In this experiment, we host a carnival of bats, faeries, goblins, harpies, demons, vampires, and souls—and as suddenly as it disappears, we extort our patrons for their very lives.

Today’s deck combines some cards and common concepts to ramp up from simple synergy and into a combo victory.

Carnival of Souls

This card can be hard to work with, as it’s kind of an inverted Soul Warden, though it does pay us back for our life points in the form of mana. It kind of says, “Pay 1 life: Add to your mana pool,” which is extremely powerful—as Channel taught us—though it’s limited by the number of creatures entering the battlefield.

Indeed, the fact that it triggers from creatures entering the battlefield can even be quite the downside. If a bunch of creatures enter, perhaps on our opponents’ turns, and we don’t have anything to spend the mana on, we will have spent a bunch of life for no reason.

Now, having mentioned Soul Warden, it seems relevant to note here that if we do control both, the Warden will pay us back for our Carnival, mitigating the losses of life and just generating us the mana with the two-card combo. From there, we just need something to do with it.

In terms of comboing off, one direction to take is to use something like Gravecrawler and sacrifice it repeatedly for some effect, regaining its price in mana each time it enters play. In this way, we’re using Carnival of Souls triggers as one element in a repeated loop.

Another direction to take is to go for one fell swoop, such as when resolving a massive Genesis Wave, Storm Herd, or Rise of the Dark Realms. In this way, we’re making a lot of mana at once—and let’s hope we’re doing something interesting with it.

Creature Tokens

Some such token-generating creatures have their abilities in the form of enters-the-battlefield triggers. Normally, these token strategies are used for filling the board with a bunch of cheap, easy-to-make creatures and then pumping them to relevant portions with the likes of Overrun or Coat of Arms.

What’s less common is the generation of many creatures for the sole sake of creating creatures. For example, Regal Force and Freyalise, Llanowar's Fury both can draw a lot of cards depending on how many creatures we control, and it doesn’t matter how large those creatures are. As another example, Pontiff of Blight appreciates many battlefieldmates, as he shares the powerful extort keyword will all of them.

The previously-mentioned Soul Warden essentially scales based on the number of creatures we create, and again, their sizes are irrelevant to this effect. With Carnival of Souls, we see the same thing—but this time, the timing of the creatures entering the battlefield becomes much more important. In the case of Soul Warden, we gain the effect as creatures enter, and no two of the creatures (other than the Warden) need to be on the battlefield at once. In the case of Regal Force, the creatures can enter whenever we want as long as they’re all there on the turn we cast the Eventide Elemental. But with Carnival of Souls, in order to generate the largest chunk of mana, we need all the creatures to enter at once.

Cloudshift

As an alternative to triggering enters-the-battlefield abilities, Avacyn Restored offered a notable Flickering theme in part to go along with the soulbond keyword. Creatures with soulbond granted their paired creatures abilities, and pairing only began when a creature entered the battlefield and only ended when a paired creature left the battlefield. Thus, Flickering, which involved both leaving and entering the battlefield, could reset a soulbond pair at surprising times.

Other than that, however, Flickering is primarily used proactively to reuse enters-the-battlefield triggers. Its defensive use can be relevant, but people rarely play such cards solely for that purpose. For avoiding certain death, Shelter is more useful, and for untapping, To Arms! provides greater effect.

Extort

When said Orzhov player also controls a Syndic of Tithes, however, the extortion ramps up—sure, every spell costs 2 more mana for full effect, but each does so with the benefit of a Syphon Soul. Extort-based strategies can be very slow to build up, but once a player controls enough extort creatures and has access to enough mana to pay for all those triggers, opponents’ life totals tend to dwindle very quickly.

Extort is strong, arguably stronger at multiplayer tables, but these triggers can draw a lot of ire from opponents. In addition, as a mechanic in only a single set, the keyword doesn’t appear on a ton of cards, meaning even fewer of them are of the caliber that people prefer to play in their Constructed piles.

And when one player extorts, other players frequently grow tired of the offending, extort-offering creature very quickly, meaning a player who dreams of winning through a Death of a Thousand Stings, of sorts, may find him or herself out of luck due to opponents’ wrath. But what if we could win through one, massive extortion and not have to deal with the building frustration of pinpricked players?

