The foremost goal of this deck is to be efficient and gain a tempo lead over every player.
In this deck, there are many ways this is achieved.
The first is ramp. Our goal is to consistently be 2-3 mana ahead of everybody at the table.
However, our mana dorks are also all multi purpose. Specifically, in the 1-mana slot, they are all mana fixing as well.
This brings me to the second goal of this deck: every card in the deck should stand alone by itself as a powerful card. That means when you're 10 turns into the game you're unlikely to draw a useless card when you want something that contributes significantly to your game plan.
This is also the reason I don't saturate the deck with mana dorks, even though that plan would significantly benefit if we're able to draw our Gaea's cradle. The thing is, that plan is easily disrupted and hard to pull off.
So, I try to make every card in this deck efficient and useful by iteself.
So what is the game plan of this deck? Well, going back to the main goal, it revolves heavily around tempo. We want to be raking in benefits that nobody can come close to. This is why we focus on an efficient ramp package (while not going overboard). However, ramping should mainly be done early in the game (around the first 4 turns), everything afterward should be focused on contributing towards our win-cons. Basically, we still want to ramp in the late game, but it should be more of something like tripling our mana production than adding one or two mana to the board in the form of mana rocks or creatures.
This ramping will lead us to be able to pull out a massive Vilainous wealth or ruinous hailfire to win the game. And, if we're able to, stomping in with massive damage from a finale of devastation.
Another important, and also efficient game plan we have is to shut our opponents out of the game by making them discard their hands. This can be done with a wheel + narset, parter of veils, or wheel + notion thief. Again, these cards also contribute to our deck by themselves. They put things into the graveyard that can be revived with kenrith, allow us to refresh our hands after playing all of our cheap and efficient ramp spells, and also disrupt our opponents' hands. Notion thief by itself can also happen to draw us dozens of cards if played at the right moment.
I'm sure you can see what I mean by each card in our deck being efficient.
We also have a ramp package in our lands:
gaea's cradle
urborg + cabal coffers
Cabal coffers is one of the weakest cards in our deck, and basically does nothing by itself.
In fact, I haven't focused much on the lands and I'm sure a lot of tinkering and fixing can be done since I mainly focused on the other cards in the deck when building.
One of the best cards in our deck is seedborn muse. If we had a single card in our opening hand with 6 lands, I wouldn't be that upset. Seedborn is that powerful. Basically, she quadruples our mana production if we have kenrith out. Allowing us to use kenrith as much as we like. Paired with a training grounds, and we've done all but win the game as long as we have enough blue sources. With this combination we can double our mana with lands and ramp, and draw a whole new hand every rotation. Add in some protection or counterspells to our hand (which we definitely have), then the game we'll be playing archnemesis until we draw the right cards till we win the game.
The thing is, even though we can pull of some crazy stuff like the above combo, we're not super imposing. We aren't playing archnemesis until we flash + wheel with notion thief, or are drawing 10 cards every turn. And at that point haven't we already won?
All we need is to tutor one of our wincons, and we have a generous package of tutors in our deck as well.
So, anyways, there are also times when we don't draw what we want. We can end up on turn 4-5 while only having a single extra mana with our hands being manaflooded. That's why we play kenrith, besides having access to all the most powerful cards in each color. We can use him to slowly draw our ways out of hell.
If we're mana screwed? Then hopefully we draw a colorless rock or a 1-mana dork, otherwise we can't do much. 1-land hands shouldn't be kept, especially if we don't have fixing.
Again, never make the mistake of keeping a hand with the wrong color mana, that's the only problem with this deck. The manabase can be shoddy at times, and keeping the wrong hand might just instantly lose you the game.
Another one of the best cards in our deck is survival of the fittest.
Here's a combo:
Survival + discard a dork (or cheap creature) and grab nyxbloom/sphinx/void winnower
discard that same card + grab an efficient mana dork (like bloom tender or faeburrow)
kenrith activation and revive the big creature.
This combo is fairly cheap and simply requires kenrith on the field. We can usually play kenrith by turn 3 and survival turn 1 or 2 if we have it in our opening hand. This leads us to such a heavy value card appearing on something like turn 5. If we have a hailfire our wealth in our hand we can come close to winning on turn 6. Still, the main priority at this point is to draw cards and make our opponent discard their hands so they can't wipe the board our remove our nyxbloom.
Okay, there's plenty of potential with this deck. You can even get out a smothering tide turn 1 and basically win the game with a nut draw (it's happened to me), or play your whole opening hand then wheel and play your next hand turn 1. With a cheap CMC deck, wheels can be absolutely broken.
I modeled this deck after CEDH with the goal of making a fun do-it-all deck for casual play. If you want to make this deck competitive, remove the big cards and their combos, adding in the demonic consultation + thassa and jace. Just adding in the consultation combo into this deck makes it likely to win before turn 6 every game. That seems way too busted for casual play, so that's why I didn't add it. I also don't want to add an infinite mana combo like dockside + barin/temur sabertooth, since it seems too broken as well. That's also why this deck might be bad, since it doesn't have the traditional answers (like wraths) and big-cards you might see in traditional casual play decks. But you can quickly convert it into a competitive deck by changing out 1 card for an infinite mana combo, or changing out maybe 10 cards to make it into a CEDH deck.
Enjoy!
