Deckbuilding Concept - I have been tinkering with some different concepts for Anje and originally I was just going to put all the madness cards in a list and run it digitally against @Tryno digitally while we are all stuck at home. I showed him what I had and we started looking deeper into discard payoffs and the list started to come together. While crafting this my focuses were 1) Cards with madness 2) Value from discarding other cards 3) Answers that stop our deck from working (Pithing Needle was a real consideration).
The gameplan - As of right now is to see if we can piledriver our opponents with Glint-Horn Buccaneer, Brallin, Skyshark Rider, or Psychosis Crawler. We have a decent bit of graveyard recursion for an option here as well so something like Gravepurge could set them back up but it can also let us run through all of our madness creatures again as well which seemed interesting. If that doesn't work..... I guess we will be running at people with bad creatures lol.
Current Concerns - Pressuring our opponents feels great when we get one of our three pingers. But when we don't have them turning sideways with bad creatures is a lot more questionable.
This will potentially be a collaborative effort list with myself and @Tryno. I say that because he showed interest and was contributing while building the list but he has a tenancy to wander off from ideas before testing them. We will see how things go.
Maybes:
- Crucible of Worlds - It could be nice to not need to play my lands from hand. It would be a bit like having Squee in hand in that we can discard all the lands and play them from there.
- Nihil Spellbomb - more grave hate options.
- Mizzium Mortars - Sweeping out a bunch of the chaff and utility creatures can slow our opponents and this has the upside of being reasonable early before its a sweeper and not killing Anje.
- Chromatic Orrery - It isn't cheap to cast but it almost pays for itself the turn it comes in. Fixing all color requirments is also kind of nice as a lot of our stuff is a bit color intensive on the madness costs.
- Gamble - I like the cost and the discard part of this effect is actually a bit more interesting with the madness cards in our deck. I didn't really think about this until recently so I guess I need to give it a bit more thought but I think I like this tutor over like the three mana ones I could run.
- Forks - Given that the deck is sort of a draw / go style of deck we could run some forks. I think Fury Storm is the one that stands out to me as the best potential one. I don't know if I really want to get into this because I feel like for the most part I would want to do this on opponents effects which is hard to rely on. Still..... getting like 2+ Cultivates does sound real spicy....
- Neheb, Dreadhorde Champion - I really love his effect, I just think that realistic, he is slow and we can't really do much to make him work better. We don't really give haste or flash and there is no reanimation to play. I worry that he will feel slow and clunky in the 99 here.
- K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth - The mana tempo is kind of tempting. I don't have a lot of life recovery is I guess a bit of my concern.