Temporarily Pacifying

I'm having more fun with this deck than I have in awhile. Terminate has hit the sweet spot of removal. It was a great choice which I think I overlooked because of a combination of overthinking the deck and being overconfident in what the removal suite I had would do.

The rest of the creatures fill in just fine with the Dash mechanic serving me well in combination with Death Match and, a key player nobody likes, Lightning Greaves. Archwing Dragon did what it did but I can't say that it did it any better than Flamerush Rider did. If there aren't any creatures to block, what difference does flying actually make?

And, since Flamerush can copy itself, I'm hitting for six a turn instead of four. Evasion just isn't my problem at that point.

Void has also proven to be incredibly useful. In the picture, I'm playing against Matt's Sands of Time/Equipoise deck. The way it works: Equipoise phases out opponent's permanents, Sands of Time ensures that they never come back. And it would be incredibly difficult to beat except for two things:

First, his deck is slow. I recommended that Matt add in something like Forbidding Watchtower to provide a stronger clock to victory.

Second, his deck is a Jason deck. It's precisely the kind of weird shit that he would pull, using non-creature permanents and challenging card interactions. So Matt is playing against someone who is ready for his wild and crazy ways.

Which is why I run cards like Void. Because Void for four breaks his lock so I can keep doing what I'm doing, and my clock is faster than his. Plus, he can't hide a Sands of Time in his hand to play it after I destroy the first one!

Granted, I have to get to five mana but as I said, his deck is slow. Getting a Lightning Greaves out meant that I could make my creatures untargetable to Maze of Ith and after that I just had to patiently work the inevitability of victory. Or something equally awesome sounding.

The other matchup I got to play was against Caitlin and Mark, one running a deathtouchy rats deck and the other running zombies. Neither of them had an answer for Death Match, so you might imagine how that went for them. It's a good feeling, knowing that it doesn't matter how many times you can bring back the undead, I can just kill them again. And again. Always a fresh target.

I'm so glad this deck has some legs. Sure, it'll suffer horribly against combo matchups and control games are odd but it's a lot of fun. I'm going to call this a winner for now.