If your deck did what it was meant to do, the overall strategy would prevail, even if its implements varied from game to game, and that’s an important factor to consider when assessing a sacrifice deck. Put as a question, can you reasonably rely upon getting the effects of the deck in most games you play, even if you don’t necessarily draw the same cards? While Disciple of the Vault was a brutal closing option in Sacrificial Bam, you still had other sacrifice outlets in the Atog and Krark-Clan Grunt.
Instead, the strength of an engine in this sort of deck is in its reliability.
Decks that hinge upon the interaction of a few, specific cards in a particular order are “combo engines,” and while those have a long and storied history in Magic, they’re actually the very opposite of what we’d see in a preconstructed deck. After all, even if you jam in four copies of your win condition, games can come and go without ever drawing it. If your opponent wasn’t clinging to a Doom Blade, the game would be all but over.Ībsurd power level aside, this makes for a fairly weak engine. The natural instinct there would be to play with a flood of cheap creatures- particularly mana dorks that helped hasten your bruiser’s arrival- then turn the beast sideways for the win. Imagine a reasonably-costed Green creature that had trample and gained +10/+10 whenever you sacrificed a creature to it. At it’s most basic, a sacrifice engine could be very small, provided that the effect was worth the cost and risk. The key to evaluation of this sort of deck is in what lies beneath the hood: the deck’s engine. If we were to summarize the objective of today’s Oath of the Gatewatch deck, Vicious Cycle, we could do no better. Towards that end, many of its cards involve sacrifice and sacrifice outlets, along with the fodder that drives the deck forward. The objective of these decks is simple- take advantage of permanents that don’t mind dying to feed ones that reward you for when they do. Following in the footsteps of Mirrodin’s Sacrificial Bam and Coldsnap’s Beyond the Grave, we summarized this style of deck as follows. It was a deck that played in a space we’d seen before with preconstructed Magic, although not commonly. Nearly four years ago, we reviewed a deck called Slaughterhouse from Avacyn Restored.
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