Liliana: Ramp, Drain, Kill *RETIRED*
Commander / EDH
SCORE: 16 | 17 COMMENTS | 6602 VIEWS | IN 11 FOLDERS
Card Upgrade 28 —April 2, 2018
-Beacon of Unrest
-Grave Pact
+Night's Whisper
+Read the Bones
I cut two cards that look more powerful on the surface than what replaced them. But Beacon of Unrest was kind of expensive, and I'm not a pure reanimator deck. I often found that I'd have one or two reanimation spells in hand and no good targets to hit in the early game. I did like that the target was put on the battlefield permanently without having to worry about an aura falling off like animate dead, but at 5 mana it was kind of clunky. I don't know if I've ever used the return an artifact mode even though my deck has some powerful artifact targets. It was replaced with Night's Whisper to smooth out early draws and keep gas flowing later in the game.
Grave Pact comes out because as my deck has evolved I've run fewer and fewer token generators. I also find that I control the board pretty well with mass sweepers anyway. When I get to the point of being able to abuse grave pact multiple times in a turn, I'm usually ending the game anyway. I found it difficult to take a turn off to cast Grave Pact, because I wasn't always ready to sacrifice a creature myself. I replaced it with Read the Bones to keep cards coming.
The past few changes have been swaps to lower my curve and keep gas coming as sometimes I found myself in situations as described above. Reanimation spells with no target, Grave Pact without a way to abuse it, etc. The cards that have been cut are powerful, but replacing them with more draw will improve the consistency of the deck. I feel like I have a really good core and the games I lose are the ones where I don't have enough fuel.