Author: Brandon Cuppoletti

A lot of people know about this deck. They know that it is one of the best and most popular standard decks in this meta and a lot of Pro’s are playing it and calling it the best deck. But what a lot of people don’t know is, where it came from and who is responsible for breaking the Standard format and (depending on your perspective) made it more fun/satisfying or ruined it.

And to those people I say, “you’re welcome! and/or #SorryNotSorry”

That’s right, it was me…Brandon/Allfunlover! (Who’s that?)

This was an early draft I posted to share easily with my friends and teammates. A lot has changed since then but the core engine has remained the same.

I’d like to tell you the story of what I consider my greatest deck (so far) and then some tips on how to play with it as well as against it. If you’re just here for the strategy then feel free to skip to it.

The Origin

People that know me know that there is a reason that I am the ‘Limited Expert’ on the Team. I am not known for my Constructed performance. However, the people that know me well know that the reason that I almost exclusively play Limited is because of my love of deck-building.

And every so often, I get in the mood to brew with 75 cards…

It all started with one weird M20 Mythic (not even a good limited card).

One night in Late July, this card was really inspiring me and I decided to brew. At first it was a bunch of fair, midrange decks. I had a couple of different builds that showed promise. In those builds Mox Amber was really good. I started playing four copies because they would ramp me and later I could exile them to Kethis to cast my sweet legends from the graveyard. Oh how times have changed! I realized early on that Mox Amber could be cast from the graveyard as a lotus petal which I would do occasionally for a boost in mana but it was too fair. But what if it wasn’t so fair?

I started writing down more ideas and that’s when I remembered the missing link from Dominaria that basically no one remembered, Diligent Excavator!

For those of you that are not in the know, this is your core engine. With these three cards and a bunch of legends, you too can make your deck disappear! Jace, Wielder of Mysteries was a natural fit after that. After beating up on Sparky (MTGA’s Practice Mode Bot) to see if it worked, I knew this deck was extremely powerful. I couldn’t wait to jump into the Ranked Queues. I just kept on winning, and winning some more. At the end of the night, I uploaded this list and sent it to all my friends and teammates.

By the next day, I had some friends that were interested and one friend, Bro_Cobra, that quickly fell in love with the deck on his Twitch stream. Once he started, he couldn’t put the deck down, we tried out a few different cards and ideas. For example, he tried Glowspore Shaman but I never liked it or what it did to your manabase. After a couple of days Bro_Cobra was climbing back to Mythic playing only this deck. That’s when I proposed trying out Lazav, the Multifarious. We collaborated on the manabase and sideboard, and that’s when the deck leveled up!

Lazav added a new dimension to the deck; more ways to ramp to four with Mox Amber, and a whole lot more resiliency! Bro_Cobra kept playing the deck and winning even more with it. Soon he was in up into Mythic top 50-100 and that’s when he played Stanislav Cifka. After that, Cifka started to play the deck too and really popularized it when he and his team Qualified for the Arena Mythic Championship playing the deck.

The Strategy

A lot of people don’t know this but this deck isn’t just a simple combo deck. It is surprisingly robust, resilient, and complicated. This deck is very good at being unfair and you can pretty easily mill yourself out and win with Jace, Wielder of Mysteries or mill your opponent to death. However, that is simply Plan A and you don’t win all of your games that way.

These are your plans to victory:

• Plan A: Mill yourself and/or your opponent
• Plan B: Card advantage- you wouldn’t expect this at first glance but this deck can grind extremely well.
• Plan C: Burn them out (Surprise!)

Plan A: Mill

The deck is capable of winning very quickly this way. It is even possible to win turn three! It can also win pretty consistently on turn four or five using this plan. What you need to win this way is the Trinity (Diligent Excavator, Kethis, the Hidden Hand, and Mox Amber).

You want to mill yourself using these three and/or Ashiok, Dream Render. Using Kethis’ activated ability, you play your Mox Ambers and net one mana per mox for each Kethis activation. Note: You will need to activate Kethis again to be able to cast legends put into your graveyard since the last activation. If you’re playing the deck in paper, set aside all the cards that go to your graveyard after each activation of Kethis. Those cards can’t be cast until the next activation.

