[Masters] Kermit and Miss Piggy: Happy Ever After

I started with Severe Griefing.

I found, as the author did also, that going all in on the Severin+pig plan makes you REALLY vulnerable to aggro, Turn To Seed, and basically all disruption; and also that most of the stuff in the original list is focused on going nuts once you have the combo, and drawing the pieces, but it falls apart if you can't put it together and it's pretty easy for them to kill you first. So this is what I've got after about a month of tweaking-snuck in just under the wire to make Masters for the month too. (It took so long because they waited until the end of the month to release Wyatt's Junkyard, which lets it really sing, and also because I personally am terrible at this game; it'll do a lot better in the hands of a more skilled pilot!)

So basically you're using the Kermit+Miss Piggy combo as a wincon in what turned out to be a pretty standard Winchest midrange shell. Blow up their stuff when you need to, draw a lot of cards, and then kill them with a bunch of Piercing Griefs. Your main card advantage engine is abusing Xo of the Endless Hoard with a high merchant count. I tried to balance the colors of the merchants so that you can most of the time get most of the market options.

The key card is Rujin's Choice because it means you only need to naturally draw one of your combo pieces and then you can tutor up the other. This frees up a LOT of slots for removal and a greater diversity of threats. I try to trade aggressively early on: don't think twice about swapping your Red Canyon Smuggler for Ijin, Walking Armory. Same with Vara; her purpose is to sap their resources so that they'll be overwhelmed quickly when you assemble the combo.

The other cards are there to either buy time/stay alive (Harsh Rule, Defiance etc), re-buy your threats/pieces, or serve as a backup plan. I've won a number of games without using Severin at all and just surprising them by giving Vara and Tasbu Overwhelm with Display of Ambition.

Wyatt's Junkyard is an all-star against most decks that aren't putting pressure on your life total each turn (control and other grindy decks). It takes away their threats, re-buys your stuff, and Chemical Rounds can take the bite out of just about anything. It's weak against decks that have a stronger board presence than we do, or those that can reduce us to a low life total before we can get it onto the board.

I'm not at all confident that this list is the best version of this idea. There's probably a better mix between the removal suite and the recursion, and I'm kind of iffy on the market. Icaria is a solid backup plan because they probably spent their removal getting rid of Vara and Tasbu and Kermit and Miss Piggy, and then even if they kill her you'll win with whatever she Warcry'd. She replaced Grinva, Judge of Battles at the last minute: he was SO AWESOME when he worked as intended (I've done literally 30 damage in a turn from the Griefs dying) but was just too slow and clunky most of the time.

We're weak to mill if we can't kill their Tome right away and then kill them before they can land another one. Ubsat can be a huge blowout. In general we don't have great tools for countering strategies that abuse the void, I'll probably try to make room in the market for Adjudicator's Gavel for this purpose. [EDITGavel is really good.]