Crumbling Sanctuary

Crumbling Sanctuary 5 Artifact Whenever any player would be dealt damage, remove the top card of their library from the game instead.

This is powerful stuff. It's a fair assumption that most decks don't have cards that cause their opponents to lose life unless they have a good reason to. That means that when this card hits the table, your deck becomes your new life total. So is your opponent's, but hopefully you're prepared for that. A Sanctuary on the table drastically changes how the game will play.

First, the life totals you previously had become irrelevant unless you're using them as a resource or one of you is playing cards that cause loss of life. Many decks try to come right out and kill you. Not only does this make them do twice as much work, it erases all the work they've already done. If their deck does damage with creatures or other sources you can see coming a turn in advance, you can soak up a full 19 points of damage before putting the Sanctuary out. Against other decks you have to use more caution. If they've been using cards up to do damage to you, the Sanctuary can let you turn that card advantage into an easy win.

Second, you now can use your life total without worrying about losing the game. Draw nineteen cards with Yawgmoth's Bargain. Pay nineteen life to a Phyrexian Processor. Draw four cards with a Sylvan Library if you don't feel up to the other stuff. If you're feeling really uncreative just use an Ancient Tomb getting out the Sanctuary. Bargain is a particularly interesting option here, because you can get the Bargain out, then use that to draw and get the mana for Sanctuary. Then it shouldn't be hard to turn your extra cards into a win.

Third, you can hit their life total with the cards that cause loss of life. Soul Feast them. Send in four Highway Robbers. Soul Feast in particular is attractive because it's already being used in UBC Bargain decks as the kill card. The logical next question is, what else is in MM for the Bargain deck? Unmask could be good, but Duress is probably still better. There's a new white two mana spell that gives five life. The most important other card could be Rishadan Port, which would be great in a monoblack Bargain deck that didn't use Corrupt or in a version whose mana base is White. The Turnabout plan is basically dead. That leaves two choices.

One is to play a variation on 'Anakin,' one of the alternative decks I built for the Nationals. The idea here to play a WW deck but to include Rector and Scent of Jasmine. At any time the deck can play a Rector, sacrifice it to get a Bargain, use Scent to draw the entire deck and then kill with whatever its engine is. It used to be Seismic Assault off Mox Diamond, now it would probably be Blaze and Skirge Familiar. The other is to use the Sanctuary in a monoblack deck or a monoblack deck with white for Enlightened Tutor and/or Academy Rector.

The most evil part of this totally evil deck is that you can't die while both Bargain and Sanctuary are out. You don't draw, so the worst thing that damage can do to you is take away the ability to Bargain, and it takes a while before that happens. After that, only a select few cards can stop you. Either he has to make you draw the rest of your deck with Stroke, he can remove Bargain or remove Sanctuary. If it were in Sixth, this deck might be able to use Jester's Cap to remove its opponents ways to win and let him get decked. You don't have that luxury, and Lobotomy is also gone. One card that isn't gone is Zur's Weirding. Since Bargain is still "draw a card," however, I'm not a big fan. But certainly putting one in the sideboard gives the deck a powerful extra weapon. If there are a lot of decks that are likely to have only a few removal spells, and right now that seems like most of the field, you can even start one and use your tutors and Rectors to get it. The main problem with the deck is that Scroll Rack is gone.

Is this any good? I don't know. It's basically just a straight adaptation of the standard UBC Bargain deck, to start to show what is possible. Between preparing for London, testing Extended, learning MM limited and (believe it or not) a lot of work that has nothing to do with Magic, I've had no time to test T2 decks.

As for the five cards, a lot of people wrote in to guess even though I said not to ask. Everyone named Yawgmoth's Bargain, obviously, and almost everyone chose among Replenish, Gaea's Cradle, Serra's Sanctum, Yawgmoth's Will and Voltaic Key as the others. It was amazing to me just how consistent the choices were. I will, of course, confirm that one of them is Yawgmoth's Bargain. As long as Bargain exists in a format that format will never be safe. This may or may not be the kind of deck that does it.