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What about
Golden Demise over
Ritual of Soot? I see all the goldfish lists with both or just Demise. Soot kills half our creatures too. Granted we can bring them back.
I still wonder if Abzan is better. Gives us more SB options and mainboarding
Knight of Autumn over Reaper.
And I love
Wildgrowth Walker, but he never sticks around. Any other life gain creatures?
Golden Demise to me feels too situational. It may be better vs. token decks for sure. But I like how soot also catches
Tempest Djin and
Steel Leaf Champion, for example. There's also just too many weeny decks that run +1+1 effects. Also, many of our own creatures are (often) stuck at max. toughness 2, so it would make little difference, unless we got the cities blessing, which is quite rare I suppose.
What I do against decks heavy in creatures cc 1-3 is, board in
Ritual of Soot, then try to play a bit sneaky. Start casting some explore creatures as needed to get the right lands and some early blocks. Then let them over extend for a bit, then Soot. This works best of course in the 1st round after sideboarding. As you said, we have many ways to bring our creatures back, also
Midnight Reaper just allows us to draw a card for any creature that might die, which is also very good. Not just to recover from a Soot we may cast ourselves, but also against control if we can get it on the board, because they play with sweepers in their main board. I've won some matches partly thanks to that (and
Carnage Tyrant, of course).
I am also testing out an Abzan version of this deck, with
Knight of Autumn in the sideboard. The Knight is quite good, but best brought in when you know it's really needed. Against Djin it's nice (to destroy that
Curious Obsession which cant be hexproofed!), also it is useful to gain life and block vs fast weeny decks. But in general, match 1, when we don't know yet what we face, the Reaper is just better in my opinion.
I have been playing on and off with a play set of
Wildgrowth Walker, and I have to say the deck feels a lot more solid with them included, so for me it definitely sticks for now. To me it feels more important to run a set of those than, for example, a set of
Llanowar Elves (which I have cut). Against very aggressive decks (like mono red) it rarely sticks, but if it eats a Lightnig Strike that's one less to the face, and again we can return it to our hand later. And if it does stick, its usually game over for them. All in all it increases the likelihood of beating aggro a lot.