The idea of picking an ally early on, whether I announce that to the table or keep it to myself, really appeals to me! Is it still called a win con if your goal is to make another player win? I think it is! I will probably use a dice roll to decide who the ally will be… Unless they are playing stacks or some other gross strategy then they don’t get included in the roll, haha!

I think the deck type that has the highest chance of making this strategy work is a Sultai or Dimir reanimator deck. Tasigur, the Golden Fang is the clear flavor win in my book so I’m working on the list today! The overall strategy is to dump a bunch of giant threats into my graveyard and then reanimate them before donating them to my chosen ally!

Reanimate, Animate Dead and Necromancy are all great tools for a reanimation deck.

Donate is the classic card that started the spirit of giving in Magic! It has admittedly been used to give opponents some very rude things over the years but let’s turn that around now! Puca’s Mischief is great but requires you to trade your permanents to your opponents but when you have such great gifts to give that shouldn’t be a problem! There have been a lot of these effects over the history of Magic and I’m packing most of them into my Tasigur Grave Gifts deck! More on that soon!

There are many impactful creatures we can give away in a reanimator deck but Blightsteel Colossus is great place to start! There are quite a few Eldrazi that come to mind too! Just make sure to avoid the ones that shuffle your graveyard back into your library when they get milled!

Wrong Turn is a great way to further team up with your ally! It is massively impactful albeit salt inducing to steal someones commander and give it to someone else! It is one of the most disruptive things I can think of. In fact if Urza is running wild in your meta I highly recommend playing Wrong Turn in every deck that you can fit it in!

Homeward Path is a great reset button in case our ally tries to turn those creatures back on us! BUT if they do knock us out of the game our cards are removed from the game and thus all our gifts! It should be stated at this point that as soon as it becomes clear to the table that we have picked our ally we will become a target! By removing us they remove all the creatures we have donated to our ally!

I can’t wait to try this deck out! I’ll post a deck tech soon or you will see a blog post about how bad it went!

Thanks for checking in for the weekly blog! I wish you many free gifts this week at the table!

-marksquare