MTG Salvation

If you don't believe in the power of politics, this deck is not for you. If you like to hit your opponents hard and fast, this deck is not for you. If you think gwafa hazid is a political general, then this deck is not for you. And also, you're an idiot.

Ok, are they gone? Oh, it's just me left? Well whatever. They'll see! They'll ALL see!!!!!

So I built this to be a fun deck, but I honestly expect it to do quite well. The main restriction I put on deckbuilding is that it has no nonland permanents - strictly instants, sorceries, and lands. This seems like a big problem, but it plays to my advantage since (1) the deck is immune to removal, including its own, and (2) it means you're a very small threat compared to your enemies.

This deck lives politics, in three ways. Firstly, it's a small threat - the only reasonable way to win is via phelddagrif beats, and there aren't many non-permanent ways to speed it up. People have no major reason to hurt you. Second, it's got major defense - you can obliterate anyone trying to hurt you with the barrage of removal, plus you've got wipes if things get out of hand. Third, it's got major politics in the form of Phelddagrif itself - he can make deals to get advantages from other players in exchange for life, tokens, or cards, and can also help balance the table to keep the table fighting itself until you can safely finish off the survivors with phelddagrif.

needless to say, your words are your key to victory. phelddagrif is a great way to make things happen without using any cards. You should always be offering people tokens and life (cards in a pinch) to do you favors, using removal only as a last resort. Obviously this deck doesn't play phelddagrif like a group-hug deck. You should never give away anything without getting something in return.

ok, fine, decklist time.

Your deck seems a lot similar to mine, although I include a lot of group hug cards. Having so much spot removal is great! The only things I have to suggest are:
Fracturing Gust - This is never a dead card, it usually gains me around 20 life from everyone's mana rocks.
Constant Mists - I know it's just a fog, but with Life from the Loam it can be a soft lock against one player. For such a political deck, being one of two players left is about the worst thing that can happen to you!
All Sun's Dawn - Recur three cards! Incredible with spot removal, unless your meta is anti-graveyard.

Have you considered potential non-permanent wincons like Twincast, Desertion, or Spelljack?

Nice post. I've always hated Phalddagrif for his reputation for group hug, but bringing up this other style to play the hippo is inspiring! Sketching out a deck right now.
I would definitely put in more/better card draw.
Torpor Orb is also really good.

Ha, so I'm actually curious how skeptical Mario found this decklist, I put it out over a year ago and no one said anything so I let it die. Well anyway, it's cool that someone finally cares about it, although be warned that I haven't exactly gotten to test it, although I have played other phelddagrif decks that were similar.

Fracturing gust seems pretty solid in this deck, I can't remember my exact reasons but obviously I have a limited number of slots for boardwipes (especially since they're fairly apolitical compared to targeted removal). The fact that it's an instant makes it pretty strong, though, I think it would do pretty well. I should also put in that new instant boardwipe that kills pws.

Constant mists seems decent, hard to say for sure. Ideally I'm killing things instead of just preventing them from hitting me, but perhaps.

All Sun's Dawn seems ok but I really prefer engines that I can reuse (notice I run a lot of buybackish draw instead of one-shot draw). The other problem is that I feel like I don't have much green in here compared to u and w.

Twincast is an option, I kinda feel like desertion and spelljack are cheating.

Torpor orb would definitely be good, but it violates the End User License Agreement of this deck. My lawyers will be contacting you shortly.

As far as "better draw", what did you have in mind? I mean, there's concentrate and such but I'd really prefer to have instant-speed draw so I can leave up answers as much as possible.

I found the link to this thread in your signature! I'm always keen to comment on decks that are similar to mine, and Phelddagrif is probably my favorite deck.

Ha, ok well cool, then I guess it's working. I was planning on building Kagemaro for my EDH group next week, but now I'm thinking I might go ahead and make phelddy instead. I forgot how cute this decklist was, plus I love being political.

Also, in response to the earlier "needs more draw", it did occur to me that this deck has BY FAR my favorite draw engine of all time - life from the loam and, more specifically, intuition into life from the loam. Get lftl + some cycling lands and you're all set. It's basically 1GGWU: draw 2 cards. buyback 0. mill 3. And the cost can be split up in lots of fun ways, plus you could just get back actual lands. It's suuuuuch a great engine. I love it to death.

Anyway yeah, I think I'll work on this for a bit, maybe over the weekend. It definitely needs some updates, now with curse of swine and unexpectedly absent running around.

Massive updates for the decklist. notable new cards include:

personal tutor: just bought one. personal tutor -> merchant scroll -> intuition -> lftl + 2 lands. Alternately, boardwipes.
unexpectedly absent: duh.
cyclonic rift: duh.
fated retribution: i love instants.
usz/sphinx's revelation: for the late-game draw
reliquary tower: no idea why I wasn't running this before.
opal palace: maybe kind of silly, but hey, it shortens the clock considerably, it's easy to kill phelddy on purpose early in the game, and then you can easily keep his costs low by bouncing him later on instead of letting him die.
long-term plans: i really, really, really like intuition.
realms uncharted: I really, really, really like lftl.
okina, temple to the grandfathers: notably this card stays in, while the other phelddy-pump didn't, because it easily makes him a 5 turn clock instead of a 6-turn clock with a single activation, with virtually no downside.

Nice list, thanks for directing me this way!

Quote from kraus911

Nice list, thanks for directing me this way!

Sure, no problem.

I've been toying with the idea of including a crazy complicated but reusable recursion engine via nostalgic dreams + pull from eternity + regrowth + lftl, unfortunately I can't think of a way to reliably get access to it, though, outside of the tutors i need for lftl. I guess if I went for 2x regrowth and nostalgic dreams off intuition I could recur the intuition with nostalgic dreams and then use THAT to get pull from eternity. Or I could try to make a really good friend to put nostalgic dreams into my hand off a regrowth, pull from eternity, nostalgic dreams intuition. Although I'm not sure if it's worth all the effort. Maybe just mnemonic nexus? I also need some grave hate, which is kind of hard to come by without any permanents.

Got to test the deck for the first time last night. Went up against nekusar and karador, which is sort of awkward on 2 counts - I have next to zero gravehate because so little of it is non-permanent based, and it's hard to ally with nekusar because he's basically trying to kill everyone simultaneously. To make matters worse, Karador player has played against me several times before, and last week I hated him (effectively) out of the game pretty quickly with my Ephara deck, so he had a score to settle.

I wasn't very successful at applying politics, however nekusar dropped forced fruition alongside phyrexian tyranny, and after a painful bounce spell to get rid of phyrexian tyranny I searched for my reliquary tower and exploited the crap out of forced fruition to give myself a huge hand. Annoyingly, despite taking a lot of damage off nekusar, karador was more interested in trying to blow up my reliquary tower than nekusar's enchantments, which he obviously failed at miserably since I had a 30+ card hand at this point.

Anyway, luckily nekusar managed to kill off karador for me, but I was pretty low on life (7?) so I had to play a pretty hard control game to keep anything that deals damage off the field. Luckily my hand was still huge, and I was able to cycle out lands with oona's grace (which was surprisingly nice, to be honest...not as efficient as lftl, but the instant-speed is great). After letting him get killed a few times, I stuck an 8/8 phelddagrif off opal palace and managed to get through 3 times to finish nekusar off.

Lessons learned:
-forced fruition is crazy easy to exploit.
-reliquary tower is mega important.
-opal palace is surprisingly worth it.
-you can't always reason with people (note that I've relearned this a good dozen times by now).
-people way overestimate nekusar, imo. He did a lot of damage, but ultimately just enabled my win.