+1 Beast Whisperer - If the amazing effect on this new card from Guilds of Ravnica wasn't incentive enough, this thing also has all the creature types! Tasty, tasty redundancy.
+1 Concordant Crossroads - I had owned a copy but it was in another deck until recently. This allows us to effectively draw into an infinite mana enabler, i.e. Priest of Titania, Karametra's Acolyte, and immediately generate that infinite mana the same turn if you have enough for the dude and the equip to Sword of the Paruns or Umbral Mantle. Usually just adds inevitability to our draws when trying to elfball out.
+1 Harmonize - This update is also addressing a couple loose final slots this deck now has, considering we took out some of its previously-vicious stax contingency plan. Initially I figured it might just be best to try to slim the curve and look to add more 1-cost druids to make elfballing more smooth, but we've only added a few of the last useful ones that aren't already in the deck. A lot of them beyond the ones we've already added are all pretty bad and would serve singularly to support our combo turn. I'm going to try Harmonize in one of these slots since oftentimes, on questionable keeps/rockier starts for this deck, the deck seems to miss its mark only by being short a couple of cards by turn 3-turn 5. This tends to happen when we are staring at a bare hand on that critical turn 3 or turn 4, right before we untap the following turn and try to go off, where both our hand and our boardstate don't have quite enough critical mass yet. Oftentimes when this happens I'm wishing for something like an Inspiration since its cost is inoffensive at that point in our mana game, and because our Collective Unconscious effects which might be in hand at this point still just haven't reached that potency where they are cost-efficient enough for our mana-card balance to cast with that current boardstate. Hopefully Harmonize impresses.
+1 Growing Rites of Itlimoc
Flip - Another great addition for this deck in the fluency department. This card always replaces itself when we cast it with the percentage of creatures we run, and it's fantastic that it flips itself into the much more resilient "Land" card type at end step, because that means it's usually becoming a Gaea's CradleGC before anyone else untaps (which I shouldn't have to explain why Cradle is great specifically for this kind of deck). The only situation I predict this card will look unimpressive is when it shows up in the opening hand exactly where one more creature should be normally, and therefore will feel more like a tempo Impulse rather than a broken "grab a creature, flip into a Cradle" as I bet it will feel like normally.
+1 Birchlore Rangers - This is just another 1drop elf druid (check that errata) for consistency in the deck. I've never owned it so I just needed to order it eventually.
+1 Krosan Wayfarer - Another 1 drop but this one doesn't also have the Elf tag. nice little upside ability for small corner cases - for example, when we have to play a Forest from hand on an important turn only to draw our Nykthos later in the turn.
-1 Yisan, the Wanderer Bard - This guy, along with Root Maze and Winter Orb, were moved to a new GB deck shell I've been toying with. They are really good cards for this deck, let me reiterate - I'm just focusing on making that new shell competitive and needs these unfair cards more than this deck. Luckily these cards aren't nearly as important to accomplishing our gameplan so I'm fine with replacing them with other things at least for the moment. As an aside, Yisan is probably slightly less valuable in a list like this since he takes a few turns to reach 3cmc and 4cmc targets which are our most important, like Elvish Archdruid, Beast Whisperer, Karametra's Acolyte, and Temur Sabertooth who all represent critical pieces of constructing our combo win. It's clear he's much more valuable in the command zone where he can come down sooner and give those competitive monoG decks an upper hand sooner.
-1 Root Maze - Read above.
-1 Winter Orb - Read above.
-1 Yeva, Nature's Herald - I'm also cutting a few cards that simply just don't advance our gameplan meaningfully at all. Yeva, for example, I thought would be cute as a way to keep our deck relevant on our opponent's turns when it's relevant, but it's actually not ever lmao.
-1 Freyalise, Llanowar's Fury - This is a 5-mana make a Llanowar Elves. It won't ever survive and it's not a card we want to see while we're trying to combo out on any given turn. The silver lining for this style of deck with Freyalise would normally be the fact that you can just cast her very early and immediately start grinding out elves or killing stuff, and then hit that ult at a critical point for more action. This deck never draws that kind of perfect gameplan with her because she's not in the command zone in this situation.
-1 Overrun - We have plenty of these effects I've surmised, and this is easily the worst in the bunch. If I ever regret this cut I'll feel fine adding Triumph of the Hordes and feeling diabolical.
