This is an attempt to build an Ayli, Eternal Pilgrim deck in anticipation for her release. I had a few different ideas for her but I think I settled on the strongest and probably the most boring of them.

With her ability to exile, I decided I wanted to make an exile themed deck, as there are a ton of effects in white and black to work with. Even some of the new Eldrazi might have been taken into consideration. My problem was however, that yes I could exile my stuff and my opponents' stuff, but without being able to actually interact with the exiled stuff, I don't really get anything out of it. Yes there are some Eldrazi that return cards from exile to the opponents graveyards, but that's not what I want to be doing with it. I was hoping there would be some type of support for interacting with exile, so that my opponents' permanents are gone but my exile would be like a second graveyard and such but that doesn't seem likely to happen at this point. I feel like this deck idea is only missing those few interacting with exile cards to actually be built on that theme but oh well.

Other ideas include Cleric tribal that has been done quite a bit in WB. Could this be the best legend for it? Maybe. Cleric tribal doesn't really interest me so I haven't even looked at it yet. Kor tribal could be a thing but all the Kor that I can think of aren't very powerful, nor do any other black kor come to mind and I feel like I might as well run monowhite Kor at that point if black is only for the spells and doesn't add anything to the tribal aspect. Similarly, I felt the same way about GB Elves and didn't want to run like two black elves, the rest green, and then most of my good spells be mainly black, nor did I feel any of the GB Elf legends really synergized with elves. hence why I settled on monogreen with Ezuri.

I guess I've settled on doing a generic WB reanimation style deck. monoblack Sheoldred could reanimate stuff, but it was more of a goodstuff black deck than one that actually had a theme. I built that deck for some coworkers to play with and one of them really liked WB lifegain stuff so I picked up a handful of cards to convert it if they wanted, but I always felt that both decks would share too many cards in common to warrant being in my collection at the same time as I would need to pick up several duplicates and the decks would play rather similarly. I've been helping a friend with card suggestions for her WB Karlov deck recently and I guess that got me wanting to either build it as well or try something different, like Karlov spirit tribal or something, and that made me realize all the fun cards like Debtors Knell and Divinity of Pride that are in my collection that no longer have a home that I want to play with again. Ayli was spoiled and I love her art and her abilities are good, and at the very least, her sacrifice and lifegain lend well to a graveyard recursion style of deck. I did recently build a GB Meren of Clan Nel Toth deck that does reanimate stuff, but it seems to be too powerful, or I constantly find myself wishing I had white in the deck. Another problem I've been running into is that my decks seem to be too overpowering when I play with certain people so I feel like I need to tone this deck down, but it needs to be fun enough for me to enjoy keeping it or it will get dismantled like several other decks over the years.

For the base deck, I did copy my Sheoldred list and started slotting out cards from there.

Hokori, Dust Drinker came out.

out
tainted sigil
pyrrhic ritual

ins
recruiter of the guard
body snatcher - thought there was synergy or a combo, seems lackluster. might get replaced

outs / ins
Body Snatcher > Triskelion