To grasp the essence behind every card, first we have Ammit Eternal. His job is to meat-shield aggressive pushes, and also pair with Key to the City to remove all his counters, and The Scarab God by being a Zombie.
Bontu the Glorified is an early powerhouse, who, without being able to attack or block can still tap for the crew of Aethersphere Harvester, and can easily sacrifice Scrapheap Scrounger, or Dread Wanderer to become a creature and get some drain.
Deadeye Plunderers is a more obvious pick. He synergizes with every artifact card in the deck, and even helps ramp a little extra power and resources into being able to utilize all your card abilities and playing cards you draw by sacrificing the artifact token for a mana of any color.
Dread Wanderer is a zombie for The Scarab God, and is able to slow aggro by coming back, and also be a great sacrificial unit for Bontu the Glorified
Gifted Aetherborn is an amazing card at any stage in the game, makes players incredibly hesitant to attack you as you get all your combos set up, and even for aggro, worst case you make a pretty even trade and gain some life to hold out.
Glint-Sleeve Siphoner first and formost pairs incredibly well with Key to the City, building up card advantage every other attack. Another amazing feature is it's pair with Aethersphere Harvester, and if said harvester had a Mechanized Production on it, with siphoner in play you draw an extra card every turn for free, then can use the harvester to gain back the 1 life which you just lost from the card draw.
Herald of Anguish as a surprisingly cheap win-con. typically when i cast him he only costs 2-4 which is crazy value. it also has a little bit of disruption since there are only two kill spells in the deck.
Scrapheap Scrounger is obviously an artifact, can be sacrificed, and is even a good unit to put Mechanized Production on as the value starts getting a little crazy after a while if they cant take care of the original.
Siren Stormtamer took me a little bit but I took out two Dread Wanderer for it. The reasoning is one, a one cost flyer that can do damage is really powerful early-game. Two, late-game, it protects a creature that Mechanized Production is sitting on so they have a hard time getting rid of it.
The Scarab God has synergy with every zombie, but the thing is with cards like [key to the city], Search for Azcanta, sacrifices from Bontu the Glorified, sacrificing Siren Stormtamer for her ability, and the desire to trade cards like Gifted Aetherborn and Ammit Eternal, he almost never runs out of things to exile and make even more zombies for him.
Aethersphere Harvester is another artifact, but paired with Glint-Sleeve Siphoner, you can choose to prioritize healing or card advantage. It's also a decently powerful flying card for the cost.
Key to the City pairs with Ammit Eternal, Deadeye Plunderers once he's big as a win-con, and Glint-Sleeve Siphoner to keep getting energy tokens.
I imagine Lifecrafter's Bestiary being the one people say the most about since its the only card I brought green into my deck for. However, it is an artifact, scrying is great, and I also love drawing cards in this deck, especially for ONE!
Treasure Map is probably one of the most important cards. Not only is it an artifact and a non-creature artifact, but putting in 3 mana over 3 turns to spawn three treasure tokens which ALL trigger Deadeye Plunderers, but every two turns that's another free card or resource of any color.
Mechanized Production is pretty crazy, paired with Aethersphere Harvester you bank tons of energy tokens, with Scrapheap Scrounger the board is most likely going to swing into your favor, and my favorite, with Treasure Map, once you have three on the battlefield, if you're donating three mana a turn (one mana to tap each treasure map, and which you can do entirely from the treasure tokens you get from transforming one treasure map) Once you have about 3 flipped treasure maps, you can tap two to make another treasure every turn, one to discard a treasure and draw a card, then bank the other treasure for resources and artifact presence.
Search for Azcanta helps The Scarab God, and after its flipped you can pay three to look at the top 4 cards of your library, find a non-creature, non-land card and put it into your hand, the rest goes to the bottom of your library. There are 17 cards that fit this description being 1/3 of the deck, (say 28% chance) so the probability of NOT is 72%. Since it's four cards deep, .72.72.72*.72= .268. So there is a 73.2% chance of gaining card advantage.
Vraska's Contempt because no matter what you need disruption too. If I'm playing against non-merfolk I'll swap in Walk the Plank
