One of my favorite cards of all time is All Suns' Dawn. This wacky card sees play in some kinds of cubes, and used to be a very fringe constructed card as a way to reward greedy, attrition-oriented control decks, which is exactly what I’m all about. When I first saw Seasons Past, I hoped it would be a role-player like All Suns' Dawn, and I’d get a chance to see it in constructed at least once or twice. Little did I know Reid Duke and Huey Jensen would break the card during the first big event after the rotation, and Jon Finkel would take it to a top 8 finish.

B/G Seasons Past ? Shadows over Innistrad Standard | Jon Finkel, Top 8 Pro Tour Shadows over Innistrad

• Creatures (4)
• 2 Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet
• 2 Nissa, Vastwood Seer

• Spells (30)
• 2 Ultimate Price
• 4 Grasp of Darkness
• 1 Infinite Obliteration
• 1 Nissa's Renewal
• 2 Duress
• 2 Seasons Past
• 3 Ruinous Path
• 4 Dark Petition
• 4 Languish
• 4 Read the Bones
• 2 Transgress the Mind
• 1 Dead Weight

• Lands (26)
• 12 Swamp
• 5 Forest
• 2 Llanowar Wastes
• 3 Evolving Wilds
• 4 Hissing Quagmire

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet
• 3 Dead Weight
• 2 Duress
• 1 Infinite Obliteration
• 1 Ultimate Price
• 1 Clip Wings
• 3 Naturalize
• 1 Orbs of Warding
• 2 Virulent Plague

Buy This Deck

This deck is beautiful. It knows exactly what it’s trying to do, and does so with brutal efficiency and astounding resiliency at every step along the curve. So what exactly is this deck trying to do? The name of the game is disruption, spot removal, and sweepers. In a format which is so heavily creature-oriented, the ability to curve out with Grasp of Darkness into another removal spell into Languish is enormously powerful against everything from Humans to Bant Company to miscellaneous midrange decks. Once you’ve cast a couple of removal spells and hand disruption spells and worked your way up to 5 mana, that’s when the deck starts kicking into gear.

The lynchpin of this deck is Dark Petition. Due to the density of Black removal and Read the Bones, it is comically easy to turn on spell mastery by turn five, which means you can immediately start casting pseudo Demonic Tutors for whatever singleton the situation calls for. Infinite Obliteration against World Breaker, Nissa's Renewal to generate even more mana and gain a life buffer, or just another sweeper or removal spell as the situation calls for it.

However, as you start selecting your tutor targets, it’s important to consider your end goal is to cast Seasons Past for a large number of cards. It’s hard to adequately describe just how overwhelmingly powerful the card is in this shell. First just imagine the upfront case where you resolve Seasons Past for a Grasp of Darkness, a Read the Bones, a Languish, and a Dark Petition. How is the average midrange deck going to beat that kind of excessive value? This is especially true given Seasons Past puts itself on the bottom of your library, ready to be tutored up again with the rebought Dark Petition.

The entirety of this deck is built around maximizing the ability of Seasons Past to function as something in between Sphinx's Revelation and Diabolic Revelation. Evolving Wilds lets you rebuy a land. Dead Weight is a one-mana removal spell. Even singletons like Orbs of Warding and Clipped Wings are there so that you can slowly and inexorably tutor up answers to even the most obscure outs your opponent has, and keep them up as necessary using Seasons Past. Even instant-speed interaction can be overcome by utilizing clever sequencing of discard spells and removal to force your opponent to pull the trigger on their effects at inopportune times.

All told, this deck is a masterpiece, and though things will certainly have to change in the coming weeks now that it’s a known quantity, I can’t wait to watch it happen.