Carnival Extortion ? Casual | Andrew Wilson

• Creatures (20)
• 1 Grave Titan
• 2 Abhorrent Overlord
• 2 Skeletal Vampire
• 3 Marsh Flitter
• 4 Pontiff of Blight
• 4 Sengir Autocrat
• 4 Soul Warden

• Spells (16)
• 2 Orzhov Charm
• 3 Cloudshift
• 3 Sudden Disappearance
• 4 Sign in Blood
• 4 Carnival of Souls

• Lands (24)
• 6 Plains
• 6 Swamp
• 4 Isolated Chapel
• 4 Orzhov Basilica
• 4 Scoured Barrens

Buy This Deck

As you may have pieced together, the plan with that deck is to play Carnival of Souls and token-generating creatures. The Carnival can help ramp a bit as we go—for example, perhaps we cast a Sign in Blood virtually for free after resolving Marsh Flitter. Or perhaps a Sengir Autocrat while we control five lands lets us cast a follow-up Sengir Autocrat—or a Marsh Flitter into a Sign in Blood.

At the same time, extort and Carnival of Souls don’t exactly work together well, as by the time Carnival of Souls gives us mana, the creature spell we cast has long since resolved, taking with it the unpaid-for extort triggers.

But that’s where Sudden Disappearance kicks in. The big brother of Flicker, Sudden Disappearance can exile and return all of our things. Marsh Flitter, Sengir Autocrat, Abhorrent Overlord, Grave Titan, and Skeletal Vampire all go away, only to return at the end of our turn with freshly-triggered tokens.

Our Soul Wardens will give us the life we need to afford all our Carnival of Souls triggers, and we’ll be left with a bunch of mana. From there, we cast a cheap instant—such as Cloudshift or Orzhov Charm—and pay the rest of our floating mana for the myriad extort triggers we control from our Bats, Harpies, Zombies, and so on.

And if all went according to plan, we took a big Shadow Slice out of our opponents’ life totals.

If you want to slot these concepts into a Commander deck, here’s a baseline for your consideration.

Commander Carnival Starting Point ? Commander | Andrew Wilson

• Commander (0)

• Creatures (23)
• 1 Abhorrent Overlord
• 1 Alaborn Zealot
• 1 Captain of the Watch
• 1 Children of Korlis
• 1 Cloudgoat Ranger
• 1 Corpse Connoisseur
• 1 Evangel of Heliod
• 1 Geist-Honored Monk
• 1 Grave Titan
• 1 Gravecrawler
• 1 Heliod's Pilgrim
• 1 Knight-Captain of Eos
• 1 Marsh Flitter
• 1 Pontiff of Blight
• 1 Ranger of Eos
• 1 Rune-Scarred Demon
• 1 Sengir Autocrat
• 1 Skeletal Vampire
• 1 Soul Warden
• 1 Soul's Attendant
• 1 Myr Battlesphere
• 1 Precursor Golem
• 1 Mikaeus, the Lunarch

• Spells (6)
• 1 Cloudshift
• 1 Night // Day
• 1 Rise of the Dark Realms
• 1 Sudden Disappearance
• 1 Carnival of Souls
• 1 Vedalken Orrery

Buy This Deck

This is basically a bunch of white and black creatures that create tokens. Of course, if you don’t want to stick to Orzhov, you can always add in colors. A Ghave, Guru of Spores deck may already be tokens-themed, and those colors can work quite well with the concept.

Casting a spell after Sudden Disappearance’s delayed trigger can be an issue, which is why a sorcery like the above that doesn’t require us to finish off our opponents during our end step might be useful. That said, there are creatures we can use. Whitemane Lion, for example, wouldn’t do much for the deck, but when returned to the battlefield either via Sudden Disappearance or Rise of the Dark Realms, it would return itself to our hand so that we could cast it and extort with it.

To fulfill the same need, Vedalken Orrery would let us turn any spell into the instant we need, though we’d want to make sure it’s cheap enough that we’d be able to afford the extortion we want to perform. Night // Day is a versatile and interesting option.

Finally, I just want to point out an unrelated interaction in the form of Triad of Fates (or Cloudshift, etc.) and Alaborn Zealot. Much like Mangara of Corondor, Alaborn Zealot has a superpower that, when resolved, removes both itself and another creature. However, the resolution of its ability does not require that it be on the battlefield. So if we block with the Zealot and Flicker it, perhaps with our commander Triad of Fates, the blocked creature will still be destroyed while we gain our Zealot back. Also, she has a gun.

And that’s it. Just have a carnival, make creatures that make tokens, make them disappear, cast something, and extort your visitors—or opponents.

Andrew Wilson

@Silent7Seven

fissionessence at hotmail dot com