Turn 2: Transgress the Mind your Collected Company. They have Sylvan Advocate.
Turn 3: Spell Queller your Tireless Tracker.
Turn 4: Cast Wasteland Strangler, put Tracker into your graveyard, kill your Sylvan Advocate.
That’s the stuff dreams are made of, folks. The dreams that make you all warm and fuzzy inside. The dreams that make waking up at 6 a.m. to drive three hours and play Magic until you’re about to drop from exhaustion sound even better than it normally does. Those are the dreams that dreams dream of.
Of course, we have to play more than twelve cards in our deck, so there is the formality of surrounding our awesome combo with some other sweet ones. This is a true-to-form midrange deck with a healthy dose of removal skewing toward exile effects to enable the Wasteland Strangler’s processing.
Then we have a smattering of efficient threats, including the brick wall of Ayli, Eternal Pilgrim, which can sacrifice Spell Queller with its trigger on the stack to permanently exile a spell if you would like. You also have Eldrazi Displacer to allow your Spell Queller to target something more substantial in the late-game: “Sure, you can have your Duskwatch Recruiter back, but I’ll be nabbing that Collected Company in its place.”
You can also repeatedly blink Wasteland Strangler and Reflector Mage after sideboarding. The other three-drops may get the hype, but Displacer does most of the heavy lifting here. It takes over games while still being a reasonable early body, which is perfect for a midrange deck.
At the top end we have Archangel Avacyn and Dragonlord Silumgar, simply the two most powerful creatures available at their mana cost. Midrange decks are all about maximizing individual card power, so the choices are straightforward there.
And to round things out, we have a bit of card advantage in the form of a singleton Painful Truths and planeswalkers. Liliana, the Last Hope lets your medium creatures rule combat, but her -2 ability really shines in the deck.
Archangel Avacyn can stop an opposing attack immediately, Eldrazi Displacer takes over long games, Spell Queller locks up games when you are ahead, and Wasteland Strangler and Dragonlord Silumgar can answer almost anything. You have creatures for any possible scenario, turning Liliana’s -2 into a toolbox of sorts. No matter what role you’ve assumed, Liliana can find the right creature for the job.
The sideboard is more of the same, allowing you to shift the balance of your cards in whatever direction is necessary. The individual card power is very high here, but there are some excellent internal synergies that make this deck even more exciting. Collected Company and Emrakul, the Promised End, beware!
Creatures (17)
- 2 Dragonlord Silumgar
- 3 Wasteland Strangler
- 2 Ayli, Eternal Pilgrim
- 3 Eldrazi Displacer
- 3 Archangel Avacyn
- 4 Spell Queller
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (26)
Spells (14)
