and there, probably at the expense of Mourning Thrull. The nice thing about this card pool's curve is that it seems fairly modular and easy to sideboard against things that are giving you trouble.

Really amazed I'm not seeing Deathbringer Liege or Falkenrath Noble.
Two of the best cards in the game.

Would you use Falkenrath Noble in addition to Bloodhunter Bat, or in place of it? They serve the same basic function. The Noble makes a convenient foil to Blood Artist, Hissing Iguanar, or any board wipe. I like how the bat's body is expendable because we already got our value when it showed up. So we can trade or chump without feeling bad, and then get more value later with Debtors' Knell.


My "double everything" build with Born of Flame has been disappointing, but it did give me an idea for my board control version:

-1 Blaze
+1 Furnace of Rath

Sometimes we lose to land problems, sometimes we couldn't control the board hard enough, and sometimes we run out of gas. Furnace of Rath helps with the last two by cutting the number of burn spells we need to end it all in half. It makes it safer to use burn to control the board early, and also makes it easier for our burn to control the board. The idea behind Blaze was that it's a one-card solution to Baneslayer Angel, but with a furnace out, half our deck is a one-card solution to Baneslayer Angel. Chandra's Phoenix goes from annoying to threatening, Rain of Embers becomes Pyroclasm, Inferno Titan is an extinction-level event, and Magma Phoenix graduates to Category 8: Mega-Colossal on the Volcanic Explosivity Index.

Land(24)
24 x Mountain

Creatures(10)
3 x Chandra's Phoenix
2 x Obsidian Fireheart
2 x Magma Phoenix
2 x Inferno Titan
1 x Chandra's Spitfire

Other(26)
4 x Chandra's Outrage
4 x Searing Spear
3 x Searing Blaze
2 x Ruby Medallion
2 x Flames of the Firebrand
2 x Red Sun's Zenith
2 x Flamebreak
1 x Earthquake
1 x Beacon of Destruction
1 x Furnace of Rath
1 x Chain Reaction
1 x Rain of Embers
1 x Lightning Bolt
1 x Fireblast


I love this deck.

With all the available board wipe in 2013 Falkenrath earned it's money sooooo many times I can't count.
Granted I'm a big 4ffa player and a wipe there can essentially win the game with Falkenrath out.

Good scientists question their assumptions. For a long time, I assumed that certain cards in the Exalted Darkness pool were either auto-include or auto-exclude, so it never occurred to me to ever even try it like it looks below:

Land(22)
11 x Swamp
9 x Plains
2 x Cathedral of War

Creatures(29)
4 x Duty-Bound Dead
4 x Guardians of Akrasa
4 x Aven Squire
3 x Knight of Glory
2 x Knight of Infamy
2 x Akrasan Squire
2 x Servant of Nefarox
2 x Child of Night
2 x Darklit Gargoyle
2 x Silent Arbiter
2 x Deathbringer Liege

Other(9)
3 x Unmake
2 x Vindicate
1 x Mortify
1 x Pillory of the Sleepless
1 x Demonic Tutor
1 x Worship



The double-white cost in the (now absent) angels made me want to try this. The deck mostly can't function without white mana, but it can make do perfectly well with only one white mana. We drop to 22 lands, and also drop our curve low to the ground with 34(!) spells at 3 mana or less. The reduced land count/increased spell density is important, because the deck's complete lack of card drawing power means we don't have much choice but to draw more threats than they have answers. Thankfully, one of Exalted's selling points is that every creature is a threat as long as you can keep playing creatures, and we can keep pretty much any opening hand that has a Plains and a Swamp in it.

The build above is good at racing. Everyone's familiar with Child of Night and Darklit Gargoyle's force multiplication, but Guardians of Akrasa does good work protecting our life total. "Plan-A" is to tempo them out by simply dropping a few 1 and 2 CMC creatures, then keeping them off balance with our removal suite just long enough to sneak in the last few points, or to force them to chump every turn until they stop drawing blockers. Most of the decks that can produce a bunch of tokens are weak against our protection knights and/or flyers, so that isn't too much of a concern. Plans B and C involve the cards that make our deck uniquely hard to deal with. Silent Arbiter is virtual card advantage when things get out of hand. Deathbringer Liege is actual card advantage when it doubles up our removal, but it also does good work as a mini-overrun if we ever need to go wide (no one ever expects us to go wide).

Our final silver-bullet of choice, Worship is mostly a concession to the land base. I don't actually like Worship, because sometimes it feels like we win games that we have no right winning, but we need a white card in this slot to get 9 Plains. If you're okay with 8 plains, then Sword of Vengeance or Whispersilk Cloak might do better, as we're a little lacking in the evasion department. But Worship is a natural fit for a deck with 29 creatures in it, especially with relatively hard to kill defenders. Mark of Asylum is worth a look, even maindeck, because our three worst matchups are Chandra, Goblins, and Mindstorms. It also shuts off kind of a lot of non-red things like Prey Upon and Tendrils of Corruption.
One thing to consider might be taking out Demonic Tutor for one of the equipments, because trading a black card for a colorless card will also let you keep the 11/9 land split. With a very low curve and relatively flat power level, it can be argued that playing any specific card with a 2 mana tax on it is unnecessary. But I've tutored for Plains before, so I'm a little shy about losing the option.

