My version of removal pile, has an edge against other icaria decks thanks to makto.
Card Choices:
Seek Power: Fixes our influence for cheap, not much more to say.
Torch: Premium removal.
Annihilate: Busted against time midrange, horrific in the mirror. Especially useful against
Predatory Carnosaur to protect your Icaria. Also works well with wanted poster because it's so cheap.
Cull the Deck: Shadow's
Strategize. You can regain the tempo loss with all your cheap removal.
Petition: Amazing influence fixer, and will usually be getting a scout-land so you can dig for more power or gas.
Quarry: Stonescar's
Strategize. It's quite a bit better than cull the deck, so if you want to cut some of the card filtering go for those first.
Vanquish: Premium removal.
Wanted Poster: In a deck with this much removal, wanted poster is amazing. Going poster+vanquish your titan on turn 4 is a game-winning play. In a pinch, it can even pop an annoying aegis. This is the card advantage that removal pile decks sorely need.
Ixtun Merchant: The best of the 3 merchants. The shadow merchant has the best body, but it can't get icaria. The justice merchant has the best options, but the body is shit. Ixtun has a respectable body, and a surprisingly good amount of options to choose from.
Slay: A bit slow, and hard to combo with wanted poster, but it's still the best removal spell in the game.
Auric Runehammer: Very necessary to combat all the aegis aggro decks running around. Only 3 because it really sucks in some matchups.
Statuary Maiden: Your win-con against midrange. Also blocks stupid aegis units in a pinch. Look out for opposing runehammers though.
Inquisitor Makto: Your answer to icaria.
In Cold Blood really hurts, but you can't really play ICB in decks with justice. The only deck mainstream deck that plays this card at the moment is Feln Control, which barely classifies as mainstream anymore since it's so horrendous. This also combos with
Cull the Deck, since you can find your revenge makto much sooner.
Icaria, the Liberator: I don't really need to explain this one, do I?
---Market---
Bore: Best relic-destruction card in the game. You can combo this with a second merchant, by using it then putting it back in the market.
Statuary Maiden: Kills midrange decks dead. Also great against grenadins. Also fine against aggro, since it doesn't die to most removal spells and it blocks most of their units.
Flamestoker: So very slow, but so very powerful. Be wary of getting this against icaria decks, because although it's extremely powerful it can also be raced.
Rizahn, Greatbow Master: Rakano's version of Black Sky Harbinger. Get this against aggro.
Icaria, the Liberator: I don't need to explain this one, do I?
Notable Mentions:
Rizahn, Greatbow Master: Great card, but it really sucks against midrange. Could see cutting a few maktos and adding a few of these, depends on how much aggro is in the metagame.
Throne Warden: Very similar to Rizahn, it's strong against aggro but super dorky against midrange.
Starsteel Daisho: Don't play this card without
Rise to the Challenge in your deck, and even then you'd almost always rather get an Icaria.
Harsh Rule: It's really good when you don't have it, and really bad when you do. Depends a lot on the metagame, but I think that with
Statuary Maidens in our deck, we'd rather rely on single-target removal. I could easily be wrong though, especially since this is a great combo with Makto.
Privilege of Rank: This card is very good, but it's extremely taxing on the influence. With 4
Wanted Poster, we have access to card advantage so we don't need privileges that badly.
Bulletshaper: When it's good it's great, but more often than not it's a 2/3 for 2 in a deck that needs all its cards to be strong. We also aren't playing
Privilege of Rank, which is one of the biggest draws to Bulletshaper.
Sabotage: If we were playing
Tavrod, Auric Broker, Sabotage would be interesting. As is, it's kind of lackluster.