Hooray for more wall decks! Axebane Guardian can get you absurd ramp and color fixing. Slagwurm Armor can give you a boost almost as big as Tower defense, and they can be stacked. The trees (Tree of Redemption and Tree of Perdition) are 0/13 monsters that are absurdly cheap at CMC 4, even ignoring their abilities to manipulate player life totals. Kin-Tree Invocation can help you turn any of the above into instant giant monsters. Order of the Stars is one of my favorite cards generally, but note that is doesn't stop fliers unless you are also playing tower defense that turn. Wall of Tanglecord is also pretty great, blocks fliers, and, with 0/6, is fairly durable and threatening.I've had a lot of fun playing this: https://www.mtgvault.com/wikey/decks/wall-aggro/ from before Arcades came out.
Permalink
I love the main combo/engine but it feels like I'm missing the spark. How do you get the first counter on the sage, just Blossoming Defense?
Agreed on the Banneret and really like the grand abolisher as a limit on the opponent's options here.
I think the warchief is there mostly to make the Midnight Guard cheaper to cast and harder to kill. The elf tokens are actually warriors so they don't benefit from the soldier buffing effect. With an infinite number of them the individual size shouldn't be an issue though. I'm more worried about damage redirection effects or something like batwing brume flipping this around.
Love the mechanism. Feels like you could speed up the key cards with some green creature search and Open the Armory. Open the Armory x4 in place of the Savanah Lions seems like a solid trade. Also the warchiefs feel a bit slow since they only apply to a couple of the cards in the deck. Maybe some Lanowar elves for generic ramp potential. That way they can help with the presence of gond casting cost too. Removing the warchiefs would make the deck almost Modern legal too. Just need to swap the Krosan Verge for one of the more recent dual lands. Might be slightly slower than a double fetch land in one approach but the mana elves should help smooth that out as well.As a possible upgrade, what about Rebuff the Wicked instead of avoid fate? That gets you coverage against sorceries as well as instants and auras. You could also use Faith's Shield to give the targeted permanent protection, which could also be used to save your creatures from damage and it happens to cost much much less $ than Rebuff or Avoid Fate. I might also look at some other win conditions once you have infinite elves. Well wisher and some of the life gain win cards or you could splash black for harsh sustenance. I'm sure there are lots of other options that will deal with agro locks.