Divine Fires

Hi everyone,

I must admit that I think I have an addiction to building decks around Fires of Invention and finding ways to break the card in the most unconventional way possible.

In my article yesterday, we tried to combine Doom Foretold with Fires of Invention and arrived at a control shell that aims to win with powerful enchantments like Captive Audience and Ethereal Absolution we can play for free.

This time around, I wanted to try and abuse Fires of Invention by playing Divine Visitation and a bunch of token generating creatures and amass an army of 4/4 angels as early as turn 5.

The problem with Divine Visitation is that it doesn’t create any board presence the turn it comes into play. Because you’re spending all your mana to cast it, you can’t actually generate a creature for free nowadays with the cards we have in Standard. The same logic I apply here is my dream of being able to play two Regisaur Alphas on the same turn so both dinos can swing and deal 14 damage the turn they come to play.

With Fires of Invention, now we can play something after we play Divine since we don’t use any mana to play our spells anyway.

On turn 5 with five lands and Fires on the battlefield, we can play Divine Visitation then follow it up with Trostani Discordant to create two 5/5 angels (thanks to Trostani’s emblem effect). Now that’s 11 power on turn 5 which is pretty scary.

You can also pay Biogenic Ooze and start using your idle mana to churn 4/4 angels. Nevermind the Ooze synergy since you won’t be making any ooze tokens anyway but a 4/4 flier is way more powerful than 2/2 oozes that grow over time.

It’s also pretty neat that a lot of adventure cards allow us to make tokens.  Cards like Lovestruck Beast can make a 4/4 and a 5/5 body if cast back to back. Flaxen Intruder creates three 4/4s if you got 7 lands. If you want to attack with Lovestruck Beast in the early game then you can always cast Heart’s Desire anyway.

And since we’re playing adventure cards, we can definitely play Lucky Clover which pushes our value engine even further because the copy ability gets around Fires of Invention’s limitation because we’re not casting the copies.

Another card that we don’t see often anymore is Legion Warboss which is perfect for this deck’s concept. Free 4/4s every combat is a sweet deal, but having early attackers against control is also handy sometimes.

Edgewall Inkeeper is our natural 1/1 creature than can allow Lovestruck Beast to attack but more importantly, he provides some card draw for us which is also very important.

Lastly, another mana sink in the deck is Castle Ardenvale which is a fantastic way to generate a constant stream of 4/4 angels. Who said Field of the Dead was bad?

So here’s the list I ended up with. It’s a blast to play at your FNMs but I won’t probably recommend this for highly competitive play (but I’m known to bring wild decks to GPs in the past so don’t judge me)

Decklist:

The sideboard is more of a reactive or transformative sideboard. We will expect the opponent to bring heavy creature hate and some enchantment removal to take down our angel factory. So for game 2-3s, we swap out some of our creatures across the curve for planeswalkers and enchantment-based token generators.

For our walkers’ suite, we have Gideon Blackblade and Nissa, Who Shakes the World. Gideon is a great 3 drop that we can swap in for Lovestruck Beast. For the same mana cost, we have a 4/4 indestructible hitter that also functions as a removal spell overtime.

Nissa, on the other hand, doesn’t make tokens but turning your lands into creatures can be a surprise tactic our opponents may not anticipate. Especially once they exhausted all their removals on our real creatures, playing a Nissa is a doozy once we start cracking back with 3/3 lands.

Our enchantment-based token generators are Dawn of Hope and Outlaws’ Merriment. Dawn gives us card draw and a mana sink in one, whilst Outlaws’ Merriment is such a powerful card on its own but with Divine Visitation, it’s just sick!

Veil of Summer comes in against control match-ups where we want our Divine Visitation to get through the countermagic. That’s basically it 🙂

That’s it for today’s decktech. I hope you find my ideas fun, as I try to bring cards that are no longer popular back into the spotlight! Let me know if you decide to build this and leave in the comments your crazy plays!

Till next time,
Vanson