The Yellow Feln [Yeln] - Top 20 masters, yadda yadda

Hi there,

This is a version of the Phyrexican Cirso's Cleaver deck that I have fallen in love with, slowly tuned and have had a lot of success with - I climbed to top 20 masters using it last month, have been climbing with it this month and have at least a 70% winrate over nearly a hundred games. The deck is now very far from its origins, sharing only about half the same cards as the Phyrexican/ManuS lists. I have continued to play it almost exclusively this month and have still been performing extremely well, though I have been testing numerous different things and made several tech changes (check the bottom for an explanation of the latest update). I believe my list is by far the best of the Cleaver lists but I am continuing to test and enhance it even so.

I have named the deck "Yellow Feln" or "Yeln" since it has a similar playstyle to old feln control decks, sharing a lot of the same cards and a similar strategy but differs in that the deck is actually good (while feln control has not been good for a very long time) and is a lot more fun to play. Plus I was getting somewhat sick of just calling the deck "Cleaver".

A huge reason to play this deck right now is how favourable the tokens and aggro matchups are - this deck has 8 merchants, access to Cirso's Choice in the market, mains Hailstorms and has BSH for good measure. It has Sandstorm Titan to combat TJP fliers and skycrag. It cleaves Stand Together decks in half with the raw power of huge creatures and killer effects. It is capable of outgrinding anything with the value generated by 8 merchants and 6 cards that have echo or otherwise produce 2 cards along with cards like Jotun Feast-Caller. Despite having a lot of situational cards, the 8 merchants mean that you can always turn them into something useful.

Another good reason is how fun it is to play - the tempo swings provided by Cirso's Cleaver, the raw value you can generate and the tricky attacks you can set up make playing this deck very different from playing other slow midrange decks. This is probably the best deck to play Jotun Feast-Caller in - the ability to buff it up with cleaver and give it killer makes it truly incredible. The deck is pretty bad against heavy removal decks if you don't draw JFCs but JFC is a nightmare for those decks to deal with and I think I still have a positive winrate against those decks (though they are usually my hardest matchups). I have recently been tuning the deck to perform better against hard control while still winning the aggro and tokens matchups in a landslide (see the latest update for more info).

The market is set up to provide all your options regardless of which merchant you draw and every market card has its own extremely useful niche.

The deck is also excellent for gauntlet grinding if that's of interest.

Proof of top 20 masters:

https://imgur.com/a/drHDgjY (My draft rank recovered at the end of the month, I promise draft is still where my heart is...)

Latest update and explanation::

-3 Cirso main: Unfortunately I have seen Cirso consistently underperform more than any other card in the deck. I have left the market Cirso in since it means I can get it when it's good (against other time decks and when I just need a big creature that all 8 of my merchants can get)

After I removed Cirso, I stopped referring to this deck as the Cirso Theme deck since it makes a little less sense now. I have been trying a split of two Twinbrood Sauropods and one Wisdom of the Elders to replace Cirso - Twinbrood helps sure up the bad unitless matchups, is better with Dark Return, generates value with merchants and is much less vulnerable to removal and Wisdom is just a good card and something to do early. Possible this deck would like more wisdoms and some number of Twinbroods may become Wisdoms but they have performed decently so far.