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SCG Talent Search – The Seven-Week Itch

Thursday, November 11th – I went to bed that night with visions of Teysa swirling in my head, and I was pretty sure I was in love. Check out this EDH deck with one of your favorite B/W legends! Read and vote!

We’ve all been there. Smitten. Utterly ensorcelled by what seems like the hottest piece of action that’s come your way. As you spend more time together, you fall deeper and deeper in love, and you start to think that this is it. This is the one. It just feels so… right, you know? Maybe you’re attracted to the sultry curves of that Radha, Heir to Keld EDH deck, or the take-charge attitude of the U/R/W Control deck, or the wacky bedroom antics of the new combo deck that has you putting Conspiracy next to Sea Hunter deep into the night. Whatever it is in your specific case, it’s a love that defies reason. It’s raw, it’s elemental, and it’s primal.

For a little while at least. See, it’s just not possible to sustain that level of passion indefinitely. Sooner or later, you start getting that longing for games that are shorter, or longer, or more explosive, or that let you draw more cards, or that just let you draw
different

cards. You start looking at other peoples’ decks and saying “man, I wish
my

deck were more like that one.” You get that itch. Conventional wisdom puts the length of time between falling in lust with a deck and jonesing to build a new one at approximately seven weeks.

I’m at that point now. It started innocently enough. My EDH generals and I had settled into a comfortable rhythm, and yeah, we didn’t play with each other as much anymore, but that was fine. Our relationship had just… evolved, that’s all. But one night, I met this foxy little number:

1

Woof. Woof. Forget about that doofus hitting on her in the art. He’s no real competition for you anyway. Just focus on those abilities. It might as well just say “kill all creatures forever and get infinite tokens” or “Tap: Make target opponent cry.” And that’s not even taking into account the myriad interactions and synergies at your disposal when you team up with this lady. It’s nuts. I went to bed that night with visions of Teysa swirling in my head, and I was pretty sure I was in love.

But, as happens to the best of us sometimes, I woke up the next morning to something much less appealing than what I went to bed with. Take a look:

2

How had this happened? How had I glossed over these glaring flaws? Sacrifice three creatures to kill one? Was I insane? And wow, when I lose a black creature I get a whole 1/1 back. Awesome, that’ll really help in a format where everyone starts at forty.

So I shelved the idea… or tried to. But it kept poking around in the back of my mind, nagging me. Had I missed something? Again? Why couldn’t I stop thinking about her?

After thinking about it long and hard, I realized that, while her superficial hotness wasn’t quite real, the revulsion I’d felt that morning wasn’t exactly warranted either. In truth, Teysa was complicated and interesting, and she really did seem to have a lot to offer someone who was willing to invest the time and energy into figuring her out. And really, isn’t that the most rewarding part? I knew I had to build the deck after all. It wouldn’t be easy, but the best things never are.

When I build decks, I like to think of them in terms of available slots. So here’s the start of the deck:

General: Teysa, Orzhov Scion

40 mana

It doesn’t really matter right now what that 40 mana consists of, but it’s going to be about that much. So 41/100 cards. Looking at this highly, highly appealing color combination, there are a few more cards I can already tell you I’m going to want to play:

Sensei’s Divining Top
Crystal Ball
Vindicate
Mortify
Swords to Plowshares
Path to Exile
Condemn
Unmake
Angel of Despair

That’s fifty cards. Halfway there. That wasn’t so bad, right? To get started on the other fifty, let’s look at our general. There are a lot of things to like about her—the fact that she’s cheap enough to recast without much hassle, the fact that she can help with both board control and damage, the fact that she has good interactions with a lot of different cards and strategies—but there’s one thing about her that drives the rest, and we’re going to have to dig into it pretty deeply to figure out where this deck is going to go:

3

Wow, just read that thing. Now read it again. The implications are nothing short of staggering! Teysa’s appeal as a general is definitely of the “build around me” variety, and building around her means building around these two lines of text. Just off the top of my head, here are some things that that ability has some serious synergy with:

-      Tokens

-      Leaves the battlefield/goes to the graveyard triggers

-      Other sacrifice effects, to also exploit the above

-      Recurring creatures

-      Taking her second ability into account, creatures that are both black and white

-      Things that care about other things being both black and white

This is actually the problem with Teysa, in a way. There’s just so much there that if we tried to use it all, our deck would be four hundred cards and incapable of winning a game even if it
were

legal in this format. But one thing is clear already:  a deck built around an ability whose cost reads “sacrifice three creatures” is going to need to draw a whole lot of extra cards. So let’s add:

Night’s Whisper
Sign in Blood
Phyrexian Arena
Skeletal Scrying
Promise of Power
Skullclamp
Mind’s Eye

With the exception of Skullclamp and Mind’s Eye, these all share a common theme:  they cost life. Nothing to be done. I need the cards badly, so I need to pay the life. Fortunately, these colors have a lot of cards that are just good that also happen to help out with this:

Serra Ascendant
Divinity of Pride
Voracious Hatchling
Vampire Nighthawk
Exsanguinate
Death Grasp
Transcendent Master

These are all pretty solid, and I think that drain effects like these are quite a natural fit for this deck. Also note that these all serve multiple roles, which is always a plus in a deck where slots are at a premium. Speaking of slots, we’re at 64/100 if we use all of these cards, which I’d like to.

