Gifts Ungiven

Crime Harvest

I began with a four-color list, including blue mainly for Oona's Grace (replacing the ever-so-convenient cycling lands from Onslaught that the Loam decks abuse), with the knock-on effect of adding in Bant Charm. But that version had terrible mana and fell apart as a result, since it wasn't able to rely on the Bosks and Ziggurats that Brian Robinson's Dark Bant deck used. With that in mind, I ditched the Grace plan and went to straight-up WBG, eventually tuning it into the list you see here. Let's take a look in a little more detail.

This deck relishes the opportunity to land something grim on turn two. To that end, there are six "Birds" (four of them being the rather more effective Hierarchs). Possible turn two plays include Nyxathids and Knights, with Sculler being an effect two-drop if you're less ambitious (or want to do Sculler plus Crime).

Following this initial play, we can clear away creatures and other problems with Paths and Rings. We back our creatures with two copies of Elspeth, there to make a Knight or Nyxathid truly scary.

This deck packs seven retrace cards, with four Crimes and three Harvests. Once you make sure you will be able to have four lands in play (and I do mean actual lands, since having just two or three and then having your Birds swept is a pain), you can retrace with abandon, making your Knights and eventual Harvests ever increasing threats. To support the retrace mania, this deck runs 26 lands.

In general, the approach here is to disrupt and beat face. At times, you may want to use a Knight to cash in a Forest or Plains for a Treetop Village, simultaneously adding a Wrath-proof attacker and boosting the Knight.

I'm not 100% convinced that Nyxathid is a better choice than Doran. On the plus side, Nyxathids can be played out in multiples, and the Nyxathid creates a tension for your opponent between playing cards out of their hand and getting smacked by a bigger Nyxathid. Specifically, this makes it traumatic for a Five-Color Control build to follow its normal "play a giant pile of lands" progression, as each land equals more harm. On the minus side, you need to be doing pretty well on the disruption side to have the Nyxathid hit equal to or harder than a Doran would, and in testing, I've lost the occasional Nyxathid to something as prosaic as an Esper Charm (when it pushes my opponent's hand back up to seven cards).

The sideboard is highly tentative, and has not been tested. Your mileage may vary, and all that.

I've run this deck up against Five-Color Control, B/W Tokens, and Boat Brew, and it's generally pretty good. The greatest risk among those matchups is falling behind against Five-Color once it stabilizes, as this deck does not have a single hammer-blow finisher if Five-Color has managed to stick a Wall of Reverence.

This deck definitely is a lot of fun, and I think it could be tuned to take down your local metagame. There's some nice versatility built into retrace, as it lets you treat each new land you draw as, alternately, disruption or threat, depending on what you choose to retrace. On top of that, the positive feedback loops with both Nyxathid and Knight are just gravy.