In this experiment, we haunt and deceive familiar harpies to form an army of demons.

Preview time is always exciting, and everyone comes at it from a different perspective. A couple popular ways to approach the season is with an eye toward Standard or an eye toward finance—and often, these two are related. But cards others often skip over are the ones I’m most excited about, and the ones others are most excited about are often the ones I’m least interested in.

Today, looking toward Oath of the Gatewatch, Deceiver of Form has caught my attention. Essence of the Wild had promise, but we’re always locked into what essentially becomes a vanilla 6/6, and the effect only applies to nontoken creatures played after the 6-mana creature.

With Deceiver of Form, we can cast whatever we want and then turn all of them into whatever else we want—as long as we put that thing on top of our library first. There are a couple extra hoops to jump through, including the increased mana cost of the Deceiver, but I think they’re worthwhile to create a splashy effect.

The Top of the Library

The top of the library is kind of a weird place. Sensei's Divining Top, Brainstorm, and Scroll Rack are a few cards that let us manipulate it, and Erratic Explosion, Melek, Izzet Paragon, and Galvanoth are a few that let us benefit from manipulating it.

Clearly, the Deceiver of Form is our reason for wanting to manipulate the top of our library—let’s see what we can dig up for actually setting things up.

Nightscape Apprentice — This card (and its across-the-color-wheel buddy Sunscape Apprentice) is the first one I thought of for this job. I ended up moving toward black, so Nightscape won out over Sunscape. I’m not sure how useful the first strike will be, but it turns out being a Zombie is pretty useful. Consider having Deceiver of Form on the battlefield. When it’s beginning-of-combat trigger triggers, we can respond by putting it on top of our library with the Apprentice. Then, when the ability resolves, we’ll reveal it and have all our creatures become 8/8s. The Apprentice–Deceiver will be tapped, but we should have several other creatures around to do the attacking.

Haunted Crossroads — Well, here’s an easy way of manipulating the top of our library. With Nightscape Apprentice, we have to have cast the card we want to deceive our creatures forms’ into becoming, but with this, we just need the card in our graveyard. Theoretically, that means it will have come into play and died first, which is actually more difficult than just coming into play, but there are plenty of ways of sending a creature to the graveyard without having to cast it.

Liliana Vess — This is perhaps the most efficient way of setting up the top of our library: We can search the entire library for exactly the card we want and just put it there.

Infernal Genesis — So the previous cards are the ones that will help us set up for Deceiver of Form, but it turns out there’s a black card that actually rewards us in another way for such manipulation. And it even synergizes perfectly with another subtheme we’ll be exploring in just a moment.

Minions, Thrulls, Serfs, Harpies . . . 

If we can turn any number of creatures into something big and scary, we should try to have as many creatures as possible prepared to make the change.

Sengir Autocrat — For 4 mana, we make four creatures. That’s a great deal! They can help us stall the game, and they look great as 8/8s later as well.

Endrek Sahr, Master Breeder — Casting Deceiver of Form with Endrek on the battlefield means making seven Thrulls. Sure, Endrek will die, but it seems worth it. And other creatures in our deck will let us make Thrulls without losing the Breeder, so we can carefully select some as chump-blockers along the way while gearing up for the big finish.

Infernal Genesis — This was covered previously—I think you get the idea.

Abhorrent Overlord — Making a good number of tokens shouldn’t be the challenge of this deck. Even setting up the top card of our library shouldn’t be super-difficult. But the challenge just may come in finding something worth transforming into. Sure, if we have Deceiver of Form and Nightscape Apprentice on the battlefield, the combo works for itself, but we might be playing with Haunted Crossroads or Liliana instead, so it’s nice to have a 6/6 flyer for backup. Incidentally, this makes a ton of Harpies in our kind-of-mono-black deck. And we like tokens. And an army of 6/6 flyers is often better than an army of 8/8 ground-pounders. Yeah, I think that’s all the ands.

 . . . and Zombies

While putting the finishing touches on the deck, I realized I wanted a tad more card manipulation.

Necromancer's Stockpile — And this is the card I found. The deck didn’t have many Zombies in it, but it did have Nightscape Apprentice, which is a Zombie according to Gatherer. I decided it would be worth it to find room for a few more Zombies. We can loot away unneeded one while making additional creature tokens for the cause. We can also use the Stockpile to discard big creatures, such as Abhorrent Overlord and Deceiver of Form, so they can be used with Haunted Crossroads and a few cards further below.

Apprentice Necromancer — Also gifted the Zombie creature type by Gatherer, this is a great way to cheat on casting the fatty. Consider spending to pull a Deceiver of Form out of the graveyard and to put it on top of our library after letting it trigger at the beginning of combat. Sure, we’re down the Apprentice Necromancer and the Nightscape Apprentice (what are Apprentices for, after all?) in terms of attacking, but if we’ve done our job of making tokens, we should be good to go.

Corpse Connoisseur — This might not be necessary, but it works even from the graveyard due to unearth, and we can use it to find the exact creature we need to work with Haunted Crossroads, Apprentice Necromancer, or one of the cards below.

More Graveyard

I wanted a couple more ways of cheating the creatures out of the graveyard. We might make it to the late game with our tokens to hold the ground, but we want to have enough of them left to attack with, and we also don’t really want to rely on a game plan that requires we both cast Abhorrent Overlord and Deceiver of Form—we can try to cheat out one or both.

Whip of Erebos — This is such an easy choice for reanimation. It’s not permanent, so a slower, midrange-style deck wouldn’t want it, but since we’re basically comboing off, the one-shot effect before being exiled should be fine. Note that this one doesn’t work with Nightscape Apprentice, as trying to put the reanimated creature on top of our library would cause it to be exiled instead. But we can bring back an Overlord for the Harpies or bring out a Deceiver for its trigger (and an 8-damage attack). Oh, and lifelink is nice.

Torrent of Souls — This can bring out one of our fatties for 5 instead of 7, so that’s nice. And if we toss in as part of that cost, it—along with everything else of ours—will gain haste and +2/+0. That means we don’t even need to Deceive anything to win—with just a bunch of tokens, the Torrent can do the job on its own.

Nightscape Deceiver ? Casual | Andrew Wilson

• Creatures (21)
• 2 Abhorrent Overlord
• 2 Corpse Connoisseur
• 3 Deceiver of Form
• 4 Apprentice Necromancer
• 4 Nightscape Apprentice
• 4 Sengir Autocrat
• 2 Endrek Sahr, Master Breeder

• Planeswalkers (2)
• 2 Liliana Vess

• Spells (13)
• 2 Sign in Blood
• 2 Torrent of Souls
• 2 Haunted Crossroads
• 2 Infernal Genesis
• 3 Necromancer's Stockpile
• 2 Whip of Erebos

• Lands (24)
• 6 Swamp
• 2 Blood Crypt
• 2 Graven Cairns
• 2 Sunken Ruins
• 2 Watery Grave
• 3 Cabal Coffers
• 4 Crumbling Necropolis
• 1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
• 2 Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx

Buy This Deck

There are a lot of two-ofs here, so finding the ones to cut and which to increase might be worthwhile. So if you love tokens, if you love Eldrazi–Zombie team-ups, or if you just love the Invasion ’Scapes as much as I do, give this deck a try.

Andrew Wilson

@Silent7Seven

fissionessence at hotmail dot com