Minthara, Merciless Soul (Blink vs Sacrifice)
I'm planning on building a somewhat budget ($50-100) commander deck with Minthara, Merciless Soul.
From what I see, any decent Proliferate card is an auto-add, since they would boost the experience counters far past Minthara's one per round trigger. Similarly, cards that help create token creatures are needed to take full advantage of the boost Minthara provides.
However, I'm having troubles deciding whether to use blink or sacrifice as the other main theme.
Blink Pros
- Every usage guarantees Minthara's trigger since you can always blink minthara herself.
- Incidentally provides more protection against board wipes
Blink Cons
- From what I see, there aren't very many blink payoffs that help Minthara develop more tokens (or at least not many that aren't mana heavy). Reverent Hoplite and similar cards exist, but not enough for me to consider it dependable.
- Blink cards can be expensive.
Sac Pros
- Tons of cheap sacrificing support in Orzhov
- Decent number of cards that require death to trigger (Blightbelly Rat, Elenda's Hierophant, Martyr for the Cause, Nested Shambler). That being said, I don't think triggering their death will be too hard, since you can defend with them.
Sac Cons
- Decreases your board state, since you lose permanents.
- Requires set up since you need a disposable creature to sac. In the case you only have Minthara out, it provides no help.
Those are the main considerations I came up with. I'm definitely leaning towards blink, since it seems more reliable to trigger Minthara. But it just seems like blink doesn't do much else, due to lack of payoffs. Maybe I'm wrong about that though.
On a side note, I was looking at the keywords: amass, mobilize, and myriad as a possible replacement/synergy to the sacrifice strategy, since mobilize and myriad both sacrifice the created tokens, therefore triggering Minthara. Theoretically, I'd like to include them since it seems cool, but not sure it'll actually be helpful. Myriad flops in 1v1, Mobilize creatures need to attack (and hopefully not be killed)(and someone online said that it wouldn't work since the LTB needs to happen before the end step?), and Amass seems synergistic with blink since there's a couple that trigger when ETB, but it supports go-tall more than go-wide. I'd love any input on this.
I'm somewhat new to magic and deck building, so any suggestions / hints would help!
Thank you!