Azindel Cleaver

I used this deck to climb through Diamond to Master this month, with a record of 34-14. I don't usually play this much ranked in just a couple days, but I was having a lot of fun with this deck.

I actually made this deck two months ago, but I didn't play it for very long before getting distracted by Azindel Mask. I came back to it just because I felt like playing with Plunderer/Tome again, but I've been pleasantly surprised by how good the deck feels right now.

The basic idea of the deck is simple - it's a ramp deck with Cleaver and Azindel as payoffs. Having 8 merchants helps both with getting your payoffs and with assembling the Plunderer/Tome combo. The deck is actually quite tricky to play though, so a few tips:

1) Your best hands have T1 Initiate, but T2 Teacher or Trail Maker is also good (especially on the play) and hands with T3 Auralian Merchant into Plunderer+Tome are generally worth keeping as well.

2) The powerbase in this deck is very unusual - you are effectively splashing S for Cleaver and Azindel on very few actual sources (but many ways to fetch them). You shouldn't worry about S influence at all in the early game - your priorities are having TTP influence (all that you need aside from Cleaver/Azindel) and curving out as well as possible. If it is completely free to get S influence from Seal, Find the Way, or Trail Maker then that's fine, but in most games you just get SS from Tome.

3) Usually the first priority with your merchants is making sure you have access to Plunderer/Tome, and then after that you want to make sure you have enough action with Cleaver and/or Azindel. It's worth noting that both merchants can get Cleaver but only Auralian Merchant can get Azindel, so in games where you have one spare merchant of each type and want to get both Cleaver and Azindel, you need to make sure that Auralian gets Azindel and Jennev gets Cleaver. Good merchant fodder includes Hurler/Snowball, extra Tomes (one is usually plenty), unneeded Find the Ways, or excess power.

4) Unless you have multiple Plunderers or are confident that your opponent doesn't have removal, you usually want to hold Plunderer until you can play more spellcraft on the same turn. Usually this means 5 power so that you can play Plunderer + Tome, but sometimes you just want to Plunderer + Staff of Speed on 4 power. Sometimes you can even wait until 6 power and play Plunderer + Tome + Staff all at once, which is usually crushing (since you get to play two Slows). It's also worth noting that you don't always need Plunderer to go off with spellcraft - sometimes you can just play Tome on 6 power and then start double spellcrafting Cleaver or Staff after that. (And of course Cleaver is a very strong "fair" card on 7 power without any help at all.)

5) Staff of Speed has a bunch of uses in this deck. The most obvious is alongside Plunderer/Tome, but don't be embarrassed to spellcraft it the hard way sometimes too. You can also just use it to break a Permafrost, allow an Auralian Merchant to attack to trigger Azindel, or enable a profitable attack with Teacher of Humility (e.g. through an opposing merchant).

6) Choosing which units to put your various weapons on is generally difficult, but the main consideration is usually that you want to avoid exposing too much stuff to a single removal/silence. Jennev Merchant is usually the best target because of aegis, but Teacher can also be good just because you don't lose any ramp if it dies. Of course there can be other incentives too - Plunderer is a good target if you are trying to do lethal because it can berserk, Auralian Merchant is a good target if you want more attackers for Azindel, or simply the specific combat math of the situation can make some options better than others.