The Concept
A deck I created after wanting to jam
Kaya, Orzhov Usurper
into Eldrazi & Taxes. The deck revolves around getting as many of our opponents cards into exile, slamming a Kaya with protection, ticking her up twice and ult-ing her to drain all of our opponents life!
Card Choices
The deck runs 4 main-board
Leyline of the Void
and 1 mana discard spells to immediately disrupt our opponents plans and fuel their exile pile. We ideally follow this up with
Tidehollow Sculler
to further rip their hand apart or
Wasteland Strangler
to process their discarded cards (or the card under Sculler) to destroy their creatures.
Thought-Knot Seer
keeps their hand empty and in discard whilst providing a big beefy body and
Blight Herder
also fills the board in the late game.
Gonti, Lord of Luxury
is a bit of a cute include, not quite good enough for Eldrazi & Taxes but fits great into this pile of untested jank!
Eldrazi Displacer
is good to help your creatures dodge removal, continually recur Thought-Knot, do flicker shenanigans with Sculler and move some pesky blockers out the way. Probably should replace Gonti with more Displacer...
Lingering Souls
is great recurring protection for Kaya since Leyline of the Void is non-symmetrical!
Matchups
The good. This deck preys on graveyard decks. Game 1 with a Leyline in play is an instant win against Dredge and Phoenix. It's naturally good against combo with all the ways to pick apart our opponents hand and with Kaya's life gain ability, our burn match-up seems pretty solid too. Against creature aggro we have plenty of ways to get rid of and go bigger than their creatures, curious to see the Spirits and Humans match-ups.
The bad. The grind fest against Midrange will be difficult. They do it better with Dark Confidant card advantage and Traitor of Ghet zombies. Bolt and Ass Trophy deal with Kaya without needing creatures and if they stick a Planeswalker it can be hard to deal with. Our hopes lie in the main-board Leylines making their Tarmogoyfs tiny so we can hopefully go bigger or pray for a Kaya ult to swing the odds massively in our favour.
The ugly. If we don't kill control early they have a few ways to return Kaya to our hand and counter her later. Wasteland Strangler becomes a vanilla 3/2 for 3 (ideally 2) and we have to hope they just have a bad hand. Post-board I can see some blade splicers coming in and just hope we can rip their hand apart and get under them fast but Terminus just sucks for us here. Tron just Trons.
Final Thoughts
Any suggestions are highly appreciated as I am no innovator and I don't even have access to MTGO unfortunately because money...
I'm excited to see if this deck has legs because I think Kaya is flying below everyone's radar at the moment despite the fact she's a 3 mana Planeswalker. So many decks rely on graveyard shenanigans to edge an advantage that it seems appropriate to create an "anti-meta" graveyard hate deck that still has legs against fair decks.
