I had a shadow deck loosely based on that method. There was:

• an artifact that decreased cycling costs by 2
• an artifact that let mana be played untapped
• a bunch of monsters with a cycle cost of 2 where the cycle benefit was adding a mana
• a spell to search your deck for mana for each creature in your grave
• and one dealing X/X damage per shadow/clear mana tapped.

It was about the only thing I found that could reliably beat a sliver deck, but if you didn’t get the artifacts you were screwed.