The Peacekeepers build I posted earlier has some problems. It's basically just a bad version of Odric's revenge deck. That doesn't mean it's bad in absolute terms (because Odric's revenge deck is insane), but there are improvements to be made.

Getting stuck on 2 lands happens often enough that the mana curve should come down a little.
Fiend Hunter is our weakest piece of removal because it's the easiest to reverse. Nekrataal it is not. I'm actually happy when opponents play it against me because it sets them up for a blowout later on.
But the body itself is technically a 2-for-1 and we want to keep that, so:

-2 Fiend Hunter
+2 Raise the Alarm


Everything else we do is at sorcery speed. We dump bodies onto the battlefield and make them big, and that's fine, but the opponent can tell before combat exactly what's going to happen and what the safe attacks/blocks are.
Crusader of Odric is a super aggressive card. It can be a 7/7 or bigger on its first attack. But this deck has 25 lands in it and seems to play better with midrange value instead.

-2 Crusader of Odric
+2 Guardians' Pledge

A card that makes creatures big replaces a card that creatures made big. It died to Rain of Embers regardless of how many tokens we had out anyway. This way, besides a surprise finish, we actually get to attack with our 3/1 buff paladins that otherwise die to everything.

Speaking of...

-3 Elite Vanguard
+2 Doomed Traveler
+1 Loyal Sentry

I love Elite Vanguard and hate when Revenge Odric opens with it. But Doomed Traveler usually gets in for more damage between its two lives.
I have no strong feelings on Loyal Sentry other than it's visually pleasing to swap out three 1-drops for three other 1-drops, and I think it'd be really funny to snipe a Phyrexian Obliterator or something with it. It holds off Kor Spiritdancer no matter how big it is, so there's that.


Lands(25)
25 x Plains

Creatures(19, or 25 if you think about it)
3 x Squadron Hawk
3 x Accorder Paladin
3 x Captain of the Watch
2 x Geist-Honored Monk
2 x Archon of Justice
2 x Attended Knight
2 x Doomed Traveler
1 x Loyal Sentry
1 x Odric, Master Tactician

Other(16/10)
4 x Captain's Call
2 x Raise the Alarm
2 x Journey to Nowhere
2 x Oblivion Ring
2 x Honor of the Pure
2 x Glorious Anthem
2 x Guardians' Pledge



One last thing to consider is Safe Passage over Odric himself. Both of them are blowouts in their own way. Safe Passage is more reliable because it isn't a creature with a huge target on its forehead, but I still use Odric because the effect is more interesting/unique, and because it feels better to have a creature-based deck with at least as many creature-producing cards as it has lands.

Seraph of Dawn is disappointing. You probably disagree. That's fine.

It's good for a common, it's good in multiplayer where you mostly want to just sit there being an unattractive target, which a nonthreatening high-toughness lifelinking flyer certainly makes you.
But it's not that good at actually gaining life or ending games. Played on-curve it's two turns slower than Kemba's Skyguard for gaining that first 2, and by mid-late game we need our cards to be gaining more than 2 per turn.
You'd think 'the lifegain deck' would have a good matchup against Born of Flame, but my Born of Flame build tears through Celestial Light like it's barely there. In this fight, Seraph of Dawn trades with Chandra's Outrage for negative life.

-3 Seraph of Dawn

+1 Rhox Faithmender
+1 Felidar Sovereign
+1 Purity

We trade out 6 power and 12 toughness of lifelinking flyers for 11 power and 17 toughness worth of some combination of flying and lifelink, and alternate wincons, and more synergy with the rest of the deck to power us up to our alternate wincons.
Leatherback Baloth will tell you that 5+ toughness is the best weapon against Chandra. Any one of these cards basically demands a 2-for-1 to get it off the table before the game becomes unwinnable. The Faithmender especially is amazing, because it's hard not to be above 30 life when it's around, so Serra Ascendant is a much more reliable threat.

This change obviously raises the mana curve a bit, so there's one more thing to do:

-1 Loxodon Warhammer
+1 Swell of Courage

That warhammer is a 6-mana investment for a sorcery-speed boost that we rarely ever need. The idea was mostly to give a 30/30 pridemate Trample when it's stuck behind a Knight of Infamy or something, but the point of a pridemate isn't to be a 30/30 finisher, it's meant to be a 5/5 on turn 3. If the pridemate plan doesn't work out, you don't double down on the pridemate plan, you play other threats.
Swell of Courage on the other hand, is the perfect card to go with most of our early game plays. Some people might think that the warhammer makes a great upgrade to Soul Warden, but I've tried that, and it mostly results in dead Soul Wardens. Here we have a flexible combat trick that goes great with the small lifelinkers. People are all too eager to trade their 1-drops with Serra Ascendants, but then for as little as three mana mana the Ascendant comes out on top and has those +1/+1 counters on it for the rest of the game.


