After trying probably a little bit too hard to beat fully-powered deck with a type II one, and reading somewhere about the uselessness of Fallen Empires, a little recreation : nothing overpowered, just a simple plan of drawing and playing three cards per turn, thanks to one single card. What is this overpowerdness of a card you ask ? I give you the last forgotten treasure : Ring of Renewal.

The few and little times I had considered it, I had always thought this would be too unsafe, making me discard my removals, counters or wincons. That makes sense since we’re used to play such big game card in control deck. But what if we didn’t ? What if I had an empty hand and I would activate it during my upkeep, discard nothing for having nothing to discard and then draw 3 cards ? So the first thing with this is that blue and white seem to be out consideration, that clears up the path. The second is that an all in red Mana Flare + Fireball + Ring of Renewal probably builds itself quite easily, so we’ll leave that to anyone interested, and the third is that we need a lot of mana. In type II, this would probably lead us to green (I mean Sisters of the Flame is cool and everything, but while we’re not shooting for the stars, we still want decently fast ramping), as we don’t have any double-duty lands like Mishra’s Factory or Strip Mine it’s not easy to put up a livable manabase that will be big enough to accommodate for Ring of Renewal and can do stuff on the side, so as to not be flooded all the time. But while it’s nice to ramp into RoR, we also need something worthwhile to ramp into, and alas no Erhnam Djinn in sight and Jayemdae Tome wouldn’t make any sense. Thankfully we do have a good four drop in this format to ramp into :

Which directly leads me to this underplayed beauty :

Green-Black ? Is that what we’re playing ? How do we deal with opposing creatures ? While some like Paralyse, I don’t, especially in this deck. And terror is a sideboard card in this format. No, like the young Michael Flores we’ll have to make use of this other Fallen Empires tool :

Which leads us to one of the stalwart of the format : the Orders. WW against BB is a matchup that often revolves around who can play the most protected from the opponent Knights. In that war Aeolipile is about the only tool to get rid of one those (well, at least in this format).

Can we accommodate for BB, which would not only gives us access to the best pump knight, but also to Hymn to Tourach ? HtT would work well as a card that offers some disruption while not needing to sit in our hand waiting for the other side to deign to play the appropriate threat; and crucially, like in the good old Necro days, it’s also quite good at discarding Disenchants before we play our big artifact.

It’s time to work-out a manabase. We’re gonna need reliable green mana on turn 1 for our mana dorks, so we should have 14 available turn 1 : 4 Bayou and 10 forest. 4 BoP and 4 Elves of Deep Shadows are to be considered as giving us only half, according to Frank Carsten, that’s 4 black we actually can rely on, plus 4 from the Bayous.

4 Bayou

10 Forest

8 Swamp

4 Elves of Deep Shadow

4 Birds of Paradise

That’s only 16 reliable black mana sources, which isn’t ideal, but at already 30 mana sources we can’t stretch too far. To note : since we have 8 mana-dorks that produce black, we have significant chances to put a turn 2 Hypno. In other words we’re not just ramping into Derelor and Ring of Renewal, we’re ramping at every stage of the curve into something great.

Which gives us, in the end :

[tappedout link for the deck]

This doesn’t break the format, if for anything for the fact that in Type II Armageddon and Winter Orb really are a thing. But it does get you some exhilarating feeling of drawing three cards per turn now and then, and even has some decent matchup against some of the competitive decks of Type II, the 1st which isn’t all that bad for a disregarded card from a disregarded set.

EDIT : This won’t work as well if you use the historical rules as WotC did a ruling making the discard a part of the cost. Stupid me would never have thought they’d nerf such an amicable card and didn’t check. Why WotC oh Why ?