Suture Sisters

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Happy Wednesday MTG peeps,

WoTC minion Jacob Van Lunen had an interesting article up today on the mothership in his regularily appear column, 'Building on a Budget'. We are regular readers as we are forever somewhere in the aether between budget and more competitive decks - we score a budget build and continually upgrade, and changing out cards when we can trade buy that choicer rare. Fortunately for us, we had come to a place were we were rather happy with our Soul Sisters life-gain deck - and then only had a limited opportunity to play until the one key card, Soul Warden, rotated out of standard.


Anyhwoos, do drop by Jacob's article on Soul Sisters 2011 and give it a read. Our previous deck used Soul Warden and Soul's Attendant with friends such Serra Ascendant and Ajani's Pridemate. Another card still in standard we had employed was Transcendent Master but found that it simply was too slow. Another noticeable difference is that we have a deckset of Solemn Offering in the sideboard instead of the 2 and 2 split Jacob has with Divine Offering. We feel the Solemn one provides more utility in our local meta-games over the Divine one.

The non-budget build that Jacob speaks onto is the redonkulous combo of Leonin Relic-Warder and Phyrexian Metamorph while a Suture Priest of Soul's Attendent is out in play to gain infinite life. A build featuring this combo from pro-player Conley Woods is present near the page bottom. We feel that with this huge arbitrary number, having a Felidar Sovereign hit and stick to the game table until your next upkeep wins you the game. Our future plans for this deck will likely include playtesting Batterskull to determine just how well a 4/4 lifelink / vigilence living weapon component ineracts with the rest of the cards in this soup. Perhaps we even go with a Stoneforge Mystic equipment package with swords and Batterskull.


Anywhoos, here's the build for now . . . please pipe in with your comments and help us out to make this deck a bit more viable.

1 x Exilir of Immortality
4 x Brave the Elements
3 x Serra's Ascendant
4 x Soul's Attendant
4 x Suture Priest
4 x Ajani's Pridemate
4 x Luminarch Ascension
3 x Survival Cache
2 x Ajani Goldmane
2 x Baneslayer Angel
2 x Elspeth Tirel
2 x Sun Titan
3 x Felidar Sovereign

2 x Kabira Crossroads
1 x Tectonic Edge
19 x Plains
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We have played this current build extensively against Elf builds and mon-black control builds. For now, the current build performs good, winning about half the matches but does not quite go over the top to the next level. We also have solid feelings about Felidar Sovereign as an alternate win condition. We do like the token capacity with the Ascension as well as the potential board wiper with new Elspeth leaving on the field only tokens. We have had a faily tough time having Serra's Ascendant actually stick around long enough with games to date as it has a big target on it, which perhaps does serve a purpose by buying some time to work on other angles.


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