MTG: Anointment Everlasting

It’s funny to me just how quickly I get bored of decks in standard. It’s probably a byproduct of standard being very big, but also the standard environment being full of small things that don’t work together too exceptionally well. I can’t play with all the things I want to play with in a 60 card deck, which means instead I make a bunch of different, interesting things.

When I sit down to play I tend to bias heavily towards extremely aggressive, or extremely passive. I don’t tend towards combo, and when I do, it tends to be a really well insulated, extremely safe combo that can be sort of hidden away in a shell of a different deck. I just don’t like trying to Assemble The Machine under pressure.

This obviously means I tend towards red and black as aggressors, since they have reach, and I love my green beef so I almost always play with that in some way, and all this means that when I do play an aggressor, it is inevitably playing anything but Blue And White. They’re not my thing, they don’t tend to have the kind of reach or aggression I really like.

Anyway, here’s a blue white aggressive deck I’ve been playing and enjoying lately.

[d title=”Anonited Eternals” style=”embedded”]The Bodies
4 Trueheart Duelist
3 Adorned Pouncer
4 Wharf Infiltrator
2 Vizier of the Anointed
4 Sunscourge Champion
4 Cloudblazer
4 Vizier of Deferment
2 Vizier of Many Faces
2 Aven Wind Guide

The Juice
4 Anointed Procession
3 Farm // Market

The Lands
9 Plains
11 Island
4 Irrigated Farmland[/d]

The last time I played Blue-White aggression for any length of time, I was playing a Return To Ravnica era Arrest-based Enters-The-Battlefield deck, spread out into modern to include the combo of [mtg_card]Ghostway[/mtg_card] and [mtg_card]Archaeomancer[/mtg_card], and, of all things, [mtg_card]Sky Hussar[/mtg_card]. Which I love. Don’t @ me.

This mainly taught me that for my tastes, a UW aggressor deck needs some way to really sustain itself. It needs something it can do to juice up later. In the previous deck, it was the ability to perma-vigilance your team and endlessly recycle arrest affects to keep opponents from necessarily slamming you down with superior creatures. Much like [mtg_card]Lightning Bolt[/mtg_card]s and [mtg_card]Zulaport Cutthroat[/mtg_card]s give you some way to break up a stall or go over the top, this deck needed some way to take over the board, some way to make early plays into really juicy late plays.

And thus we meet our buddy, [mtg_card]Anointed Procession[/mtg_card].

Double Trouble

I played with [mtg_card]Doubling Season[/mtg_card] once; I played with [mtg_card]Dual Nature[/mtg_card] in Commander and in Extended (it was a thing!). I played with most of these effects, and so far, I think this is the best use of this effect I’ve ever played. With those other cards, with the decks those cards had to fit into, Procession doesn’t care if you get the token-makers before it or after. Embalm and Eternalise feed into Procession elegantly, both before and after it on the mana curve. It’s not like the awkward math where you’re left wondering ‘wouldn’t the [mtg_card]Mycoloth[/mtg_card] have just won this on its own?’

Procession lets this deck treat its graveyard like a second much scarier hand. I’ve had games end on the spot after I drop a procession and untap to Eternalize [mtg_card]Adorned Pouncer[/mtg_card] times two onto the battlefield. It even lets you do silly things like copying two things at once with embalmed Viziers.

The deck’s threats, overall, are hard to counter – and I mean that as killing or counterspelling, and even creatures traded for a card typically to go to the bin and wind up embalmed or eternalised for more head count. There’s even a durdly toolbox effect where the [mtg_card]Vizier of The Anointed[/mtg_card] can go hunting up other things – and if your opponent has a great big creature, you can steal it with your [mtg_card]Vizier of Many Faces[/mtg_card], then trade them, then bring back your vizier as two also-huge creatures.

The sad thing is, I sometimes feel like [mtg_card]Cloudblazer[/mtg_card] – the reason I started making this deck! – might just not be a good fit for it, since at five mana is when you’re bringing bombs out of your graveyard! At the same time, though, it’s an incredibly juicy target to Vizier of Many Faces with a procession – four or five cards, and four life!

Still there is at least one critter that needs some explanation and that’s the [mtg_card]Wharf Infiltrator[/mtg_card]. Synergy between the Infiltrator and Eternalize and Embalm is a tiny bit obvious; you can have a turn three of attack, ditch a [mtg_card]Trueheart Duelist[/mtg_card] or [mtg_card]Sunscourge Champion[/mtg_card], and then you’re left with the possibility of making a 3/2 Eldrazi (for no real card loss), or embalm the duelist, or, say, make an Eldrazi, play a tapped land, and untap into something like Sunscourge Champion Eternalized.

Notably, the Infiltrator can make a 3/2 off any discard, not just their own, and if you have two of them, you can serve, discard one card and make two 3/2s or if you’re feeling saucy and it’s late in the game, discard two cards for four 3/2s. And that’s without their interaction with Procession.

Price

With a quick check at MTGGoldfish – and I use them because they have a tool that makes it easy and free to check, not out of any particular love for them – this whole deck costs eight dollars to make. The bulk of that price is five dollars for the Irrigated Farmlands – which, again, I will stump for: Buy dual lands if you cans.

Followup Update

Real quick, here’s the most recent build of the deck I’ve been playing when this article comes out. I like this deck a lot and keep playing it when I mean to go do other things, play other decks for other articles.

[d title=”Anonited Eternals 2.0″ style=”embedded”]Creatures
4 Thraben Inspector
4 Sunscourge Champion
3 Vizier of Many Faces
3 Trueheart Duelist
3 Adorned Pouncer
4 Wharf Infiltrator

Vizier Toolbox
4 Vizier of the Anointed
1 Sacred Cat
1 Anointer Priest
1 Glyph Keeper
1 Aven Wind Guide

Spells
3 Anointed Procession
4 Farm/Market

Lands
4 Irrigated Farmland
7 Island
13 Plains[/d]

Two quick notes: The Sacred Cat is there when you have other Vizier of the Anointed out so you can play a second Vizier, pay a single mana and draw 2 cards. Also, Oketra’s Monument doesn’t seem to work super well with this deck in testing, because A. There’s a better Monument deck, and B. this deck doesn’t cast spells as often as it Embalms or Eternalises.