Esper Griefblade (Modern)

Now that you mention it I can definitely agree with going down to 3. What would you put in place?

I decided to go up to a 4th inquisition instead of the vendilion clique.

Yeah that's a good call.
Why quietus spike ? Bassilisk collar used to have that slot back in the eldrazi days where it would be equipped on the ballista to ping stuff to death. Not sure that ballista would work in this, but collar will.

The quietus spike reduces the opponents life quicker. With Quietus spike I can get the opponent down to 7 on turn 3. I wanted to go for a faster version of stoneblade with more of an aggro / tempo idea.

Turn 1 - Evoke Grief and Ephemerate
Turn 2 - Stone forge, Find Quietus spike, attack for 3
Turn 3 - Sigarda's Aid, Cheat in Quietus spike, trigger equip to Grief, attack for 3, trigger opponent goes down to 7 from 14.

Also I swapped out Inquisition for Undying Evil as it gives me more 1 drops to keep Grief on the field after Evoking it. Added 3 Malakir Rebirth for the same reason.
And I'm trying Solitude instead of prismatic ending but I'm still not sure if I like either of those changes. Just testing them out.

Have you fully analysed the damage dealt with quietus? They might drop from 14 to 7, but from there it just halves again. Have you measured the full number of turns it takes to kill with it, compared to without it ?

I love the new avatars because they are revoke and fit into an ensnaring bridge design I have where I stop the big aggro by getting rid of my hand.

I've been thinking if there is a way to cheat a card like squee, goblin nabob back out of exile with a few eldrazi processor. It's a far out idea, but my deck is of the long game control type so it might be possible for me to exploit it, but I mention it so you at least know of the trick.

Yeah. In my play testing I've found it worth the search from stoneforge and defintely comes up faster even with compleat or batterskull. Even though it gets less and less as you do more damage halving is very fast. But it wins when my opponent gains life which they will do if I have to exile something to solitude.

I will certainly be playtesting this more so I'll be able to see how quietus spike stacks up but so far I have some good results with it

One way of testing it is that whenever one of them is played you put a copy of the other nearby and place counters on both for each life they take. That way you can slowly write down how much damage each one deals, and in the end you can calculate their averages.

Ooo that's a really good idea! I'll do that!

Just be carefull, once you start measuring cards you might end up spending days on using paperstrips as a tool to track the performance of every card in your deck :)

*** warning *** putting paperstrips inside the sleeves with a card will damage the paint on it after hundreds of measuring.

Yeah I don't think I'll use paperstrips. I'll just note it on the side. I've also found paper in the sleeve in front of a card damages the sleeves too

I've been playing with proxies and paperstrips for years and actually have several sets of the first sleeves made.
People break sleeves by not caring about them.

I first started on using paperstrips to analyse what would happen if I cut a 4th raging goblin, so I can safely say paperstrips don't harm sleeves. I've played with both proxies and paperstrips in sleeves.

I use old lands and token cards with strips most of the time.

I've been talking with people who use alternate art which makes the cards slightly different, and you can even used colored markers to plant a small dot on cards to make it distinct, those who do this won't need the paperstrips but if someone notice the dot at a sale it will lessen the value. There are places to plant them where people wont notice them and theoretically, during games if one of your cards are more worn, you can do some additional math that people who don't distinguish between the cards can. In the first years of fallen empires this was really abused.
The advantage to alternate art cards is good if you want to use math or tracking card performance.
The effect was so good during the fallen empire that it actually made mint cards more valuable, because if you did not have a math mind, you could at least stop math minds from reading your deck by playing scràtchfree identical cards. For example if you had two different Swamp pictures and the opponent had discarded you the turn before, and you played the Swamp they hadn't seen, then they would know you have a land in hand and that you drew that other land. For the superior mathminds having individual looking cards is an advantage which is why there is really such a huge pressure at alternate arts being printed. For example, in the oldschool formats 93/94, homemade alternate art is allowed in a huge scale, as the cards are really hard to get, but many mathminds also exploit that there is so much alternate art around in the format.

So after playtesting against a friend I found I was getting flooded with return cards for the Evoke creatures and I think the 4 Ephemerate 4 Undying evil are plenty so I dropped the 3 Malakir Rebirth // Mire.

I found that I was really in need of some draw power, so in place of the Malakir I dropped in 3 Silent Clearing to give myself the option to sac them for an extra card if I need it. Might up it to 4 or possibly throw in some scry lands in the future if I still need more tempo.

I felt like my buddy lands (check lands) weren't getting that much utility and the fast lands would be a better fit for this deck so I swapped Glacial Fortress and Isolated Chapel of Seachrome Coast and Concealed Courtyard

Also I found Scytheclaw which I hadn't previously known about and thought it fit the deck better than Quietus Spike.

Just noticed scytheclaw isnt't legal in modern. Well I'm not doing that then haha