DB's Challenge XIII (Poll): let Zen bring peace to your mind

Rogues
4 Acquisitions Expert

Clerics
4 Selfless Spirit
3 Containment Priest

Wizards
4 Deputy of Detention
4 Jace, Vryn's Prodigy
4 Spellstutter Sprite

"Warriors"
4 Unsettled Mariner

Payoffs
3 Coveted Prize
2 Thwart the Grave

Other
4 Aether Vial
4 Path to Exile

Lands
4 Flooded Strand
3 Marsh Flats
3 Polluted Delta
1 Plains
1 Island
1 Swamp
2 Hallowed Fountain
1 Seachrome Coast
2 Watery Grave
2 Godless Shrine

Because a party deck needs to be jammed full of party creatures, we really need to select our "Pinata", aka our payoffs, with care. Part of this process is asking the question of "What does a Party version of a deck offer that a non-party deck wouldn't?" There are a lot of cards that reward Party, but that does not mean all of them are superior choices - for example, Linvala, Shield of Sea Gate could end up being a slower Selfless Spirit that also dies to Lightning Bolt.

Two of the best cards that answer this question in my opinion are Coveted Prize and Thwart the Grave. A lot of party cards suffer from being weaker or overcosted if not cast at full party or at least party = 3 - at party = 2 , Thwart the Grave can still be comparable to a sorcery speed Collected Company and Coveted Prize is a Grim Tutor that doesn't shock you. This allows the deck to be a bit more forgiving with its party requirements and aim for getting party = 2 or party = 3 - we still have the opportunity to get a nut draw for full party, but the deck is capable of operating without it.

Honorable mention to Spoils of Adventure here, which this deck could be easily be reconfigured to use instead of Thwart the Grave, but I felt the potential advantage of getting cards back on the field is more in-line with what a party deck wants to do. Tazri, Beacon of Unity (and Valiant Changeling) likewise offer substantial aggressive bodies that can threaten to eat player's life totals on turn 3 and onward, but the amount of mana/setup required to get them is rough to work with (and interferes with another critical component of our strategy seen below).

As the first spoiler might've indicated to you, a Party deck wants to swarm the field with tons of creatures that quickly enable party so that its Party payoffs are costed very cheap or hitting extra hard. One might immediately think mana dorks solve the issue here, but they create two problems:

1) It has the usual mana dork problem of "bolt the bird" - if your Birds of Paradise, Llanowar Elf, or Noble Hierarch is bolted, you're not only behind on creatures/mana, you're also behind on your party payoff.
2) Most mana dorks don't enable party! Deathrite Shaman, Elves of Deep Shadow, Gilded Goose....you're probably noticed at this point that most dorks are either Druids, Shamans, or have no class! This isn't helpful for us because we want to be set on enabling party from turn 1.



We thus turn to Aether Vial, using in a manner similar to more generic tribal archetypes like Humans and Merfolk. Our turn 1 play, being an artifact that can pseudo-Flash things out at instant speed (and avoid counterspells), ensures that by turn 3 we've got a very high chance to suddenly jump from party=1 to party=3 out of nowhere, putting us in the ideal zone for our payoffs - suddenly Coveted Prize is Demonic Tutor! It also acts as a way for us to turn almost every single creature in our hand into a pseudo counterspell response, as many of our sorcery-speed creatures like Selfless Spirit, Unsettled Mariner, and Deputy of Dentention act as ways to fizzle removal spells or removal.

This mostly is here to make note of a few other synergies not covered in the other sections:



Unsettled Mariner, being a Faerie, also enables Spellstutter Sprite and with Aether Vial in play effectively means we are running 8 counterspell Faeries to act as both more weenies to gum up the board and as removal. Keeping a hand with a Mariner and a Faerie is extremely beneficial to us as a result, since it gives us two counterspells that help us build party.



Normally, not having a lot of spells for Jace, Vryn's Prodigy to recycle might be seen as a bad thing, but in this case it's an excellent opportunity to preemptively dump a weenie or two for Thwart the Grave later on, or even bin Thwart the Grave itself if you know it's not going to be useful right now. Should Jace actually flip, he can still help gum things up with his +1 to help his fellow partygoers rush in and chip down the opponent.