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Unless you won them in that CCC Momir Basic tournament back in December, some avatars are just hard to come by.  Today's article is about three of them.

Deck 1 Platinum Angel

The obvious part of this avatar is that you'll need to play with a lot of artifacts, creatures, and enchantments in your deck.  The unobvious part is what to do once they're out.

True, you could theoretically have no win condition, and just rely on waiting 50 turns for your opponent to get decked (you will not lose even if your library runs out first).  But the truth is, I hope, that nobody wants to play a game requiring 50 turns of hitting F6.  Even if it is a guaranteed win.  (When I say "guaranteed," I'm assuming you took the precautions of protecting those permanents of yours.  Uh, and countering your opponent's Feldon's Cane.)

I think a better approach is to be a little more proactive in killing your opponent.  But so as not to put the avatar to waste, we're going to do so in a way that also kills us.  Or I mean, would ordinarily kill us.

But wait!  There's more to the av than just killing everybody at once!  When it says "you can't lose the game," it doesn't only mean at your opponent's hands.  It also means you're saving yourself from... yourself:

       

These cards, and several others like them, are now without drawback.  You can't lose the game.  You can even Animate Dead a Phage the Untouchable into play!

Today's deck is going to focus on cards that kill you a little less directly though.  Specifically, we're going to run mono-black with cards that make us pay a lot of life.  I'm not talking about a suicide black aggro deck.  I'm talking about a lot more life loss than that, and a lot more varied a gameplan.  First, the life loss:

 

Remember: life loss doesn't affect us when our avatar's working.  And before it's working, we don't mind dropping down to 1 life.

Note that Murderous Betrayal is not only (for decks who don't care about life, like ours) a powerful source of repeatable removal, but also an enchantment, which will help turn on Platinum Angel.  (I originally ran 4x Ashes to Ashes until I realized I wanted a few to be permanents.  I not only changed some to Murderous Betrayal, but some to Oubliette as well.)

Next, some accessories:

Anvil of Bogardan and Spiteful Visions are each good in obvious ways, but notice that they also synergize with each other.  Also notice the Anvil's "no maximum hand size" clause, which with all of the card drawing this deck does can actually be relevant.  And it combos with either half of the previously mentioned Promise of Power!  And if you're worried about what all of that card drawing is going to do to us with our Spiteful Visions in play... our avatar saves us, remember?

Forsaken Wastes is great in here because (1) it prevents our opponents from recovering from all the damage we're dealing them (2) the life is makes us lose is made moot by our avatar and (3) it's an enchantment, which helps activate our avatar.

One alternate win condition, in case for whatever reason our other stuff doesn't do the job, is Mesmeric Orb.  Cast it as early or as late as you want — in either case, it will burn through both player's decks fairly quickly.  And you don't need to be careful about what permanents you tap, because as I've been saying, the Angel will keep you alive through this card.

Two tricks I want to highlight are as follows:

Let's say you have out a few lands and Murderous Betrayal and nothing else, and you are down to a very low life.  Your opponent swings in for what he assumes is the kill.  But then you cast Pact of the Titan (it's an instant!) for zero mana, and you remind your opponent that Vault of Whispers is an artifact, and although the attack brings you into the negatives, you are still kept alive because your avatar was just activated.  Stuff like this will happen more often than you might think.

Some Platinum Angel decks stay alive by protecting their permanents (Privileged Position, Rebuff the Wicked, etc).  This one can't do that, so its plan instead is just to cast a large number of permanents.  WIth the card drawing, and the structure of the deck, it isn't too hard.  (To see what I mean by structure, look at how many of each permanent type are in the below decklist.)  True, this deck can spend three turns with negative life only to die out of nowhere to a Tranquility, but every deck has some sort of weakness, doesn't it?  Fortunately for us, global artifact and enchantment destruction are fairly rare.  And global creature destruction is fairly common, but that's why our Pact of the Titans are in here.

The decklist, which is casual and customizable:

Avatar: Platinum Angel Land (24) 17 Swamp 4 Vault of Whispers 2 Piranha Marsh 1 Ebon Stronghold Creatures (10) 2 Pact of the Titan* 2 Dross Harvester 4 Vampiric Spirit 2 Promise of Power*	Artifacts (10)** 4 Charcoal Diamond 4 Mesmeric Orb 2 Anvil of Bogardan Enchantments (12) 4 Forsaken Wastes 2 Oubliette 2 Murderous Betrayal 4 Spiteful Visions Nonpermanents (4): 2 Night's Whisper 1 Ashes to Ashes 1 Infernal Contract
*Technically nonpermanents, of course, but filed under creatures for the avatar's sake. **Plus another four from the Vault of Whispers.

Rules clarification:

You cannot pay life you don't have.  If your avatar is keeping you at negative 20 life, you cannot activate a Souldrinker because you don't have 3 life.  However, you can activate a Murderous Betrayal, because there is such a thing as half of negative 20.  Weird, huh?

Deck 2 Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni

Ink-Eyes decks need three basic things.  1, lots of mana.  2, lots of life.  And 3, a backup plan for creatureless opponents.  (Unlike Oath decks, we can't just use a Forbidden Orchard to fix a creatureless opponent.  Ink-Eyes needs the creature to be in the opponent's graveyard, which there is currently no way to do.)

