What can you do now? Necro is gone, and you are forced to sit on your Donates and Illusions hoping to pull of some new variation of the Trix combo. Get over it. The dream is dead.

Sure I know about using Diabolic Intent on a Rector, blah, blah, blah. Turn a nice two-card combo into a four-card combom and... Well, it will probably suck. Feel free to keep trying, though.

So - what do you do with your Donates, now that it is back to being the crap that WOTC intended it to be?

Exactly: Thought Lash.

Thought Lash
Color=Blue
Type=Enchantment
Cost=2UU
AL(R2)
Text(AL+errata): Cumulative Upkeep - Remove the top card of your library from the game. If you don't pay the cumulative upkeep, remove your library from the game. ; Remove the top card of your library from the game: Prevent the next 1 damage that would be dealt to you this turn. [Oracle 99/07/23]

Hmmmm... Suck-O-licious! Okay, so how to bend Thought Lash (since "break" would be a bit too much to hope for). Obviously the only thing to do is to Donate it to your opponent once the upkeep is nice and high.

This card begs us to play with a rather large and redundant deck so that we can actually use its beneficial abilities of keeping us immune from damage at the measly cost of some cards from our deck. Heck, cards in our DECK don't hardly help at all. Who cares about those? So first off, we need some standard control elements to help keep us alive until we can burden our hapless opponent with Thought Lash's wondrous effects. So aside from:

4x Thought Lash
4x Donate

We need to add:
4x Wrath of God
4x Swords to Plowshares
4x Glacial Wall
4x Wall of Air

Okay, so now we have the "combo" and we have some protection. Hmmm... What is to keep our opponent from just Disenchanting the Thought Lash once they get it? Ah, Counterspells are a wonderful answer to that!

4x Counterspell
4x Force of Will
4x Misdirection

Okay, that ought to be enough to keep Thought Lash in play. We really don't need to worry too much about creatures or burn, since we have the Wraths and Walls and can use Thought Lash to prevent the damage from burn and the odd creature that does live long enough to try and hurt us.

Great - things are cooking now! So now we just need to find the Thought Lash. Luckily, Blue is good at this sort of thing:

4x Frantic Search
4x Brainstorm
4x Intuition
4x Fact or Fiction

Whew, that ought a do it! Now we can find the Donates and the Thought Lashes, no worries. So far, we are at a tidy 52 cards. Seems about right. Time to add some mana sources and off to terrorize your local Extended events.

4x Marble Diamond
4x Sky Diamond
4x Adarkar Wastes
4x Tundra
23x Islands
10x Plains

That should be about right, giving us a slim 101 cards. Fantastic! What more could you ask for in a deck? Hardly any deck has anti-decking technology in them aside from Counterspells or trying to kill you before you can do anything about it, so this is definitely a metagame deck. Sligh is going to burn itself out before it can kill you with Incinerates and Scrolls - I mean, we have over a hundred life from the get-go (twenty life plus 101 cards), and we'll deck 'em way before they can kill us. Counterspell decks might be a bit of an issue, but we are packing twelve counters and several ways to deal with Morphling, like Wrath, so I think we are okay there, although it's totally a tough matchup. You may want to keep some Gainsays in the sideboard.

Thanks for reading.
David P.