You always want to target yourself with Diligent Excavator until you’re ready to win. It’s much easier to win with Jace, Wielder of Mysteries but if that is not an option, you boarded out Jace, or your goal is to mill your opponent–you still want to mill yourself until you have multiple Diligent Excavators and multiple Mox Ambers. I start to do the math once I’m getting 3-4 Diligent Excavator triggers per Kethis activation. One easy way to do this math is to count up the number of legendary, non-moxen cards in your graveyard and you have half that many activations of Kethis to get there multiplied by two times the amount of Diligent Excavator triggers you’re getting per Kethis activation. If that number is greater than or equal to the number of cards remaining in your opponent’s library (and they’re not playing Nexus of Fate) you win!

That’s the basics of your main game plan. The Trinity is the most important part, that’s your engine. The next most important card in many match-ups is actually Teferi, Time Raveler. Most of the time he is all the disruption that you need and when you have him in play, you know your opponent can’t interact. He is the ultimate counter bait because if they don’t counter him, they’re not countering anything the rest of the turn. Some not so common but important play patterns with Teferi are bouncing Fblthp, the Lost for two cards, bouncing Oath of Kaya for Lightning Helixs, and when you have the trinity, you can use Teferi to bounce Mox Amber and gain a card and two Excavator triggers for the investment of net one mana.

You really only need the Trinity to start going off, but even then the deck has ways to find/recover the missing pieces and Ashiok, Dream Render can be a reasonable substitute for Diligent Excavator. The rest of the deck mostly plays support. You have cards like Sorin, Vengeful Bloodlord, Tamiyo, Collector of Tales, Lazav, the Multifarious[/c], and Teshar, Ancestor’s Apostle to get back your missing pieces. Once you assemble the Trinity and are milling yourself for 4-6 each Kethis activation, it is almost impossible not to be able to put your whole deck into the graveyard and either win the Jace, or mill your opponent.

Plan B: Card advantage/attrition- the ‘fair’ game

That’s right, the deck can pretty easily win playing normal, fair Magic. The deck has a lot of card advantage built in. The most important card for winning a ‘fair’ game is Kethis. If your opponent is trying to stop you with counterspells when you have Kethis, you can cast Teferi, Time Raveler until it sticks. if you have Teferi, you can do anything you want on your turn and they can’t interact anymore. I often will play Teferi first to force interaction before I play my engine or other important cards.

You have other cards as well that are even better for running your opponent out of answers. A lot of the fair games I win are simply by playing the ‘Protect the Kethis’ game. Essentially. if you have Kethis and a graveyard, it’s very hard to lose to anyone. If you have Kethis and at least one way to get back a Kethis such as Sorin, Vengeful Bloodlord, Tamiyo, Collector of Tales, Lazav, the Multifarious, and Teshar, Ancestor’s Apostle it makes it very hard for your opponent to stop you especially with the Planeswalkers. They need to have multiple pieces of interaction to beat that board and also each Kethis and each thing that can get you back a Kethis will take them multiple cards to properly disrupt as well.

Many lists I have seen do not play Sorin, Vengeful Bloodlord and I believe that is a mistake. I would always play at least one copy in the 75. The reason is that he is so good in a fair game and he also gets you any missing creature from your graveyard for only 3-4 mana and 2-4 loyalty. His passive makes you almost impossible to burn out or race. His +2 is great for harassing planeswalkers, especially Teferi and Narset and others that have a habit of dropping to one loyalty.

Depending on the match-up as well, Oath of Kaya goes a long way towards winning a fair game too. It’s very powerful against decks that are attacking your life total directly but also it punishes them and can put them in a bad spot if they try to interact with your planeswalkers by attacking. Which leads me to the secret third win condition….