Lands(25)
25 x Plains

Creatures(26)
4 x Soul Warden
4 x Serra Ascendant
4 x Ajani's Pridemate
3 x Kemba's Skyguard
2 x Lone Missionary
2 x Knight of Meadowgrain
2 x Archon of Redemption
2 x Baneslayer Angel
1 x Rhox Faithmender
1 x Felidar Sovereign
1 x Purity

Other(9)
2 x White Sun's Zenith
2 x Swords to Plowshares
2 x Day of Judgment
1 x Marshal's Anthem
1 x Well of Lost Dreams
1 x Swell of Courage



Basically, every card at any given mana cost makes a good follow up to any cheaper card, so it keeps the same amazing early game rush that you usually expect from Celestial Light, but it has a stronger late game with a lot of bombs. Which is a pretty sensible way to build it, really. It's a 25-land deck. We should play it like one.

I can't take seriously any list that would pull the Warhammer but runs garbage like Rhox Faithmender and Felidar Sovereign.

The Warhammer is a recursive threat that is very difficult to remove, especially in 2013. Don't get cute. Run things that win games. If you believe the deck wins in the late game, don't pull the card that can both get to the end game and finish games.

Nobody disagrees with you about Seraph of Dawn

And vert is right. You should undo your courage for warhammer swap. Not even gonna read your 2 paragraph explanation on why that's a good change. Its not

At the end of the day the only deck that mattered was the one where DevilWuster ran a total of 3 creatures and won most of the games where people didn't gang up on him. Or at least the ones I had to suffer through.

Although I am now stuck trying to remember if the above deck had more than 2 copies of Lone Missionary available.

It didn't. I would probably run four.

---

Oracle of Mul Daya is disappointing. Its ability is a mockery of Future Sight, and is not a suitable replacement for actual card draw. Even when we do get to 'draw' extra cards off it, we end up with a dozen lands in play and nothing to do with them.

-2 Oracle of Mul Daya
+2 Greater Good

All the extra lands we tend to wind up with thanks to Yavimaya Elder make fine discard fodder for the Greater Good, and we're okay with having two copies because the second makes a fine pitch to the first(and because we somtimes blow up the first with Pernicious Deed).
But if we're getting rid of our ramp, we also probably need to lose the expensive things too:

-1 Gleancrawler
-1 Penumbra Wurm
+2 Spiritmonger

That simplifies things. Now we basically never need to go beyond five mana unless we need a really big Pernicious Deed.

Drana's been disappointing, too. Even with the ramp we don't have anymore, I've only seen her survive long enough to kill one of my opponent's things. Literally one thing, ever.
Grave Pact is super fun and nearly impossible to grind through. But the casting cost is going to give us trouble now, and just having it in our deck looks like it wants to give us a swamp-heavy land split, which is unacceptable when we need 1GG early all the time.
Defense of the Heart is also super fun, but slow, possible to play around, and largely unnecessary when we can just draw thirty cards off a Lord of Extinction. Basically, let's just cut the free-for-all stuff and see what happens...

-1 Drana, Kalastria Bloodchief
-1 Defense of the Heart
-1 Grave Pact
-1 Damnation
+4 Go for the Throat

It was either Damnation, or Consuming Vapors. It's uncommon that I need or want a reset button here. To maximize removal we could try keeping both and dropping Asceticism, but that screws with our land situation again. Vapors is a fine tempo play that can buy you two turns even if it doesn't kill anything on the second, and it works vs. totem armor. We can still get Blood Artist to go off well enough with Pernicious Deed or our sac outlets.

Overall, this build has a significantly higher percentage of keepable opening hands than the last one, and a lot more consistency. My favorite move so far has been to use Rancor to give Greater Good a little extra kick over and over again.

Land(24)
10 x Forest
10 x Swamp
4 x Evolving Wilds

Creatures(22)
4 x Yavimaya Elder
2 x Viridian Emissary
2 x Ravenous Rats
2 x Blood Artist
2 x Blood Connoiseur
2 x Creakwood Liege
2 x Master of the Wild Hunt
2 x Mitotic Slime
2 x Spiritmonger
2 x Lord of Extinction

Other(14)
4 x Go for the Throat
2 x Rancor
2 x Greater Good
2 x Pernicious Deed
2 x Maelstrom Pulse
1 x Consuming Vapors
1 x Asceticism
2x Bituminous Blast