Hour of Devastation has arrived, and with it so has Nicol Bolas, God-Pharaoh, but we are not talking about him today, but rather his gift.  Today’s deck won a recent PTQ online (Go Carlos!) and uses God-Pharaoh’s Gift in order to reanimate creatures every turn, as early as turn 4.  This deck was actually designed by one of our members, Patxi, who gave us all a quick run-down of the deck.

The aim of the deck is to use Minister of Inquiries, Strategic Planning and other ‘self-mill’ cards to fill your graveyard with creatures, which then allows us to activate Gate to the Afterlife to find God-Pharaoh’s Gift and begin to amass a horde of zombies.  Or, more simply, we can get the gift into the graveyard through milling and then we can Refurbish it back into play.

Angel of Invention makes a pretty good Baneslayer Angel impression in this deck, apart from it also has haste and makes two 2/2s.  Reanimating this card is often game changing, as it can kill Gideon, Ally of Zendikar out of nowhere, it has lifelink, vigilance and haste.  A Zombie Angel of Invention just does it all.

Similarly, another powerful target to reanimate is Cataclysmic Gearhulk.  Although it ends up being smaller than the original creature, the powerful ETB effect will still happen.  This is usually the first creature we bring back in order to try to stabilise the board-state and get us back into the game.  This is often back-breaking against the creature aggro decks like Zombies or Temur Energy, as they are frequently left with one creature, while we have our Gearhulk and a God-Pharaoh’s Gift returning another creature of ours every turn.

Champion of Wits adds a lot of consistency to the deck, it provides a way to get reanimator targets from your hand to the graveyard, it digs for more of the combo and when eternalized or reanimated it nets us cards advantage, what is there this 2/1 can’t do?  It can easily be used as a chump blocker early on in order to get even more value later on in the game, much like our other small creatures.

This new desert looks inconspicuous; however it is a major part of our game plan, it allows us to quickly fill the graveyard with creatures allowing us to get our combo going as soon as possible.  I would consider adding more deserts into the deck in order to get a repeating effect, possibly Desert of the Mindful in order to add some more utility to the deck too.

Going forward, this deck can be adapted in order to beat the meta, I think that Angel of Sanctions is a good card that has a lot of potential in the deck, due to the options it provides with embalm.  I think this deck has the opportunity to steal games from linear aggro decks and provides an interesting change to the current meta game.  How the deck lasts in the next few weeks, with the looming Pro Tour is unknown, but it would be interesting to see if this deck pops up at that tournament at all.  I am not sure whether we will see more God-Pharaohs or God-Pharoah’s Gifts, but I think it could be quite close, what do you think?