Here we are folks, our fourth installment of the Singleton Guild Wheel. They still haven't fired me, so here I am for another week giving you the lowdown on the most unnecessary deck building restriction since...highlander? Either way, thanks for stopping by again for this entry.

Now to be completely honest this deck has been the hardest to build so far. Some of the guild wheel's decks have just come together naturally, while others forced me to get creative, but they still came together cohesively. Glissa, the Traitor on the other hand has been a pain in the ass to build. Her deck suffered from an identity crisis since Day 1 of being "built". I do say "built" very loosely because the deck never seemed to come together and do much of anything. It was always a little too here and a little bit there but just...sucked. Yep. We've all built sucky decks and this was mine. Retiring Glissa seemed inevitable.

Thankfully the latest Kaladesh block provided some awesomely fleshed out black and green synergies that Glissa could leverage. Previously I played a load of awkward cards like Vile Redeemer, Painful Quandary, or Cryptolith Rite that didn't really do much of anything. The deck was half stax, half value, and all crap. Thankfully a bad deck doesn't have to stay a bad deck! Glissa, the Traitor epitomizes the Guild Wheel: you can't just slop some random cards together and call it a deck.

Commonly Played Cuts

Even when I didn't think this deck was very good I still played a decent amount of the top cards across all Glissa, the Traitor decks. Seriously, who doesn't love a Mindslaver lock every game? (You know who you are...)

[Editor's note: This guy.]

Kaladesh's new hotness meant cutting a few big-time EDH staples. I found it easier to swallow an artifact-centered deck without Solemn Simulacrum. As much as I love value, the value can't go in every deck (stupid Guild Wheel), so I had to turn to some new fun stuff instead. Two out of three decks reported to EDHREC play the saddest robot around, which is a testament to how great of a card the depressed droid is.

Eternal Witness is a fantastic card we go without too. I love the card, I play in pretty much any format where it's legal, but here it always seemed like extra redundancy. Glissa is already getting all of our stuff back so it never really made much sense to get...other stuff back. This might be the most unprotected witness around, since looking at the decks Eternal Witness goes into is pretty much a who's-who of popular decks.m

Eternally yours...unless not

There are also a few cards that don't jive with a few of the haymakers found in most Glissa decks. Nihil Spellbomb ruins our potential stealing of the other cards with Demon of Dark Schemes along with a few other synergies we start to run like Rise of the Dark Realms, which for the longest time was the only good card in the whole deck. Nixing their graveyard just was too much of a nonbo for my tastes. Nevinyrral's Disk is a super good card in the right deck, but I ended up putting it into my Tajic, Blade of the Legion, deck I covered here instead. Plus, I can't ever remember how to spell Mr. Disk's first name well enough and honestly didn't want to type it several times.

The Staples We Keep

Mindslaver. Because like I told you already, Mindslaver locks are hilarious and 42% of EDHREC decks seem to agree with me. Is it a mana hungry activity? Of course, but this is EDH where every day is Magical Christmas Land! There are some key cards like Executioner's Capsule and Sylvok Replica that get combined with Glissa to form a repeatable Doom Blade or Naturalize, helpful for killing any and everything your opponents try to do. Since the deck is admittedly on the slow side of things having the ability to slow your opponents down equally just makes sense.

 

Glissa's BFF's

Trading Post also might be the most overall valuable staple in the deck. Trading Post almost literally does everything an EDH player might hope to get out of a card. It draws cards, sacrifices artifacts, sacrifices creatures and RECURS artifacts, and it juliennes french freaking fries! So I may have gotten carried away towards the end there, but Trading Post is just a great Magic card. I can't really explain just how good it is, so I'll let my friend Billy Mays fill you in...

Underplayed But Not Under-appreciated

As I alluded to in last week's article, ramping in green without your typical stable of Kodama's Reach and the other staples of many green decks starts to get interesting once you're on your third (or fourth eventually) green deck with the same card pool. Since we love to sacrifice our own dudes for the sake of triggers it seems fitting that Primal Growth gets a chance to shine here. Rites of Spring is a card I had to dig REAL deep to find as well, but having it serve as as sweet discard outlet to fix our hands that are a bit light on lands almost lets the deck not have to worry about mulligans is a real upside.

 

This deck also really gives new cards in Kaladesh block a chance to shine in EDH. One thing the deck really wanted was a way to sacrifice artifacts that wasn't just Krark-Clan Ironworks which is a fantastic card in the deck, but one sacrifice outlet does not a stax deck make. Defiant Salvager is a card found in leftover draft piles at your LGS but instantly breathed some new life into Glissa's pile of nonsense. Adding on to the synergy is Marionette Master, Metalwork Colossus, and Oviya Pashiri, Sage Lifecrafter help to make sure that the deck has a steady stream of sacrifice targets and outlets for all the fun needed. Combine these of course with the powerhouses of Grave Pact and Dictate of Erebos and you have yourself all the recursion you would ever need.

 

Oh...and also there is one of my favorite things to do ever. So, first you take some of this...

with a little...

and it leads to this...

That said, here's the new and improved lineup for Glissa, the Traitor!

Final Notes

• The Strive mechanic is incredibly underrated for EDH. Consign to Dust is a fantastic card for trying to pick off multiple problem cards of an opponents. Since we don't have Shatterstorm or Shattering Spree type cards, the Strive cards let us do things in our colors that many don't have. Creeping Corrosion would be great but most times we don't want to wipe our own board as well (save for the Darksteel Forge) so we get this great card to turn to instead.
• Pentavus and From Beyond are WONDERFUL cards to pair with our sacrifice engines as well. From Beyond gives us a steady stream of blockers or temporary ramp. Pentavus gives us a pseudo-infinite sacrifice target so long as we have the two mana to keep activating the ability, which I happen to find quite attractive in a deck that can struggle with resources.
• There aren't any cards that slot into Glissa that were in previous installments of the Guild Wheel this week. As I said before, this deck has been in flux and part of the project for a while, so when I retooled the deck with lots of new toys it wasn't too hard to pull off. Sorry to let you down(even though I know you're not).
• Spine of Ish Sah has never really impressed me, so I'm actively looking for something to replace it with. If you have any ideas, let me know in the comments!

Well there we have it folks, another guild in the books. Is there some hidden gem that I completely missed in the overhaul or did I totally nail it? I'm pretty sure I totally nailed it. Let's all agree I nailed it.

Anyways, thanks for stopping by everyone!