Historic: Esper Parhelion
Raw Text
Deck 4 Greasefang, Okiba Boss 3 Tezzeret, Betrayer of Flesh 1 Fading Hope 4 March of Otherworldly Light 4 Disruption Protocol 4 Faithful Mending 4 Thirst for Knowledge 1 Wrath of God 4 Portable Hole 1 Glass Casket 1 Reckoner Bankbuster 4 Parhelion II 1 Island 1 Otawara, Soaring City 3 Mech Hangar 3 Clearwater Pathway 4 Deserted Beach 1 Eiganjo, Seat of the Empire 1 Godless Shrine 4 Hallowed Fountain 3 Hengegate Pathway 1 Plains 3 Watery Grave
Sideboard 1 Deafening Silence 2 Grafdigger's Cage 1 Aether Gust 2 Dovin's Veto 2 Sunset Revelry 4 Mystical Dispute 2 Wrath of God 1 A-Hullbreaker Horror
Overview
Note: This deck is an almost exact port of the deck Saffron Olive played on video for MTG Goldfish. We changed out the board wipes for ones available in Historic, but otherwise this deck was available exactly as played in his Pioneer build.
Parhelion II is one of the most powerful vehicles ever printed. It's a huge body with relevant abilities that gains you board presence the moment it attacks. The objective of this deck is to get in one of those attacks as soon as possible. We do this by trying to discard a Parhelion II to the graveyard then return it to the battlefield for a turn with Greasefang, Okiba Boss. Sure it's going to return to hand at the end of turn, but we can either discard it again or simply attack in with the two angels it produces to end the game.
The rest of the deck is a light control shell that is trying to control the early game and resolve the combo.
Combo
The combo is based around two cards, Greasefang, Okiba Boss, and Parhelion II. The goal is to get a Parhelion II into the graveyard, resurect it with Greasefang and attack in. That normally swings the game enough that we can close things out either with another big attack (We still have three creatures) or buy enough time to reapply the combo.
Discard
Our combo only works if we can get Parhelion II into the graveyard so we run quite a few ways to pull that off. Tezzeret, Betrayer of Flesh takes on dual roles of discarding our Parhelions and animating our various artifacts (Including vehicles) to help us close out games. Faithful Mending gives us a little life gain, and the flashback can be useful both for digging for Parhelion and discarding it again to continue the combo. Thirst for Knowledge is some great card advantage in a deck of so many artifacts, and we actively want to discard our artifacts.
Control
The rest of the deck is an early game control shell that is trying to disrupt aggro enough to pull off the combo and fight back against control so we cana ctually do our thing.
Sideboard
The sideboard is mostly made up of cards for aggro or control shells. We do have some graveyard hate to help with various decks, but otherwise we are trying to do our thing.