Okay, so:  on to the real meat. Let’s pick one of those core concepts to focus on. We can always stir in some good stuff from the other interactions, but we don’t want to sacrifice too much card quality for the sake of appeasing the synergy gods. So let’s see what cards we’d look at to fuel each of these strategies. For the “sacrifice stuff” plan, we’re looking at things like:

Academy Rector
Roc Egg
Reliquary Monk
Monk Idealist
Archon of Justice
Reveillark
Twilight Shepherd
Yosei, the Morning Star
Twilight Drover

Both Monks and Reveillark will kind of depend on what else ends up in the deck, but the rest of those seem pretty good. Roc Egg might look a bit lackluster at first glance, but it’s a fairly cheap creature that can be used in two activations of Teysa’s main ability, which is worth something.

The recurring creatures plan would ask us to run stuff like this:

Chronosavant
Ivory Gargoyle
Evershrike

There’s not really that much here that’s very exciting to be honest, because these have to be white to work toward what we’re trying to do with this deck. Evershrike is heartbreaking, because that’s a card I’ve always wanted to play, and it’s not happening this time. Auras are just too bad, and nothing else in this deck really benefits from them very much.

The “color matters” plan argues for several of the creatures we’ve already included for other reasons, along with things like these:

Deathbringer Liege
Mourning Thrull
Nip Gwyllion
Nightsky Mimic
Orzhov Guildmage
Tidehollow Sculler
Necrotic Sliver
Restless Apparition
Stillmoon Cavalier
Ghost Council of Orzhova
Selenia, Dark Angel

Some of these are pretty good, and things like Orzhov Guildmage and Nightsky Mimic might even make the cut just for their synergy with Teysa. Mourning Thrull and Nip Gwyllion are pretty terrible though. For the most part, I think this is better left as a small subtheme. We need a lot of creatures in here anyway, so some of them might as well be B/W, but we should really be emphasizing solid creatures over dual-colored creatures when it comes down to it.

Finally, here are some cards we’d want to play if we started focusing on tokens:

Even the Odds
Spectral Procession
Decree of Justice
Conqueror’s Pledge
Martial Coup

I’ll just stop there. There are a bunch more cards that make white tokens, but I don’t think I like any of them more than these, and I’m not even sure all of these will make it. Persistent token makers like Elspeth, Knight-Errant and Sacred Mesa are good cards, but they don’t really get at what this deck is going for. As it stands, I’m inclined to run Martial Coup, Conqueror’s Pledge, and Decree of Justice in this deck, and leave the other two off. Unmake is good enough to run in here, but other three-mana spells that act as extra copies of it and only work when Teysa is in play probably aren’t.

So that’s the basic framework for the deck. Now we just need to fill in the details. But first, let’s take a look at where we are now, because you’re probably about as lost as I am when it comes to how the actual list is shaping up:

General: Teysa, Orzhov Scion

40 Mana

Tokens (3)

Decree of Justice
Conqueror’s Pledge
Martial Coup

Card Draw (7)

Night’s Whisper
Sign in Blood
Phyrexian Arena
Skeletal Scrying
Promise of Power
Skullclamp
Mind’s Eye

Other Utility (10)

Sensei’s Divining Top
Crystal Ball
Vindicate
Mortify
Swords to Plowshares
Path to Exile
Condemn
Exsanguinate
Death Grasp
Unmake

Graveyard/Leaves Play Triggers (8)

Academy Rector
Roc Egg
Archon of Justice
Twilight Shepherd
Yosei, the Morning Star
Reborn Hero
Mistmoon Griffin
Twilight Drover

Other Creatures (13)

Angel of Despair
Deathbringer Liege
Tidehollow Sculler
Necrotic Sliver
Restless Apparition
Stillmoon Cavalier
Ghost Council of Orzhova
Selenia, Dark Angel
Serra Ascendant
Divinity of Pride
Voracious Hatchling
Vampire Nighthawk
Transcendent Master

Eighteen slots left. I feel like they should be mostly creatures, but we have room for a few more utility cards too. Let’s see… sweepers are always a hit; this deck wants a couple fat targets for Academy Rector, and I always like having some extra ways to deal with non-creature permanents, so let’s go ahead and add:

Wrath of God
Hallowed Burial
Debtor’s Knell
Oblivion Ring
Grave Pact
Disenchant
Return to Dust
Austere Command

I’m also going to cut Death Grasp at this point for Demonic Tutor, which pretty much goes in any black deck instead of whatever the worst card is. Roc Egg is also looking a little weak right about now, as the deck is leaning more towards playing a bunch of guys and activating Teysa’s ability judiciously instead of constantly. I don’t feel like a guy that just gets to be used in two activations (and is basically pretty worthless before the first one) isn’t doing enough. Instead, I’m going to bring in Identity Crisis, which is just such an awesome (in every sense of the word) bomb in these colors that it’s pretty hard to resist.

