Welcome to "surprise mutations"
A bunch of articles that will be covering some of the oddest mutations that arise while I let evolution design my decks for me.
Today's deck, featured above was built from scratch by evolution and the original "generation zero" contained 3 wall of glare and 3 cho-manno's blessing.
The idea was more or less that if you faced a monocolored deck an enchanted wall of glare could hold it all back.
However, plans rarely survive intact when facing the enemy.
First of all, when the deck didn't face monocolored it would have to somehow survive that too.
At first evolution added creatures with protection from black and even more with protection from red. Then at a later stage it started connecting the dots by adding a rebel theme with ramosian lieutenant and defiant falcon.
During all of this cho-manno's blessing simply disappeared and a single wall of glare remained.
But there has been some underlying events that were never described before now.
While cho-manno's blessing was first added it was actually in competition with two other cards, ward of lights and inviolability, and at that time it was decided to focus more on the two first.
But here's the surprise. Since cho-manno's blessing and ward of lights have been tried and failed, inviolability has been given some more attention, and it has started to gain a significant amount of points while being in competition with the rebel theme.
Both cho-manno's blessing and inviolability are flexible, but the major flaw was that my test team (and me) considered the blessing to be more flexible, while in actuality that honor belongs to inviolability. Sure, some removal spells can take out a creature with inviolability on it, but the real deal here is that most removal is actually performed by damage, and that is why inviolability is more flexible.
So, as long as there is a wall of glare in the deck, it will call out to be enchanted with inviolability, and frankly, the protection from black and red aspect also calls out to the card, because when you play against decks with neither black nor red, inviolability is still usefull, and so it is called upon more often than cho-manno's blessing was when we focussed on it.
If inviolability starts entering the deck, it will in turn start to call out for more wall of glare to be inserted, and so that synergy will be rather strong and odds of those becoming future mutations increases more than other odds.
Wall of glare and inviolability doesn't deal with flyers, but the rebel theme is ensuring that the deck has flyers, and wall of glare does also call out for dragon wings, so it looks like the puzzle is getting more clear.
Each card currently in the deck calls out for synergy with a number of things, and one of the most recent surprises has been that both firebolt and the rebel fetches call out towards cathodion. Both can be used as instant effects, so if you attack with a cathodion you get to harvest the mana it contains if it gets blocked and dies.
The whole process is controlled by an elaborate system where the cards that get called the most often gets a place in the deck.
A simple way to mimic this system would be to count out the synergy of all cards within your deck, count out all the synergy your cards have with all enemy decks in average and then assign points for it. Then the 9 lowest scoring cards could be replaced with anything you discover that has more points.