So say I Mimic Vat a Storm Crow and then cast Sundering Growth and populate my Storm Crow token. What's interesting with all of the token doublers and populated tokens is that they don't actually get the clause that exiles or sacrifices the token at the beginning of the next end step. Populate allows me to create one additional token of a token I already control, so if I had a Storm Crow token that say my Mimic Vat created, I could create an additional Storm Crow token.

These seemed to be the most commander viable of the bunch, as the other spells are either too narrow in effect, were obviously made for limited, or too slow ( Growing Ranks and Song of the Worldsoul come to mind). We of course have the standard Anointed Procession and Parallel Lives that accompany all token decks, as well as an innocent little mechanic from Return to Ravnica called populate, present on spells like Trostani, Selesnya's Voice, Sundering Growth, and Ghired, Conclave Exile. My next step was finding cards that synergized with the plan of creating tokens of specific creatures, as we aren't interested in making an army of 1/1s here. In the past few years, the magic gods have been kind to this deck, providing Feldon of the Third Path, God-Pharaoh's Gift, and of course the more widely known Mimic Vat (and everyone's favorite goblin, Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker). Its power comes from one innocuous little word on the first line of text: 'At the beginning of each upkeep.' This allows us to autonomously cash in on our value creatures turn after turn while freeing up our mana, letting us play out our turns as normal and/or leave up interaction while gaining some additional value in the late game after our board has been swept a few times.Īfter some (bad) brews with the deck that didn't function when I never drew Seance, or had nothing in my graveyard when I did draw it, I began to looking for all of the effects in magic that mimic Seance. After some playtesting, I realized that Seance on its own was powerful enough to build a deck around it in its own right, and moved away from the exile theme. What once started out as a casual 'exile matters' deck, revolving around using Pull from Eternity and Riftsweeper in conjunction with creatures like Misthollow Griffin and Eternal Scourge, I aimed to get value out of exiling permanents with cards such as Seance, and some valuable mass-exile effects like Descend upon the Sinful. This deck has been a pet project of mine for many years.

Mtg seance