If Invoke Despair is your favorite card, this is the deck for you.

The sweepers and Invoke Despair never end! Bring them back every single turn with Shigeki and Dryad's Revival. Enough recursion to make Arcane Bombardment green with envy. Your life force surges as you pick off your enemies, ripping victory from their clutches. Your opponent will be powerless to stop you as your nuclear plan unfolds. Be prepared for them to run screaming when they see three more Despairs materialize back into your hand. Ready to be mercilessly slammed into their face one after the other.

Pick up the deck and lay down THE HAMMER.

Deck Breakdown

This deck's strategy revolves around carrying powerful cards and key answers, then recurring them over and over with Shigeki and Dryad's Revival.

Against Aggro, you rely on your sweepers, Depopulate and Vanquish the Horde, as well as your stall-out lifegain cards, Sunset Revelry and March of Wretched Sorrow to survive until they have no more cards in hand.

Against Control, you're mainly focusing on forcing your Despairs through and recycling your answers to stop any of their threats from sticking. If they're running their own Invoke Despairs, Sunset Revelry and March of Wretched Sorrow provide enough lifegain to neuter their damage.

Once you begin casting your Invoke Despair, you can expect to quickly find yourself casting them every turn.

Dryad's Revival is the all-star here. Previous variations of this deck only carried Shigeki. The problem with running only Shigeki is twofold: When you can only afford to bring back one card, you 1) must expend 2GG to do it, and 2) you sacrifice loads of potential card advantage. Additionally, the non-legendary rule meant it really hurt to see a Celestus get removed, and you required some other card to get endless recursion with Shigeki.

Let's first talk about the endless recursion problem:

Other decklists try to approach this with Soul Transfer or Urborg Repossession.

The problem with Urborg Repossession is easy. All it can get back is Shigeki and another permanent. It's cheap, but in a control deck, your options will be very limited; with only Shigeki, The Celestus, and perhaps a planeswalker or two. Most of the deck consists of instants and sorceries you would rather have.

Soul Transfer, on paper, sounds very good. Sorcery speed Hero's Downfall that exiles and can later pull back Shigeki, or just pay the 1BB to get the Snake Druid back? From extensive testing, this card only ends up being the sorcery-speed removal. First off, you have to satisfy the artifact + enchantment requirement to get the 2-for-1. This is extremely difficult in this meta. You will be hard-pressed to keep a bankbuster on the battlefield for long. And aside from the decision of which enchantment or saga you would run, these often get removed too. Many times by opposing Invoke Despairs. You end up cutting down to one Soul Transfer, but at that point, you aren't drawing it anymore when it matters, and certainly not when you're meeting the bonus criteria.

Finally, if you are really hurting for that Depopulate in your graveyard, you must first Soul Transfer to get your Shigeki, then Channel your Shigeki to get the sweeper, then finally cast that Depopulate. For a total cost of 5WWBBGG. And chances are, you aren't going to afford an 11 mana cost against aggro, which means you will be waiting three turns for your sweeper while also throwing away all of the potential card advantage Shigeki offers. So Soul Transfer is right out.

Dryad's Revival doesn't suffer from any of these problems.

You can use it to bring back any card in your graveyard that you like, without the whole roundabout of fetching Shigeki, then Channeling for the card you want. You can even bring back Shigeki, or use Shigeki to bring back Dryad's Revival! In the aforementioned example, when you're looking for your sweeper, you can spend 2G to bring back your Depopulate, spend your remaining mana to remove a big threat or set up a stall with Sunset Revelry, then wipe the board by the next turn. AND have the flashback available to get another card back! You now have the option to spend less mana to get a single powerful answer out of your graveyard without sacrificing card advantage.

But of course, we still run Shigeki as a mid-late game card advantage engine.

This brings us back to Invoke Despair. Once you get one in your graveyard, you will find yourself able to bring it back the next turn with Dryad's Revival, while holding a 2 mana spell to stall. Then, casting it again, drawing into enough land to cast Shigeki for 4GG, bringing back Dryad's Revival and Invoke Despair, then casting Invoke Despair and another spell, followed next turn by Dryad's Revival targeting Invoke Despair into said Invoke Despair, drawing into another Invoke Despair, and so on. I cannot underscore enough how persistent the recursion is. You will feel your opponent reeling from all of the Despairs you cast, and they will scoop as soon as they see you Shigeki two Despairs to your hand on their end step with 10 mana ready to cast both of them.

Last but not least, Tear Asunder deserves an honorable mention. It is extremely powerful in this meta, being able to shoot down sagas, opposing Celestuses, Bankbusters, Leyline Bindings, you name it. While also being able to exile Tenacious Underdogs and reanimation targets as well as planeswalkers. This makes it a very robust card that you may find yourself returning to your hand again and again.

At the time of writing, I have taken this deck from the bottom of Gold 4 up to Platinum 1 with a 75-80% win rate.