Today I want to try a new brew I’m working on that takes the elements I like most from my R/W Tokens deck and combines them with some of the more powerful green cards in the format. My goal is to increase the overall power level of the deck while improving its positioning against Hornet Queen and Doomwake Giant.
I’ve loved Heliod’s Pilgrim for Chained to the Rocks, and I realized that playing a single Nylea’s Presence to find with Heliod’s Pilgrim can allow me to have even more access to “Mountain” than my R/W deck had, and my Pilgrim never has to find a card I can’t cast. Splashing Chained to the Rocks and having access to lots of copies of it because of having four tutors allows me to exploit the synergy between Eidolon of Blossoms and Chained to the Rocks–the efficiency of Chained to the Rocks forgives the inefficiency of a four mana 2/2, while giving me a lot of cheap enchantments to “go off” with.
Fetchlands maximize my access to Mountain while minimizing my lands that enter the battlefield tapped, minimizing the amount of mana that I waste each game on tapped lands, allowing me to play more inefficient cards that generate card advantage. This also gives me access to a huge number of untapped green sources on turn 1 to maximize the strength of Elvish Mystic.
The other elements of the R/W deck that I’ve preserved are Wingmate Roc in a deck full of cheaper creatures and most of the sideboard, particularly Chandra, Pyromaster, Glare of Heresy, and Erase.
Because I’m not playing Stoke the Flames, I’ve included Murderous Cut and Sarkhan, the Dragonspeaker as outs to Stormbreath Dragon.
My decklist for today:
Creatures (28)
- 4 Elvish Mystic
- 4 Sylvan Caryatid
- 4 Courser of Kruphix
- 4 Eidolon of Blossoms
- 1 Doomwake Giant
- 4 Heliod's Pilgrim
- 4 Wingmate Roc
- 3 Ashcloud Phoenix
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (23)
Spells (7)
Sideboard
Round 1
Round 2
Round 3
Round 4
Overall, I’m pretty happy with the deck as a start. I think it might be a little too clunky–I might want more cheap removal, like Lightning Strike, and while the numbers on cards that give me access to each source of mana that I need work out well, the fact that almost all of my lands only actually tap for one color of mana means that I often have to choose not to be able to cast some portion of my spells. Sylvan Caryatid fixes everything, but I’m likely leaning too heavily on it. I can still have access to plenty of Mountains while playing fewer fetches like Windswept Heath and a few more duals. This makes Elvish Mystic a little more awkward, but there’s some room to do that here because I have so many untapped lands at the moment.