[C20] Nikara, Lair Scavenger & Yannik Scavenging Sentinel

It took me a moment to see it but this pair is probably the most powerful abzan general option.

With a free sac outlet out you can loop Yannik with any Fiend Hunter type effect. With a Blood Artist out you can drain your opponents out. With Nikara out you can draw through your library till you're out of life.

This isn't a super-broken combo. You have to find a sac outlet and a Fiend Hunter effect just to get it going, and it still needs a payoff to close the game out. It all costs quite a bit of mana. What makes this strong is that there's already a very powerful Abzan Graveyard Combo deck. You know the one - sac outlets like Viscera Seer and Carrion Feeder, ETB creatures like Karmic Guide, Reveillark, tons of tutors, and in the more powerful versions combo lines involving Boonweaver Giant/Pattern of Rebirth or Protean Hulk. It's a deck with tons of combo pieces that fit together in a ton of different configurations. Now one of those pieces is sitting in the command zone.

Yannik + a sac outlet loops with (off the top of my head) Fiend Hunter, Karmic Guide, Reveillark, Faceless Butcher, Sun Titan + Animate Dead/Dance of the Dead/Necromancy, and probably some other stuff.

Yannik still costs 4. This is all very clunky and the deck has much better lines whether it's the Boonweaver or Protean Hulk versions, but having a viable plan B in the command zone is still powerful.

This doesn't make the Abzan Graveyard Combo deck a cedh powerhouse. This still gets shit on both by Flash Hulk and all the decks built to fight Flash Hulk. It can't interact with the stack and it's super vulnerable to hate. But it is a notable step up in power for a deck that's been around for a long time. It'll be weird to see someone other than Karador at the helm.

/r/EDH Thread