Passing the time with Suture Preist

So... after all the initial excitement of getting the full NPH spoiler weeks earlier than usual, it's now settled into one of the most agonizingly boring spoiler seasons of recent memory. Nothing to do, but wait for the new cards to drop, I've halted all deck building operations (but not deck tuning) for now, as I can not think of any ideas that don't include or revolve around NPH cards.

Thus, my only recourse is to theorize and speculate, but with my set review all published and picked to peices, there isn't much of that to do either. One thing I have noticed about NPH is that there are a ton of cards I'm pretty excited to put into  EDH decks, and one exciting new General even, but there are few cards that inspire new 60-card decks.

I can think of one card that I am eager to build a 60-card deck around, and it's a great Multiplayer card too. Suture Priest! Oh, right I probably gave that away in the title... oh well. Suture Priest is surprisingly cool for a common, and while I can't say it's powerful until I've actually played with it, it definitely has potential to be a house.

So I'm just going to discuss some ideas for a deck built with Suture Priest in mind, and get these ideas down on paper, or screen I guess, before I forget them.

Step one is to analyze what the card actually does, so let's take a look:

Right. In essence, what this creature does is punish your opponents for playing creatures, while rewarding you for doing just that. That's a double standard, isn't it! That tells us this so-called priest isn't intrested in playing fair. "Oh, sure it's fine for ME to do that, but YOU shouldn't be allowed!" Anyway, since she's not going to play fair, we might as well embrace that element wholeheartedly and make her as unfair as we can.

So we know creatures coming into play will be a major part of this, as you need to drop creatures to gain life, and you want opponents to be dropping creatures so that they'll lose life. The beauty of it all is that you can give your opponents creatures to trigger her.

One of the first cards I thought of when I saw Suture Priest was Genesis Chamber. A nifty little two-mana artifact that gives everyone a free 1/1 Myr token when they play a creature. On one hand this give your opponents an incentive to drop dudes, but with the priest out even that free 1/1 they got will hurt them. And when you cast a creature, you'll reap double the life.

Another cool idea was to combine Suture Priest with Bitterblossom. Yeah, it's expensive and not really a "casual" card at heart, but I just like the synergy it has with the priest. Make a Fairie token at the cost of 1 life, but Suture Priest steps up to pay the tab for you. "No, dude, I got this!"

But back to Genesis Chamber for a moment... I'm still worried that giving my opponents a free 1/1 token for every man they drop might come back to bite me in the ass. Normally something like Night of Soul's Betrayal could help us get around that, but it unfortunately kills our Suture Priests too, not to mention our 1/1 Myr tokens and Fairies, etc... so I'm thinking maybe Zealous Persecution and Orzhov Pontiff could play major roles here.

Zealous Persecution has particular appeal in that it simultaneously wipes out all the 1/1s you gave away while pumping yours up to 2/2 status. Hard to beat that deal, especially at two mana. By the way, almost everything I've talked about so far is two mana. Odd.  Let's look at something that costs a little more: Massacre Wurm. If you are facing down an army of 1/1s that you foolishly helped create, Massacre Wurm can easily turn around the situation; suddenly it's your opponents facing certain doom, not you!

Since this is clearly headed in a W/B Tokens area, many of those staples could transfer over nicely:

Spectral Procession
Marsh Flitter
Cloudgoat Ranger
Grave Titan
Ajani Goldmane
Elspeth, Knight Errant

Any of these could be contenders for inclusion. I might want to run a singleton Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobyte, but only if my EDH needs are met first and I still somehow have an extra copy.

That's as far as I've got brainstorming for this deck, but it all seems a little obvious, other than my ingenious use of Genesis Chamber. I'm really hoping someone can suggest a few more outside-the-box ideas for the deck, so it's not quite so by-the-numbers. Please comment if you have some tech in mind for exploiting the Suture Preist!