Abzan Blue Eldrazi (Standard)

Abzan splashing blue for counter magic and colorless for Thought Knot Seer and Reality Smasher.

Traditional Abzan Creatures such as Warden of the First Tree, Anafenza the Foremost and Siege Rhino are, of course, still as good as ever allowing you to hit fast, hard and early. Anafenza keeps your opponent's graveyard from becoming a delve/rally engine and with Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet the deck now has another creature with the same ability, but better. When a non token creature you opponent controls dies it is exiled AND you get a 2/2 Zombie token. For 2B: Sacrifice a Zombie or Vampire to put 2 +1/+1 counters on Kalitas...Oh, and he has lifelink.. Abzan gets another HUGE value creature from Oath of the Gate watch in Sylvan Advocate the 2/3 Elf Ally with Vigilance for only 1G, but that's not all. Once you have 6 lands Sylvan Advocate AND land creatures all get +2/+2. If you have 2 Sylvan Advocates in play your land creatures get +4/+4 etc. He is also an Elf and an Ally so he fits in both tribal decks perfectly.

There were two Eldrazi creatures that stood out above all the rest in Thought Knot Seer and Reality Smasher. We are already in four colors and getting the colorless mana needed by turn 4 can be a little tricky, but after a lot of testing, tweaking and testing again I you can consistently get green, white and black/blue by turn 3 for your Abzan spells and counter magic. The colorless mana comes from the 3 Caves of Koilos and 3 Llanowar Wastes. These pain lands makeup 25% of the mana base though they can't be fetched. The odds of getting one of the 6 colorless producers by turn 4 are pretty good. I play 9 fetch lands which increases the likely hood of drawing into a colorless land slightly higher each time you fetch a basic or battle land. Really, without at least 6-8 fetch lands and 2-4 battle lands it would be hard to play a 4 color deck let alone a 4 color + Colorless deck. I have found 10 fetch lands to be around the maximum you can run without running out of lands to fetch for or taking away a place for one of our colorless mana producers. Though it is not in this deck list 2-4 shambling vents should be incorporated to take full advantage of the Advocate's ability. I took them out to make the deck faster and to get the colorless mana I needed more reliably, but the vents need to be in the deck plain and simple.

Gideon, Ally of Zendikar is such a great planes walker I don't think I need to go into detail about why he is so good.

Sorin, Solemn Visitor is awesome with his +1 ability, but when you pair his Vampire token generating ability with Kalitas' +1/+1 counter ability Sorin becomes better than ever.

I added Narset because she lets you draw cards for free much of the time, cast spells with rebound and an obtainable ultimate that shuts off your opponent from casting non-creature spells for the rest of the game pretty much locks it up for you. There is still a lot of testing to be done, but it feels like she is nothing but good things can come from playing her at 4 mana and entering with 6 loyalty.

This deck likes the early game, loves the mid game, but if you don't close out a game against a control deck or ramp deck you are in for an uphill battle. Another copy of Painful Truths and/or Treasure Cruise can be added to help keep you hand full. After turn 6 you start casting spells faster than you can draw them.