That said, once you figure out those three things, you have a very powerful effect on your side.  Notice that, unlike the Haakon avatar, there's no exile clause on the animation target: you can reanimate a single creature as many times as you want.  Whether you use that for repeated chump blocking or repeated Brion Stoutarm activations is up to you.

Today's deck is designed to do the former: use the ability for a series of chump blocks to stall while it sets up.  Its main reason for creation was because of this card, however:

I love epic.  A lot.  Its obvious problem is that there isn't much to do once it's in effect, potentially putting you at a disadvantage, but this avatar gives you plenty to do, since activated abilities can still be used.

To get ourselves to the point where we can comfortably cast an epic spell, we'll need a lot of defense.  I went with:

A few notes about some of them:

• Innocent Blood — With only two creatures in this deck, this card is generally a discounted Cruel Edict.
• Seal of Doom — Often wise to cast this before the epic spell, even if there are no creatures on the board.  It can easily be used later.
• Barter in Blood — No reason not to swap this out for Damnation, if you have 'em.
• Wall of Frost — This might seem contradictory to the Innocent Bloods and Barter in Bloods.  And... it is.  But all are good enough to make the cut anyway.  Just think about all of them before casting any of them.
• Icy Manipulator — Again, this gives us stuff to do post-epic.

A card I want to highlight in this deck is Journeyer's Kite.  Aside from the obvious functions (smoothing out our draws, ensuring our landcount), it serves a very important role in this deck: keeping our handsize up!  Remember that Neverending Torment is a wisdom card, so we need ways of getting extra cards.  (Dregs of Sorrow can't do it all by itself.)  And even when you have a full hand, this can still be activated during your upkeep, with the Neverending Torment trigger on the stack, to let you exile 8 cards from your opponent's library instead of 7.  It can matter.

A late addition to this deck was a singleton Reliquary Tower.  Situations like the one above happened more often than I anticipated, and I often found myself not wanting (but having) to discard.  After more playtesting, I may even add a second.

Another card I want to highlight: Diamond Valley!  These and the Sun Droplets are our only ways of gaining life, which with our avatar we need to do.  But this card I like because it gains life in a way that's very synergistic to the avatar, and not just incidental like Sun Droplet's life gain.  Remember: you can reanimate the same creature any number of times.  And you can therefore sacrifice the same number of creature any number of times.  You're losing an amount equal to its CMC, and gaining an amount equal to its toughness, which doesn't always work in your favor, but often does.  At the very least, it helps you recoup a little bit.  (If nothing else, you can always sacrifice your own Wall of Frost for a quick seven!)

Here's the list (customizable etc):

Avatar: Ink-Eyes Land (25): 2 Diamond Valley 1 Reliquary Tower 1 Dimir Aqueduct 9 Island 12 Swamp Creatures (2): 2 Wall of Frost

Noncreatures (33): 4 Innocent Blood 2 Ostracize 4 Journeyer's Kite 2 Last Gasp 2 Negate 2 Sun Droplet 3 Consult the Necrosages 2 Seal of Doom 3 Icy Manipulator 4 Barter in Blood 1 Diabolic Tutor 1 Ribbons of Night 2 Neverending Torment 1 Dregs of Sorrow

Last up:

Deck 3 Royal Assassin

An avatar like Royal Assassin can go in virtually any deck to make it strictly better.  Aggro deck, defensive deck, combo deck — they all benefit from this avatar, with very few exceptions.

But if you know me, I like to do more than just put two random good things together.  I like to create synergies, and so today's deck is going to use Royal Assassin not only to generate card advantage but as itself part of combos.

What does card drawing combo with?  Wisdom, but a 5-card max handsize doesn't.  So how about cards that trigger off of drawing?

   

Hoofprints can give you a guy every 2 turns; the Coatl gets a permanent +2/+2 every turn, and the Pursuit can be cracked in very short order.  And all three of those cards get even better with any of the following:

Brainstorm's combo potentials have been written about enough that I probably don't need to repeat it.  Like the Platinum Angel deck above, this deck uses both halves of the Anvil to their fullest.  And Paradox Haze... well read the timing of our avatar's trigger if you're not sure why it's in here.  (Why go to black for a Phyrexian Arena?)

With all those extra upkeeps, I also added Honden of Cleansing Fire, Gerrard Capashen (we'll need them with this avatar), and Time Bomb (ha ha as long as we have Paradox Haze, why not this too?).  The only cards I haven't mentioned yet are either mana accel or utility.

The list:

Avatar: Royal Assassin Lands (23) 8 Plains 7 Island 5 Forest 3 Seaside Citadel Creatures (9): 3 Gemhide Sliver 4 Lorescale Coatl 2 Gerrard Capashen

Noncreatures (28): 4 Brainstorm 4 Hoofprints of the Stag 2 Lignify 1 Seal of Primordium 2 Oblivion Ring 4 Anvil of Bogardan 4 Paradox Haze 3 Time Bomb 2 Honden of Cleansing Fire 2 Pursuit of Knowledge

See you next time, and have fun with vanguard!