At it's core the deck is pretty basic. Get a creature with persist; a way to sacrifice them for free; a way to give them a +1+1 counter when they come into play.
To get a benefit from
Reaper King
you turn your creatures into a scarecrow via cards like
Xenograft
,
Conspiracy
or Arcade Adaptation .
The deck also features the (newly unbanned)
Flash
+
Protean Hulk
combo. The deck also features many sacrifice outlets making Hulk easy to kill other ways though not as easy to get out.
Flash
just works great with the deck anyway. With
Reaper King
out and something like
Conspiracy
Flash essentially turns into a double
Vindicate
if you throw down a persist creature.
Flash
into
Woodfall Primus
on turn two is also pretty annoying. If you're worried about an opponent ramping then you have turn two blow up two lands! The deck also features the
Reveillark
infinite combo using Karmic Guide + Reveillark + Saffi Eriksdotter
. As a back up to
Saffi Eriksdotter
you can also use
Body Double
to target
Reveillark
.
When
Protean Hulk
dies you can fetch a game win. Assuming you already have a sacrifice outlet you search for either
Melira, Sylvok Outcast
or
Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit
as well as
Murderous Redcap
. That's the easy route. The harder route is to fetch
Viscera Seer
&
Karmic Guide
then bring back
Protean Hulk
, sacrifice it with
Viscera Seer
, fetch
Reveillark
and maybe
Dryad Arbor
since it's free, doesn't matter, you wont need it. After that you have the infinite and you can go fetch nearly every creature in the deck, the only creature too expensive is
Woodfall Primus
.
To mana fix most of the ramp spells specifically target forests.
Nature's Lore
,
Skyshroud Claim
, Wooded Elves,
Farseek
, and
Shard Convergence
all will let you tutor for forests. Simply find the dual land or shock land that shares the second color you need. If you're hurting for red go get Stomping grounds. This gives you the benefit of more green sources and fixes your color.
Your win conditions are:
Blow up the board with
Reaper King
or
Woodfall Primus
and just slowly beat your opponent down (assuming they don't just concede).
Infinite damage with
Goblin Bombardment
,
Zulaport Cutthroat
,
Murderous Redcap
or
Purphoros, God of the Forge
.
Deck the opponent with either
Altar of Dementia
or
Bitter Ordeal
Go infinitely tall with a couple of other creatures and
Cathars' Crusade
.
One interesting combo is
Spark Double
will naturally go infinite by cloning a persist creature. This means that if you have a sacrifice outlet and another persist creature you don't need any of the cards that give creatures +1+1 counters when they come into play.
The deck has a few weaknesses at the moment and a few cards I'm interested in putting in somewhere but not sure what I want to take out.
- The deck is a little on the slow side, typically you are looking at like a turn 6-7 win without interruption.
- The deck doesn't have much card draw (though it has several tutors) so it can run out of steam as your hand size dwindles.
- Removal is situational. Without
Reaper King
there isn't much direct removal for creatures and only 1 board wipe. You could potentially swap
Aura Shards
or
Shriekmaw
for
Path to Exile
or
Wrath of God
if that helps.
- Exile sucks, but when doesn't it?
- Graveyard hate. Especially cards that exile at instant speed. Opponents can respond to the persist trigger or
Reveillark
combo by exiling your graveyard mid combo.
- Blood Moon or Winter Orb; the deck is 5 colors with tons of non-basics lands. There's 11 basic lands, 2 mana rocks that produce colored mana, and
Phyrexian Altar
. On top of that, the only enchantment removal in the deck is either
Reaper King
,
Aura Shards
, or
Woodfall Primus
. It's very hard to get rid of enchantments.
The deck is prohibitively expensive because I'm running the true classic duals. If you remove those and put in like trilands or utility duals you'll drop the price dramatically. Removing the revised duals would drop the price down to around $700. If you remove
Vampiric Tutor
&
Vesuva
then you have a much more reasonable $600 deck. Expensive, but not crazy.
Update: changed a few things, removed
Essence Warden
for
Worldly Tutor
, add a few new Modern Horizons cards, and removed
Panharmonicon
since it's just a "win more" card. Deck now registers as 100% competitive, something you might not see much of with a
Reaper King
deck. This is certainly the only persist king deck I've ever seen.
Although the deck is rather slow overall, there are a handful of ways to win on turn 3 or 4 with the right draws.
I'd say that as far as I can tell the main way to improve it would be to add in the 1 life fetches, and/or maybe just throw in the remaining classic duals. That might speed it up. Another sacrifice outlet or draw engine might not hurt either. Otherwise I think it's really solid.