Plan C: Burn Them Out

This doesn’t come up much but is possible with Oath of Kaya. Many games your opponent takes a lot of damage from attacking your planeswalkers when you have it. They may not even know that Oath can target players but it definitely can, and it wins games that way sometimes. It’s important to know that if you have two or more Oaths and Kethis, each activation of Kethis can get you at least one WB Lightning Helix per activation minus one mana for each Mox. It doesn’t take many of those to win. This plan can also be effective to win against a deck with Nexus of Fate without Jace, because you simply cannot mill those decks out.

Lazav

I also want to talk in depth about the card that leveled up the deck Lazav, the Multifarious

He adds a lot or resilience and utility. Here are some important things you might not know about how he works and also some tricks.

• When you activate his ability he has all the characteristics of the creature you chose except that he keeps his name and his legendary supertype. This means a few key things:
• Mox Amber will only see the colors that he becomes. It doesn’t matter if that creature is not Legendary.
• Even if he is copying a non-legendary creature you can still use him to cast a Legendary Sorcery such as your Urza’s Ruinous Blast and he will never get exiled by it. It also means that he can never be targeted with Cast Down.
• With Shalai, Voice of Plenty, you can copy her to give your other permanents hexproof at instant speed. This can importantly stop burn, or other interaction.
• Because he keeps his name it is possible to effectively have multiple copies of the same Legendary creature he copies. Which leads me to the trickiest plays with our friend Lazav…
• It is possible to win with Lazav and the entire Trinity in the graveyard and enough mana. To do this, copy Kethis, the Hidden Hand with his ability. Activate the Kethis ability the Lazav now has and play Kethis. Then you can copy Diligent Excavator with Lazav and suddenly you can start going off depending on how full your graveyard is.

The Deck Now

Granted, I haven’t played this deck since it was just my team playing it but this is close to what I would be playing now.

The deck is everywhere now. The biggest changes that I would make now is to play 4 Lazavs and to add Ashioks to the maindeck. Ashioks help your main plan and also are one of your best cards against the Scapeshift deck and the mirror which are both very popular. You never exile your own graveyard with Ashiok, Dream Renderso you basically always want to target yourself with the mill. With this meta, I don’t think Urza’s Ruinous Blast does enough to be in the maindeck. Also, I haven’t tested it but I prefer my manabase without temples because I think it’s better to have all of your lands enter the battlefield untapped or at least have the potential to do so.

Playing against the Deck

Whether you’re playing against the mirror or just playing against the deck, the most important card your opponent has is Kethis. It’s the first card I would always name for Unmoored Ego. I have heard an argument for naming Mox Amber but I simply don’t agree with that. Losing mox makes you lose mana when you’re going off but you are still very capable of winning without it. Without Mox, the deck is still a very good midrange deck. Without Kethis, the deck is medium at best. You can’t combo off and your fair game is fairly poor.

In my opinion, the best ways to disrupt this deck is fighting Kethis with cards like Unmoored Ego or fighting threats with exile removal. For example, Legion’s End can be very annoying too. It only hits Lazav, the Multifarious or Diligent Excavator but it also hits any copies that you have found also. Ashiok, Dream Render is also pretty good at disrupting the deck’s plan and it can help your game in the mirror by milling yourself too. I don’t recommend trying to fight this deck with cards like Leyline of the Void, Sorcerous Spyglass, or any other permanent that Teferi, Time Raveler can interact with, even temporarily.

Sometimes your mana can be your greatest enemy. You’re four colors and you have no basic lands. Because of that, you can be susceptible to cards like Assassin’s Trophy and Field of Ruin. I think most lists, including mine, are not building around that weakness right now so it’s still a pretty good avenue of attack and you may want to consider adding a basic to the 75 because of that. I would recommend basic Island if that’s the way you want to go.

Overall

I’m very proud of the deck and what it has become. It’s a real treat, very fun to play, and it plays very differently than any other deck in Standard. I hope that you at least learned something. My hope is that now, armed with my knowledge, you are ready to play with and/or against the deck. Let me know your thoughts.

Happy Comboing!

–Brandon aka Twitch Allfunlover or @allfunlover1