Geiseric, the Souleater

Written by Neil Crompton

The Fall of Marmathoa is approaching! To celebrate, I'm pleased to unveil the latest preview card. Behold... the mighty demon knight, Geiseric, the Souleater!

Needless to say, getting new toys to play with is pretty exciting for deckbuilders, and Geiseric is no exception. As soon as I saw the card, I started getting ideas for decks I'd like to try out featuring him.

With a threshold of triple Obsession, he's going to need a strong Arcanist commitment, which is fine because he has excellent synergy with a lot of different Arcanist cards. Marmathoa's newest demon knight really wants to lurk in a deck full of cards that return characters to your opponent's hand.

Besides his ability to turn bounce into removal, Geiseric is also a solidly aggressive attacker in his own right. With all the Arcanist bounce effects removing the opponent's characters from the game, it should be easy for Geiseric to get into the opponent's face to deal damage. As a 3/2/3 with a numeric cost of 3, he's pretty aggressive. My first impulse is to make an aggressive Arcanist tempo deck, designed to gain incremental advantages by being more efficient than the opponent. Geiseric squeezes so much extra value out of Arcanist's traditional removal options that this could be a very competitive strategy. Quotidian Assassination, Evanesce and Quotidian Ejector would work perfectly in such a deck.

Once he starts feasting on souls, his Soul Consumption ability will make sure you keep a steady stream of bounce cards flowing, sifting through cards you don't want and finding the important cards. That means that once your deck starts doing its thing, you'll start gaining more and more momentum, until eventually your opponent is unable to keep up with you.

There are also lots of options for a more long-range control strategy featuring Geiseric. Forget and Perturb become quite obscene when Geiseric is in play, removing one of their characters from the game as well as something from their hand. Violating Anomaly is always excellent, and works twice as hard alongside Geiseric.

At the top of your curve you could use Eldridge Gosche, who can put tokens on Geiseric directly to use for drawing cards, or feed him souls by Ejecting the opponent's characters to their hand.

Another option with Geiseric is to put him in a deck featuring lots of token manipulation. Voidal Perversion and Skimping Ecto-Manipulator let Geiseric sink his demonic fangs into your deck much faster. Cards that let you put tokens on your cards also work well with Quotidian Ejector, which is already great with Geiseric. So much synergy!

I can't wait to get my hands on the new cards and start testing them out in decks! I'm keen to hear your thoughts on Geiseric on the forum, so post any ideas you have about him there.

Are there any cool combos you'd like to try with him, or any of the other Seed 3 preview cards so far? Apart from straight Arcanist decks, what else would be a good fit for Geiseric? What sort of an impact do you think he'll make on the Open Constructed format?

Bring on the Souleater!