MTG Salvation

Teneb has long been one of my favorite generals. I've built numerous versions of him over the years, including reanimator, Reveillark combo, the Rock, and goodstuff.dec. I recently decided that I was tired of playing with all the usual suspects (Bloodghast, Lurking Predators, Genesis Wave, Living Death, etc) and wanted to try something new out. True Conviction was the card that caught my eye and that naturally led me to think about the various ways to abuse life gain. This is the deck I've been playing on MTGO lately.


Cards that are out of my budget currently:

Cards that I'm thinking about including:

I've deliberately excluded Sensei's Divining Top because I've found that online it's costs me more time to use than it's worth. Offline, I can top when other people are doing things. Online, that's not possible.

The deck has been surprisingly effective so far, largely because most of the cards say "gain x life" and we're conditioned to think of those cards as irrelevant. The large amounts of life gain in the deck allow it to shrug off almost all non-general damage and drastically increases its longevity in a multiplayer game. Something as simple as Akroma + True Conviction is almost impossible to race without appropriate removal. An early Essence or Soul Warden can give you a cheap and easy 10-15 life before it dies to a sweeper, and the life gain only gets bigger from there.

There are a few ways to turn all that extra life into material advantage. Perhaps the most direct method is Sanguine Bond. This turns all of your lifegain into drain effects, your lifelinkers into doublestrikers, and Exsanguinate becomes even more ridiculous. I've one-shotted many people with the Beacon of Immortality+Sanguine Bond combo. Extra life can also convert into extra cards through spells like Well of Lost Dreams, Sylvan Library, Necrologia, or the holy grail, Necropotence. Finally, both Ageless Entity and Serra Avatar benefit directly from increased life and Cradle of Vitality can grant the bonus to the creature of your choice.

This deck is built to be an attrition machine. It does best in an environment where decks are competing for card advantage directly on the battlefield. It's soft to decks that are more explosive than it is and who use that early mana to fuel combos. It aims to beat people through combat damage using cards that are dismissed as absolutely terrible.

What I'd like to know is are there any on-theme cards that I've overlooked? This is not a theme I normally pay attention to, so I'm sure there are cards that I've never heard of that would be perfect for the deck. Advice would be welcome.

I've wanted to do something similar with Doran, with a Treefolk tribal subtheme alongside things like Sapling of Colfenor, Orchard Warden, and Angelic Chorus.