MTG Salvation

I made this deck born out of a challenge to myself to play a non-traditional manabase with no fetchlands and also to use counter lands with Atraxa's ability.

This deck is bad.

But I like it. It's fun, fairly strong, and can win games even at decent tables with a little bit of luck. It has a good number of mana sinks and can make a truly comical amount of mana without needing any real gimmicks like mana Reflection or similar.

I mostly wanted to write about it a bit in case someone else had a similar derpy desire with Atraxa, as a resource.

The goal of the deck is to cast Atraxa on turn 3 or 4 every game and immediately start proliferating stuff. It's...faaaairly consistent at that, but the mana is quite iffy and you have to mulligan if that's not going to happen. But with all the rocks and lands that can make any color, it's fairly consistent at making UBWG on turn 4 and will do it on 3 sometimes.

I don't play it regularly to have it hyper tuned, basically just a pile of cards I wanted to play at this point with a few that really don't belong (looking at you Throne of Geth and Weathered wayfarer). But there's a lot of neat tech that is pretty fun to play with and a metric ton of cards I do not normally play like Lux Cannon and Orochi Hatchery and Iceberg and Wickerbough Elder.

There's a lot of things I am looking to re-think in the deck, along the lines of:

* The removal balance needs a lot of work - probably need about 2-3 more instant speed removal spells and/or counterspells
* The mana really is soft for playing Hour and Cleansing Nova
* The land package in general is something I think might need some more support, ways to get more lands into play that are novel. I might try to slot a few budgety things like Realm seekers in there.
* Deck sometimes floods out so I think the balance of bombs and card draw may be too low



That's it. I'd love to hear of card ideas you have that I haven't considered, or any general thoughts you have on the deck. So far the only real issue I've had is that sometimes Atraxa herself is just too powerful, but overall it feels pretty decently matched against most actual casual decks.

From an aesthetic standpoint, I am trying to do some general things here that influence the overall design:
* Play as many things as can take advantage of Atraxa meaningfully as I can
* Minimize excessive tutoring
* Avoid playing traditional goodstuff cards like hoofdad and tooth and nail and stuff like that
* make sure I still have a decent gameplan if atraxa bites it
* play a lot of creatures so I'm not getting randomly beat to death early for not having dudes
* no planeswalkers

Ulvenwald Hydra can grab any land when it comes in, might be worth a punt.

Treasure Mage only has three targets. Don't get me wrong, they're pretty good targets, but it feels a bit underwhelming. Could just be a difference in playstyle though. Speaking of, have you considered the artifact lands so that Trinket Mage has a couple more no-brainer targets?

Graft creatures can be quite interesting with easy proliferation, also good for resetting any persist stuff you've got knocking about. Llanowar Reborn fits the theme quite nicely as well.

Dragonlover

Thanks for the response!

Hydra's not bad, I decided to try out realmseekers since i needed my weathered wayfarer for another deck anywho - little more bomby. My thought is mostly on the land front that what I'll try adjusting first is the number of draw effects.

Treasure mage was mostly the only way I could think of to get contagion engine while keeping the body count up, so that's what it's doing. I put the other two expensive artifacts in there so there's always something for it to get if I already have engine. But even with probably 10 sources of proliferate other than Atraxa including treasure mage, I often don't get one - so if I cut TM it'd probably need to be for another proliferating target.

Graft creatures seem like a pretty reasonable inclusion; there're quite a few good ones, esp. the one that steals dudes. But I don't think the deck can absorb any more ETB tapped lands like Llanowar Reborn. It's horrid enough already hehe.

Trinket mage is actually actively stupidly good in this deck. It has a lto of targets:

-sol ring
-pyramid
-hatchery
-amulet
-chalice
-cornucopia
-walker
-ballista

I don't think i would ever want to use it to get an artifact land and a not one of those - if I have 3 mana I can cast a cornucopia on 1 so not even really needed for fixing.

You could cut Hollow Trees for the Llanowar Reborn, at least it'll give you mana the following turn rather than having to wait around till the turn after.

Just noticed, no Hardened Scales. Deliberate choice or just didn't have one to hand?

Thanks for the response!

No worries, this is exactly the kind of deck I can actually help with. I'm not great at combos, or honing to peak efficiency, but my god I can faff around with random tat and zany restrictions!

Dragonlover

So I have one floating around but my thought was more to try to focus on stuff that lets me derp with lands, but it might be better now that I have more +1/+1 counter theme going on.

I might also try to fit a Gavony Township in here now that I'm doing that too.