So here I am, thinking on another Standard deck to brew on a boring night. I decided to browse through the Khans of Tarkir spoiler list for ideas and came upon the card named Abzan Ascendancy. I initially thought of a Convoke tokens list that the enchantment can pump, but its second ability will be pretty much useless. Since the clan’s mechanic is Outlast, I scoured and sorted creatures from the clan’s colors with that ability.

After a few minutes, the list is now composed of mostly White Outlast critters and a few of them from the Green pile. So the deck’s core colors will be White and Green with Black splash for ascendancy and maybe Abzan Charm. A few deck statistics analysis and choosing the right creature while discarding unnecessary ones, here is the first version of the deck, Abzan Outlast:

Creatures
4 Abzan Falconer
4 Ainok Bond-Kin
4 Elvish Mystic
4 High Sentinels of Arashin
2 Soul of Theros
4 Sunblade Elf
3 Voyaging Satyr
3 Wingmate Roc

Spells
4 Abzan Ascendancy
4 Abzan Charm
1 Ajani, Mentor of Heroes

Lands
3 Sandsteppe Citadel
3 Temple of Plenty
4 Caves of Koilos
4 Plains
2 Forest
4 Llanowar Wastes
3 Windswept Heath

There were only two Outlast creatures that made into the list: Abzan Falconer and Ainok Bond-Kin. That is because their ability is the only relevant type in most of the combat situations. First Strike gets you advantage against most blockers and Flying for bypassing late game threats. The rest are mana creatures that you’d need to ramp into your sentinels or rocs as wells as mana dump for Sunblade Elf’s pump (+1/+1) ability.

The sleeper card in the list is High Sentinels of Arashin, a four drop flyer that gets big coming into play as a follow up for Abzan Ascendancy plus it’s is a late game pump source which also triggers Outlast’s static ability as well.

Soul of Theros is the deck’s top of the curve and can give your team a huge swing once you have untapped into it. It is also a 6/6 threat on its own and can even be used from the graveyard if ever it is killed.

Aside from the ascendancy, your other +1/+1 counter sources are the Abzan Charms and the lone planeswalker in the deck Ajani, Mentor of Heroes. I was thinking of having Dictate of Heliod in his spot but then he can provide gas by digging into your relevant creatures and filtering redundant cards.

This is still an experimental build so I won’t expect it to perform well against the current Tier 1 decks in Standard, though I will still be testing it on Magic Workstation and maybe I will post some match results soon so stay tuned for that.

That’s about it for Abzan Outlast deck tech, thanks for reading and until next post.