I had a pretty good game last night. I played against
God-Eternal Oketra,
Rhys the Redeemed, and
Vaevictis Asmadi, the Dire.
No really did anything too drastic too early. Rhys was a Squirrel tribal deck with a couple of Silver Bordered cards (not really sure how I feel about this, but there we have it) and Vaevictis missed their green mana for a long time so all they had was
Birthing Pod out for a while.
I didn't really have much going on either. I kept a pretty decent hand, but didn't have a way to make black mana for non-zombies (I had
Unclaimed Territory) but I was able to draw into more.
Eventually, after about 7 turns, Oketra really started going off. They had gotten Oketra down and had ways to make a decent number of tokens as they had gotten to about 4 zombies. Rhys had also gotten a few tokens of their own. It felt kind of premature, but since Oketra had out a couple decent artifacts, I decided to wrath the board with
Hour of Revelation. I only had a Talisman, a
Dreadhorde Invasion, and a couple small Zombies so it didn't affect me too much.
Luckily, before I wrathed, I had gotten
Burnished Hart down to get me actual swamps. Unluckily, Rhys had
Liege of the Hollows which gave Oketra and Vaevictis a few Squirrels. Rhys themselves were tapped out so they got nothing. I also got 5 squirrels. I dropped in
Liliana of the Last Hope on my next turn and killed Rhys with it. I then used my tokens to protect her as best I could. Eventually she got overwhelmed but I was able to get rid of a couple more Squirrel tokens with her and it kept the focus off me.
The main issue with these tokens was that my
Fleshbag Marauder wasn't as good. I could have easily cleared the board with it since people just went for the generals the next turn, but that didn't work out very well.
The game went on a little bit longer until Oketra needed to wrath due to Rhys and Vaevictis swarming the board. I still didn't have a lot on board, but it was enough to justify destroying everything anyway.
From here, I actually rebuilt pretty nicely. I got a
Kindred Discovery off Vaevictis a little later, followed by Varina. I created a few tokens with her to draw me cards. I also had
Diregraf Colossus on the field so every zombie I cast drew me 2 cards. A couple turns after, I was able to land an
Alhammarret's Archive which meant that now every zombie I cast got me 4 cards. I swung with 5 zombie tokens, gained 10 life and drew 20 cards (discarding 5). I discarding a bunch of zombies.
Next turn I had to sequence a bunch of things very specifically because I only had about 13 or 17 cards in my library. I did some things, and ended up with 1 card left. I was able to land Gray Merchant the turn before to give me some much needed life and take out Vaevictis . I ended up reanimating
Grimgrin, Corpse-Born with
Havengul Lich with the idea to sac my board and reanimate everything with one of the 3 mass reanimation spells in hand. I would have had to stack the triggers in order to make sure I didn't draw before Gray Merchant would kill the opposing player, but it turned out I was able to get just enough zombies on the field, and Oketra's zombies counted too, where
Shepherd of Rot just closed out the game.
Other than the small stutter at the beginning where I didn't have a lot of black mana, this game went pretty well. I might actually think of adding another wrath since Hour was very good and Oketra's wrath ended up helping me win as well since I was getting a little behind again at that point. Other than that, Liliana of the Last Hope still fails to impress. I might just cut her for an
Austere Command or
Akroma's Vengeance or something. 3 mana to 6 mana doesn't help the curve, but I think I want to be able to get rid of most of the board in one sweep. I might also think of leaning towards
Winds of Abandon so I don't have to mess with my own board too much at the risk of leaving Artifacts and Enchantments alone.