Death/Life - Poison Stall

[xxqwerty xx]

After deciding to make a deck of my own, I ended up wanting to make a death/life deck, since it seemed cool, and I hadn't seen one yet. I
originally wanted to use poison, and ended up adding some different cards later on.
So, without further ado, here's my idea/prototype:
V2

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52g 52g 52g 52o 52o 52o 52o 52p 52p 52p 52p 52q 52q 52r 52r 52r 5c2 5c2 5c2 5c2 5c8 5c8 5c8 5c8 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5deI'm generally more reliant on death quanta now that the deck has been streamlined. The extra speed of this version is working well so far.
Shields [chaining] that avoid poison from the scorps has been a problem (purify too!), unless a good amount of poison has already been
built up. High HP creatures that don't die quickly to plague can bring down my walls and cause problems as well.
V1

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52i 52i 52i 52i 52n 52n 52n 52p 52p 52p 52p 52q 52q 52r 52r 52r 5c2 5c2 5c2 5c2 5c6 5c6 5c8 5c8 5c8 5c8 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5deI think that this deck feels a bit overstuffed right now, but I don't know what/if I should take anything out.
Right now, I've noticed  that I'm often ending up with extra quanta, so I'm thinking about removing some of the pends and shrinking the size
of the deck. Any suggestions?
NOTE: This will probably be used for either PVP, or maybe AI5 if it works. Also, I'd like to try and keep this deck unupped if possible.

[Leo]

I suggest you remove some of the pends and shrink the size of the deck, because you're ending up with...

...extra quanta. 

[SteppingStone81]

First of all, welcome to the forums!

To make an effective deck, you may want to consider your "win conditions" (i.e., how you are going to win).  Most likely the deck you posted will win by building up poison counters on the opponent and then surviving until the opponent succumbs.  Let's now look at how your cards fit with these objectives:

Poison: Arsenic and forest scorpions both help build poison, but both are blocked by a number of shields (dimension shield, wings, titanium shield, bone wall, etc) and are vulnerable to creature control / permanent control.  Further, there are also only 6 copies of your damage cards in a 40 card deck.  You may want to consider adding 3-5 copies of the death spell poison to penetrate shields and speed up your deck.

Surviving: Building up large bone walls and then healing is an effective tactic for surviving.  How best to heal, though?  Boneyard + triggering deaths + empathic bond can provide a lot of healing, but this set up is very slow and requires a combination of 3+ cards.  Also, in mid- to late-game, you will have built up a large bone wall to block most damage, so fast healing (i.e., the heal spell) is preferred to help survive until you can build that large bone wall. 

Next, how to build up the bone wall?  The spell plague will work well when the opponent has numerous frail creatures out, while the creature virus can poison only one enemy creature (one turn slower than plague) but contributes its own death effect to the bone wall.  While the choice is somewhat situational, I would drop the viruses and go with plagues for creature control / building bone wall.

A possible alternative
Incorporating the changes discussed above to build a more focused deck, we might come up with something like the following death-life poison stall:

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[ratcharmer]

Hi!

First off, listen to Steppingstone, his advice is good here. Especially shrinking your deck down some is important.

I might also recommend switching some of your pendulums to a mix of death and life pillars. While pendulums are great for making sure you at least get some quanta of both types, using only pendulums means you will never have hardly any until turn 3, which will slow down getting your Arsenic and plague into play, and both of these are important to play fairly early. At a glance it also looks like you need more than . So maybe shift the balance more towards quanta?

With heal versus emphatic bond, I think the most important thing is to pick one or the other and commit to it, trying to use both in this case is weaker than either one by itself.

[xxqwerty xx]

Hey all, thanks for all the advice!
I plan to test all of your suggestions, so thanks a lot! I'll edit the main post once I'm done testing with an updated version.

@SteppingStone81:
I like the idea of adding the poisons. It was something I had included in my original draft of this deck, but dropped to shrink the size of the deck. What I'm worried about is the loss of the viruses, which makes me lose a lot of CC, which in turn weakens the bonewalls. While I think dropping the yards and committing to poison stall is a great idea, I'm not sure if the added speed is enough to make four plagues enough to maintain a strong shield. The loss of the empathic bonds and skeletons means I'm completely reliant on heals to keep my health up if I can't build a wall. I'm currently trying to think of a solution for this.

@Racharmer:
I originally had some four bone pillars in this, and I may add something similar to that again. I'll probably test switching to death pendulums with a life mark instead, which means I'll have death quanta by turn two, as well as adding some bone pillars to help support the poisons that SteppingStone suggested. With SS's suggestions, I guess I'll commit to heals for now, and go poison stall.

EDIT: Main post has been updated. Thanks for the help guys. The extra speed from SS's version has been enough to make up for the loss of certain cards so far. With the removal of those cards, I tend to use more death quanta now, so I've added in three bone pillars and removed two life pends.