I just had the chance to play with some of the Amonkhet cards at length this weekend and man...
Nest of Scarabs is one of the most disgusting cards I've had the pleasure of playing with. I made a deck primarily using Amonkhet cards as a test, ended up going Green/Black. A buddy of mine was doing a very mean Sultai Deck, barely using anything from Amonkhet (made me sad!)
I won 2 out of 4 games, using a deck that probably cost less than $30.00 to make (2
Westvale Abbey lands as a win-con paired with
Nest of Scarabs). Ended up doing a crazy amount of battle tricks with the -1/-1 tokens stuff, which is fantastic!
Soulstinger is incredible paired with
Splendid Agony.
Soulstinger came in, put -1/-1 counters on itself, went down to a 2/3, generated 2 scarabs. Ended turn. Friend attacked with
Torrential Gearhulk,
Noxious Gearhulk,
Grim Flayer with Delirium and
Ishkanah Grafwidow and 1 spider token with reach. Blocked
Torrential Gearhulk with
Soulstinger, ended up using
Splendid Agony on
Torrential Gearhulk, generated 2 scarab tokens--took it down to 4, hit it for 2 with
Soulstinger, down to 2, placed the -1/-1 counters on
Soulstinger on it, generated 2 more scarab tokens and killed it off. Used the newly generated Scarab Tokens to flip
Westvale Abbey and block
Noxious Gearhulk paired with another scarab!
Lifelink got me out of burn range. At the end of his turn he was just out of the game. He had a
disallow but was tapped out at the time and couldn't deal.
It really made me appreciate the versatility of the -1/-1 deck. Every-time I managed to get out
Nest of Scarabs the game went incredibly well. I lost the last game due to a really crappy draw. I hit Hapatra, Vizier of Poison 2 times in a row with my draws and aside from
Festering Mummy I didn't have any other creature in my hands (already had a Hapatra). The snake token generation didn't pan out like I'd hoped, but it was still a lot of fun to use the deck! I'm trying to refine it right now and was debating pairing it with a lot of the other zombie generation/embalm mechanics from Black/White. Gotta say, Amonkhet feels good.