Cycling/Zenith Flare

Ok, it's not a Theros deck (though a lucky second copy of Klothys, God of Destiny, has made my Gruul Aggro/Midrange deck better) but I decided to invest a couple wildcards in making a Cycling deck from Ikoria - I figure this represents the efforts of the humans on Ikoria to survive the monsters attacking them, so it seemed only fair.

I've got a... Mardu? Mardu, W/B/R deck, which I'm going to call Savai because I know Ikoria better than Tarkir. I burned one rare wildcard to get a second Savai Triome, so I now have at least two of each (I'm actually thinking it might be a good idea now to rip off the bandaid and get another copy of all the shocklands now, as I'm sure those will continue to be useful forever - they seem to reprint them just often enough to keep them in Standard) though having made the deck, I'm beginning to wonder if I should just go full Boros and drop the Black cards from the deck.

The basic way it works is this: you get out a few cheap creatures that have things that trigger when you cycle a card; Drannith Healer and Drannith Stinger are both good examples. Basically, there are a bunch of 1-2 cost creatures you can get out there to cause every time you cycle to do a bunch of useful effects.

The key is that you want to burn through as much of your deck as you can, dropping cycling cards in your graveyard. Then, you've got four copies of Zenith Flare in your deck. This does X damage and heals you for X, where X is the number of cycling cards in your graveyard.

So if you can get, say, ten of them in there, you can blast them for half their starting health and heal yourself up for a massive amount. I won recently by doing back-to-back Zenith Flares at X=10 when the opponent had 17 life.

It's definitely weak to graveyard removal (beware Ashiok) and while the Drannith Healers (and if you manage to give a Stinger Lifelink) can buy you time, you can get overwhelmed by aggressive decks. You'll also want to make sure you're getting land out consistently, as even with a cycling cost of 1, you'll want as much mana available to you as possible.