Here is an instructive loss. This deck seemed to come out of nowhere. I jotted down all the cards for future reference:
Ivory Crane Netsuke (2 mana) (At the beginning of your upkeep, if you have seven or more cards in hand, you gain 4 life.)
Orb of Dreams (3 mana) (Permanents enter the battlefield tapped.)
Font of Mythos (4 mana) (At the beginning of each player's draw step, that player draws two additional cards.)
Static Orb (3 mana) (As long as Static Orb is untapped, players can't untap more than two permanents during their untap steps.)
Iron Maiden (3 mana) (At the beginning of each opponent's upkeep, Iron Maiden deals X damage to that player, where X is the number of cards in his or her hand minus 4.)
Meekstone (1 mana) (Creatures with power 3 or greater don't untap during their controllers' untap steps.)
Ebony Owl Netsuke (2 mana) (At the beginning of each opponent's upkeep, if that player has seven or more cards in hand, Ebony Owl Netsuke deals 4 damage to him or her.)
In this loss my opponent used their Animate Dead on my Iona naming White as the color I couldn't cast. I never recovered... ouch!
In this loss, by the time I could have gotten going, it was 'death by Slivers.'
Here I lost against a hand disruption deck (and mostly because I didn't land a single Swamp).
Here is another instructive loss:
Glaze Fiend (1B) (Flying Whenever another artifact enters the battlefield under your control, Glaze Fiend gets +2/+2 until end of turn.)
Cranal Plating (2 mana) (Equipped creature gets +1/+0 for each artifact you control. BB: Attach Cranial Plating to target creature you control.)
Turn 4, and I was dead... ouch!
Now, the wins. Here I drop a bunch on lands on my graveyard.
And then I drop them all on the battlefield using Planar Birth.
My opponent made me sacrifice my Wurmcoil Engine and enchanted one of my lands with Nettlevine Blight (4BB) (Enchant creature or land Enchanted permanent has "At the beginning of your end step, sacrifice this permanent and attach Nettlevine Blight to a creature or land you control.")
I finally placed the offending enchantment on a creature I did not mind sacrificing.
Here I lose a Steel Hellkite.
And another... sigh.
I came close to losing, but my opponent did not remove my Reya Dawnbringer with a graveyard full of strong creatures... that was a mistake.
I slowly built an enviable position.
And swung for the win.
Here is another win. Planar Birth takes a lot of setting up, and the reason why you will probably never see it again outside of this one-time experiment, but this one-trick pony sure has a great trick. I am forced to play only basic lands, which means I get mana-screwed out of one of the three colors I am running too often, but when it works, boy, does it!
After that land windfall I could hard cast Iona. Do you want to guess what color I picked?
Here is a win against another reanimator deck. I was heart-broken when I lost my Reya Dawnbringer, but then I could Animate Dead my opponent's Projenitor Mimic naming Reya Dawnbringer....nice!
For the win.
