“Queen of Hearts”‘s upgrade

Hi everyone and welcome to a small update to my Oona cEDH deck: Queen of Hearts.
After some games with my playgroup and with the will of fully embracing the cEDH philosophy of bringing a deck to its limit I removed the stigma I had against some of the most expensive cards and consequently upgraded my deck.  

You can find the previous post about the deck by clicking here.

While by clicking here you can find the updated decklist.

+ Gilded Drake; – Thieving Skydiver
Thieving Skydiver was there to help me get enough mana rocks to go infinite with Isochron Scepter and Dramatic Reversal but lot of time it ended up being a dead card as I didn’t want to invest mana in it if I didn’t have already the combo in hand. Gilded Drake instead is a nice card that would help me get more control against my opponents’ boards. As an ex-Selvala I can tell you that a Drake can cripple you if you aren’t ready… he only needs to steal your Commander to shut you down almost completely.

+ Miscast; – Thoughtseize
Thoughtseize is another card that ended up underperforming in the recent games: it was nice to get information on the opponents’ hands but I rarely wanted to do it if it wasn’t in the first turns. Having more counterspells seems always like a nice thing so I decided to add Miscast to replace it.

+ Mystic Remora; – Impulse
Impulse never performed poorly in the deck but after playing more cEDH I understand the Remora was such a better card for all the advantage it could give me so I simply decided to make this change.

+ Timetwister; – Snapcaster Mage
Remember the part of my stigma about proxing up pricey cards that I would never be able to afford? I had to totally remove it to add Timetwister to the deck… the price for this card is insane and so I’m lucky that proxies exist and are well perceived in the cEDH community.
To add the Timetwister I decided to remove Snapcaster Mage; Snappy was always a card that I felt as really powerful when I saw it played in Modern deck, but after playing it a bit in cEDH I thought it was underperforming my expectations and various time I didn’t want to spend that two mana to recast a spell from my graveyard.   

+ Sea Gate Stormcaller; – Power Artifact
Using Power Artifact to help out with the Isochron combo wasn’t really working out and it ended up resulting in a dead draw lots of time. I decided to give more support to the main Demonic Consultation combo by adding the Stormcaller as it can act as a substitute of Thassa’s Oracle in the late game. For example by casting the Stormcaller and then Tainted Pact you will get two copies of the pact; you can use the first one to find Thassa’s Oracle and the second one to exile your whole deck and then cast the Oracle to win the game.
I will test how the Stormcaller performs and I will tell you in one of the future updates.

+ Wishclaw Talisman; – Black Sun’s Zenith
The Zenith was another card that ended up not working for me; the reusability of this removal is really nice but most of the time I didn’t want to dump that much mana into it to remove creatures.
I had some doubt about Wishclaw Talisman being passed to an opponent after using it, but I want to try abusing the fact that its ability can be activated only at sorcery speed to use it to find the last piece of combo I need in my turn right before going for the win, not leaving my opponents the possibility to use it.

+ Darkslick Shore, Gemstone Caverns, Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth; – Drowned Catacomb, Reliquary Tower, Tarnished Citadel
Drowned Catacomb was a residue of the previous iteration of the deck where I used to not play Tainted Pact as a piece of combo and with having so few Swamps and Islands Darkslick Shore resulted in a much better choice.
I never found myself relaying much Reliquary Tower’s ability of giving me infinite hand size and so I preferred to substitute it with Gemstone Caverns that could totally give me a really nice jumpstart at the beginning of the game.
Tarnished Citadel was a nice way to fix my mana but against the more aggressive deck of the format, that three life I had to pay ended to matter some time; I preferred to switch to Urborg despite it fixing Black also for my opponents as I think that the chances in which it will be really meaningful for my opponents’ wins are slick.