Locations
In this experiment, we weave unhallowed pacts of giants to indulge a fallen ideal.
Continuing my trend of making decks based on Magic 2015 cards, I put something together around Boonweaver Giant.
Searching alphabetically through my options, the first one I came across was Abduction. It’s intended to be a Control Magic effect, but it has the downside of giving the abducted creature back to its owner when the creature dies. If we just use it on our own creature, however, we can just treat Abduction as a False Demise—and this line of thinking reminded me of, of course, False Demise. Fool's Demise, Unhallowed Pact, and Shade's Form all have this same ability to bounce a creature back.
With Blasting Station, for example, we can cast Boonweaver Giant, search up False Demise and attach it to the Giant, sacrifice the Giant to Blasting Station to deal 1 damage, return the Giant with False Demise’s trigger, return False Demise with the Giant’s trigger, and untap Blasting Station with its own trigger.
That works well enough, and with Phyrexian Altar or the like, we can make infinite mana—which happens to work quite well with Shade's Form. If one of those interactions is up your alley, you’re good to go. However, I prefer to avoid “easy” combos like those when I can avoid it, at least favoring jankier options when I can avoid the combo standbys.
The Sacrifice
Fortunately, there are less ubiquitous combo options, such as Devouring Swarm, Flesh-Eater Imp, Nantuko Husk, and—just our luck—an Aura in the form of Fallen Ideal.
Flesh-Eater Imp is the most efficient among those, as it has flying and only requires we make eight sacrifices to enact the kill. Of course, with Boonweaver Giant, we have endless sacrifices available, but we may as well hedge for non-Boonweaver scenarios.
Fallen Ideal fits great, as it’s on the Aura theme. Searching one up with Boonweaver Giant means we’re not fetching a False Demise effect, and putting Fallen Ideal onto Boonweaver Giant doesn’t make a ton of sense anyway, as it will just be sacrificed in the loop. A redundant Giant would work, but ideally, we’ll be putting the Fallen Aura on another of our creatures.
One such creature option is Heliod's Pilgrim, which will do for us the work of finding a copy of Fallen Ideal in the first place.
Stars and Friends
Underworld Coinsmith will give us a healthy life buffer, especially when that life buffer is infinite. And when we have spare mana, we can turn our life into our opponent’s loss thereof.
Grim Guardian provides another great constellation trigger, reducing our opponent’s life total directly and circumventing the Coinsmith’s indecisiveness.
Note that both of those are pretty defensive—we want to slow our opponents down while we’re waiting to hit 7 mana for a Boonweaver Giant finish.
I mentioned it above, but Heliod's Pilgrim can serve as a very defensive creature as well, given the Auras we’re packing into our library. We can grab a False Demise effect and put it on the Pilgrim so that, when it dies, it will just come back to block again.
Monk Idealist does a very similar job, though it requires that the Aura we want be in our graveyard already. Auramancer is an alternative to Monk Idealist, and while I love Rebecca Guay, I have to go with the Monk theme for this list.
False False Demise
And while I might have liked to skip blue altogether, I had to make room for Flight of Fancy. It will let us dig into our deck as a 1-extra-mana Divination, though it opens up possibilities for all kinds of shenanigans. It’s a Divination that Heliod's Pilgrim can search up. It’s a Divination that Monk Idealist can return. It’s a Divination that Boonweaver Giant can search up, turning it into a kind of Giant Mulldrifter. And with the next card, Flight of Fancy is even crazier.
Flickerform is something I couldn’t skip over, so it made the cut as a one-of. If we don’t have a potential win with a sacrifice outlet when we cast Boonweaver Giant, we can grab Flickerform instead. Then, for 
, we can search up an additional Aura each turn, such as Flight of Fancy. Over the course of a few turns, with Boonweaver Giant’s triggers, we can stack up multiple copies of Flight of Fancy and trigger all of them each turn with Flickerform activations.
Treachery may not fit perfectly here, but it is quite powerful. Cast normally, we can just grab an opponent’s creature for virtually 0 mana. However, that doesn’t really play into our deck’s game plan. With Flickerform on the same creature with Treachery, however, we can generate more mana than we spent on a Flickerform activation. That will make our Flight of Fancy shenanigans much more achievable in terms of mana expenditure.
Finally, Gift of Immortality is another one-of Aura for us that might not be a great fit, but it’s a reasonable choice for setting up an early defense with Heliod's Pilgrim—and every time that Pilgrim dies and comes back, we’ll be able to search up another Aura. (How does a Flight of Fancy sound?)
Boonweaver Shade ? Casual | Andrew Wilson
- Creatures (21)
- 2 Flesh-Eater Imp
- 3 Monk Idealist
- 4 Boonweaver Giant
- 4 Grim Guardian
- 4 Heliod's Pilgrim
- 4 Underworld Coinsmith
- Spells (15)
- 1 Flickerform
- 1 Gift of Immortality
- 1 Treachery
- 2 Fallen Ideal
- 2 Unhallowed Pact
- 4 Flight of Fancy
- 4 Shade's Form
- Lands (24)
- 6 Plains
- 6 Swamp
- 4 Drowned Catacomb
- 4 Glacial Fortress
- 4 Isolated Chapel
If you’re looking for something to search up with Boonweaver Giant that isn’t Eldrazi Conscription, or if you’ve just been hankering to use your foil Torment copies of Shade's Form, give this deck a try.
Andrew Wilson
fissionessence at hotmail dot com