So ten more creatures, and we’re done. We’ve got a lot of synergy built up already, so really we’re just looking for guys to fill space and dish it out, but let’s think this through and see what’s out there. Our curve is a little heavy at three, but otherwise we’re okay. All of the guys we add should be white, and I want to mix them up between two, four, and five mana to get a decent spread of costs. Here’s what looks good to me:

Serra Avenger
War Priest of Thune
Dust Elemental
Emeria Angel
Knight Captain of Eos
Akroma, Angel of Wrath
Zhang Fei, Fierce Warrior
Adarkar Valkyrie
Crovax, Ascendant Hero

So if you look at those, a couple of them are just good beaters, but most of them end up interacting with Teysa anyway. Building around a general is like that a lot of the time; you make a plan and run a bunch of stuff specifically because it has synergy with your general, and then you start looking through for filler and find a bunch more good stuff that also plays into that strategy that you hadn’t even thought about. As for some of the less obvious choices:  decent bodies that also power up Teysa seem good, reusing enters/leaves-the-battlefield effects seems good, and an unblockable 4/4 with vigilance seems good (plus I’ve just always wanted to use a guy with horsemanship and haven’t had the chance until now). Baneslayer Angel is not invited because I wouldn’t be able to play it with a straight face.

If you bothered counting, you may have noticed that I’m actually short one. I was originally considering Wall of Omens, but I don’t think it really does enough. Plus, Zhang Fei and Adarkar Valkyrie got me thinking. I’m pretty sure fat creatures with vigilance are like really good in multiplayer games. I’m kind of thinking I’d like another one of those, and after considering the options, I decided to treat myself to a blast from the past, just this once:

4

There she is, in all her white-bordered glory. So excited to be playing this card. Come to think of it, it should be legal as an EDH general, because if any creature is truly legendary, it’s this one.

Anyway, I’ll spare you the agony of watching me puzzle out the mana base. Here’s where I ended up:

General: Teysa, Orzhov Scion

Land (33)

Terramorphic Expanse
Evolving Wilds
Fetid Heath
Tainted Field
Orzhov Basilica
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Godless Shrine
Marsh Flats
Flooded Strand
Polluted Delta
Bloodstained Mire
Windswept Heath
Verdant Catacombs
Arid Mesa
Kjeldoran Outpost
12 Plains
6 Swamp

Other Mana (7)

Sol Ring
Knight of the White Orchid
Mind Stone
Orzhov Signet
Coldsteel Heart
Tithe
Land Tax

Creatures (30)

Academy Rector
Archon of Justice
Twilight Shepherd
Yosei, the Morning Star
Reborn Hero
Mistmoon Griffin
Twilight Drover
Angel of Despair
Deathbringer Liege
Tidehollow Sculler
Necrotic Sliver
Restless Apparition
Stillmoon Cavalier
Ghost Council of Orzhova
Selenia, Dark Angel
Serra Ascendant
Divinity of Pride
Voracious Hatchling
Vampire Nighthawk
Transcendent Master
Serra Angel
Serra Avenger
War Priest of Thune
Dust Elemental
Emeria Angel
Knight Captain of Eos
Akroma, Angel of Wrath
Zhang Fei, Fierce Warrior
Adarkar Valkyrie
Crovax, Ascendant Hero

Other Spells (29)

Mind’s Eye
Austere Command
Identity Crisis
Wrath of God
Hallowed Burial
Debtor’s Knell
Oblivion Ring
Grave Pact
Disenchant
Return to Dust
Demonic Tutor
Sensei’s Divining Top
Crystal Ball
Vindicate
Mortify
Swords to Plowshares
Path to Exile
Condemn
Exsanguinate
Unmake
Decree of Justice
Conqueror’s Pledge
Martial Coup
Night’s Whisper
Sign in Blood
Phyrexian Arena
Skeletal Scrying
Promise of Power
Skullclamp

Not too bad. It feels weird saying so after spending this much time and this many words getting to this point, but keep in mind that this is a first draft. After actually playing with the thing, I don’t doubt that there are a bunch of cards I’ll hate and a bunch more that I can’t believe I forgot to include. But hey, that’s deckbuilding, and all things considered, I think this is a pretty good start. The biggest question about this deck is whether or not this ragtag bunch of 2/2, 3/3, and 4/4 underdogs can pull together and beat the 15/15 champions of this format, but I believe that through teamwork, they just might be able to pull it off.

It’s the feel-good hit of the summer; the heartwarming and unlikely tale of a deck that had what it took to win against all odds and the one man who was just crazy enough to bring it all together.

I hope you’ve enjoyed getting to know Teysa as much as I have. She really is a special lady, and I’m really looking forward to spending more time with her. I really do think that this deck has enough fun and powerful interactions to keep me busy for a while, which is always nice, and there are just a ton of cards and combinations of cards that I’m really excited to see in action. I love the way this deck looks, and I definitely can’t see myself getting tired of it any time soon.

Or at least, not for another seven weeks or so.