Breaking Mox Amber

Is Mox Amber broken? Unplayable? Merely good?

I wanted to find out. My journey to find the truth went deep. You’ve been
warned.

Moxes tend to be their most powerful when you’re accelerating to bigger
spells sooner than your opponents. Ramping from two mana to four mana tends
to be more powerful than ramping from four to six. Getting an early mana
advantage tends to turn into a tempo advantage, which will snowball. A
small amount of acceleration later is typically less impactful.

My descent into madness started with a single card.

From there, I found Unclaimed Territory. A cursory glance revealed that
there are far more playable Humans than I initially thought.

The impetus for this deck was looking for the best things to accelerate
into, deciding it was Hazoret the Fervent, and then looking for ways to add
redundancy. Llanowar Elves fit the bill and is even the same color as
Oviya. From there, it was all about picking the best legendary Humans and
seeing that they all worked pretty well with Appeal, which gave redundancy
to Hazoret as a way to close the game.

Metallic Mimic helps the Human subtheme while also, alongside Bomat Courier
and Mox Amber, makes Spire of Industry reliable. Once I figured out the
various interactions I wanted to build around, the deck basically built
itself.

Naya Legends

Gerry Thompson

Test deck on 05-02-2018

Standard

Creatures (31)

Lands (21)

Spells (8)

4 Appeal
4 Mox Amber

Sideboard

This deck isn’t perfect. However, I went 4-1 in both of my first two
leagues, so there’s clearly some promise. Unfortunately, others haven’t
been able to replicate my success. They share tales of drawing too many
copies of the same legendary cards or having games with Turn 3 Lyra
Dawnbringer and wildly unplayable hands in the next.

Decks like these tend to not be for the faint of heart. Some players, pros
even, can’t handle the swings. Regardless, this deck is capable of some of
the most broken openings in current Standard. Attacking with Hazoret on
Turn 3 is not out of the question, nor are Turn 4 kills.

Six untapped green sources for potential Turn 1 Llanowar Elves is low, but
you have a lot of different backdoor outs, including those involving Turn 1
Oviya and Mox Amber (which gives you four mana on Turn 2!) and even just
Mox Amber and Spire of Industry. Overall, it’s not that bad. There are a
non-zero amount of games where you must name Elf with Unclaimed Territory
though, and that doesn’t feel great.

There are consistency issues, but any time that’s the case, you should be
asking yourself if the juice is worth the squeeze, and in this case, it
most certainly is. Decks like Affinity and Tempered Steel typically
suffered from the same sort of wildly variant strength of opening hands,
but that hasn’t stopped them from performing well. The secret is that you
should be trying to use your broken draws to end the game as soon as
possible before you get punished by something like drawing too many copies
of redundant legends.

If the Pro Tour were tomorrow, I would register something similar, although
there are a few problems I’d like to fix. For starters, Metallic Mimic
isn’t great. Some have suggested Scrapheap Scrounger or trying to make
Heart of Kiran work, either of which I’m fine with.

Another thing I’d like to address are many boxes you need to check for the
deck to be functional, and it’s possible I should scale back on some of
them. After sideboarding, these issues are further amplified because the
sideboard cards don’t do a great job checking these boxes.

Things you must be cognizant of in deckbuilding and sideboarding:

Artifacts for Spire of Industry
Colored legendary creatures or planeswalkers for Mox Amber
Humans for Unclaimed Territory
Basic lands for checklands
Untapped green sources for Turn 1 Llanowar Elves

I’d also need to find a cohesive sideboard strategy, although that could be
as simple as staying aggressive against everyone. Maybe Tetsuko Umezawa,
Fugitive is a great splash for that reason. After sideboard, Bomat Couriers
tend to get much worse, but Tetsuko can keep them attacking.

I’ve found that against control, when you want to stay aggressive while
also sideboarding in Lifecrafter’s Bestiary, you still have a deck that
functions. Getting to bring in an artifact and keep a low mana curve has
kept the deck feeling whole, which is probably a sign that I should rebuild
things (and look for sweet artifacts).

Still, my sideboard plan against midrange decks that involved bringing in
Shalai, Voice of Reason, Lyra Dawnbringer, and some extra lands was mostly
successful. That made me think there was hope in starting the sideboard
package in the main deck.

Naturally, my adventures didn’t stop there. Once I made note of the
different engines I could be utilizing, I took turns splicing different
portions of them together.

The various engines:

Needless to say, exploring this stuff kept me fairly busy last weekend
(despite also playing in Grand Prix Columbus).

While not a particularly fruitful venture, this list did give me a glimpse
of what was possible:

Five-Color Legends

Gerry Thompson

Test deck on 05-02-2018

Standard

Creatures (29)