Greetings from Nel Toth - Introduction
This is a casual
Meren of Clan Nel Toth
list that hopes to achieve victory by controlling the board via powerful enter the battlefield triggers then drain the life essence of your enemies quickly. This is done not through the use of infinite combos, but by building up dominating board states and graveyards. Plentiful tutors allow us to answer any permanent that may be an issue to our game-plan. Although, I don't like using any sort of power scale, I would rate this a high six or a low seven. Despite having strong hay-makers and tutors, our end goal is not incredibly easy compared to more combo-orientated decks. If you like reanimating creatures and desire a medium length game, consider this list.
To stay on theme as possible and promote deck synergy, enter the battlefield trigger (ETB) creatures are much more of interest over cards that perform similar functions but not in the same manner. A quick example of this is choosing
Farhaven Elf
over
Rampant Growth
. While both perform the same function, having the basic land ramp on a body lets us abuse its ETB trigger through repeated reanimation, and contribute to create death triggers more readily. There are some exceptions to this. For instance, nothing quite beats the ramping power of
Sol Ring
or the instant speed flexibility of
Assassin's Trophy
.
Please note this is not a full primer, I will not explain the selection process and use of every card. Key functions of the deck and maybe less obvious synergies will be discussed however.
Draining their Life Force - Winning the Game
The main way this deck defeats opponents (besides occasional combat damage wins) revolves around a few key cards that go after your opponent's life points directly. Reanimating either these creatures or others while these are out multiple times in one turn lead to a swift victory.
The explosive plays that result in the above life drain cards winning the game usually happen when
Living Death
or
Twilight's Call
are cast. Set up for these cards by having powerful enter the battlefield trigger creatures in your graveyard ahead of time. With either of these cards,
Eternal Witness
, and a mana generating sacrifice outlet, you can go infinite or pseudo infinite. If enough creatures are on board or in the graveyard,
Phyrexian Altar
or
Ashnod's Altar
can entirely or partially generate enough mana to recast a mass recursion spell to re-trigger your
Eternal Witness
and start a loop. Note that this is typically not needed and rather hard to assemble.
Massive bonus points if you have
Mikaeus, the Unhallowed
out as well. He essentially acts as a
Panharmonicon
for the deck, with the added utility of stacking more death triggers into to the mix. Note that
Nightmare Shepherd
is under consideration for serving a similar function, although the card is much riskier in application.
A Calculated Loss - Sacrifice Outlets
Sacrifice outlets are very important in maintaining the deck's preferred play pattern. Because of the nature of
Meren of Clan Nel Toth
, reliably getting our creatures to the graveyard is necessary. This is not only because it gains us experience counters, but it allows those valuable ETB triggers on our creatures to be reused through reanimation. Instant speed sacrifice outlets can also double as exile protection. There are two types of sacrifice outlets: repeatable and single use. Here, we will define any outlet that cannot be used more than once per turn as a single use sacrifice outlet.
The majority of sacrifice outlets in the deck are single use. They are used to maintain a steady flow of creatures jumping between the battlefield to the graveyard, while getting extra value in the process. None of these cards are in the list for the sole reason of being a sacrifice outlet and have another primary function. Despite this, having a high number of these will make
Meren of Clan Nel Toth
run significantly more smoothly.
There are less repeatable sacrifice outlets here, but they represent some of the strongest cards in the entire deck. The value you get from them directly scales to the number of creatures sacrificed. Unfortunately the better ones in Magic the Gathering happen to be artifacts and not creatures, an easier tutor target.
Let There Be Life - Reanimation Effects
Serving the opposite function to sacrifice outlets, reanimation effects let us bring back creatures from the dead. While
Meren of Clan Nel Toth
does this wonderfully, reanimating creatures multiple times in one turn create some truly nasty plays. Also, if for some reason our general is unavailable, having redundancy in maybe the most important effect our deck wishes to do (beyond card draw and living) is a good idea. Because of the high number of reanimation effects in our deck, sending
Meren of Clan Nel Toth
to the graveyard when she perishes can often be the correct play to save mana in the future.
Willing Participants - Token Generators
There are not many card slots dedicated strictly to making tokens, but it remains something to be desired with the right cards in play. Currently, only
Tendershoot Dryad
and
Avenger of Zendikar
are in the deck. The number of creature tutors makes them easy to find when needed. I see token generators as a "win more" card in this type of
Meren of Clan Nel Toth
build. Sure, having more bodies helps maybe generate experience counters faster, but I would rather do this through having more impactful creatures die. However, some cards that naturally fit into this strategy scale very well with having many tokens in play especially on the turns where we are attempting to close out the game. These cards contain triggers upon death or are repeatable sacrifice outlets.
While this may seem like plenty of cards that have token synergy, all of these function fine without one. The deck is already creature heavy by design with small bodies after their ETB trigger has gone off. Many token generators fail to get immediate value and are slow in nature.
Avenger of Zendikar
is the gold standard, although at the top of our curve. Currently
Tendershoot Dryad
is on the list of cards I'm most likely to cut, but he is a good mana investment and I feel the need to at least have two token generators.
