Everyone hates getting Blood Mooned. Conversely, most people love Blood Mooning their opponent. It’s comforting to know that your opponent has zero castable cards in their hand and you get to play your cards with abandon while they are forced to watch impotently from the sidelines.
Playing actual games of Magic is overrated. Winning is not. And locking your opponent out of the game on turn 2 is going to win a lot of games. This deck does that more often than any I’ve seen while still retaining a strong backup plan for when things go awry and your opponent has basic lands (the nerve of some people) or your draw isn’t perfect (we all know how unlucky you are).
And the formula is quite simple: “Mana creature on turn 1. Blood Moon or Eldritch Evolution your mana creature into Magus of the Moon on turn 2.” Eldritch Evolution is a functional Blood Moon here, thus greatly increasing the consistency of landing the lock piece on time. Other decks trying to do this may have to run four copies of the subpar Magus of the Moon, but you get to cut it to one while having your virtual copies be among the best cards in your deck in any situation, thus greatly decreasing the opportunity cost of building your deck around such a narrow but powerful plan.
And the best part is that, despite being a three-color deck, your mana creatures insulate you from your own Moon effects, thus letting you break the natural symmetry of the card without limiting yourself to mono-red, which would necessitate a huge sacrifice in the power level of your surrounding cards.
In fact, the rest of the deck looks like a typical Kiki-Evolution deck, complete with the Chords of Calling and infinite Restoration Angels. The one concession made to the prison plan is the singleton Avalanche Riders, allowing you to shut the door on your opponent by killing a basic land and potentially rebuying the effect with a Restoration Angel. Pro tip: Cast your Restoration Angel on your upkeep with the echo trigger on the stack. Then immediately duck to avoid your opponent’s flurry of punches brought on from their blinding rage.
After all, you’re the one serving up a heaping pile of Fiery Justice on their mana creatures in case they were hoping to, you know, do something of consequence. You’re the good guy fighting the good fight, so how dare they get upset!
The designer went a bit overboard with the toolbox here, filling their sideboard with narrow singletons, so feel free to cut down some of the less-needed ones for your expected metagame for more powerful sideboard options. I’d also like to see the fourth Eldritch Evolution in the maindeck over the fourth Chord of Calling, but then again, I really like Blood Mooning people.
Creatures (23)
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 2 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
- 1 Avalanche Riders
- 2 Eternal Witness
- 2 Wall of Roots
- 1 Magus of the Moon
- 1 Reveillark
- 2 Noble Hierarch
- 1 Spellskite
- 2 Restoration Angel
- 3 Voice of Resurgence
- 1 Pia and Kiran Nalaar
- 1 Selfless Spirit
Lands (23)
Spells (14)
Sideboard
