Daily Digest: Pure. Brilliance.

Jace’s Sanctum is the key card in the deck, as Muller notes in a deck tech you can find here. Jace’s Sanctum lets you dig quickly through your deck, and all the key combos come online two turns faster. Multiple Sanctums just make things that much more degenerate, so you do not have to worry about drawing too many of them. Just start doing even more broken things.

Broken things like Part the Waterveil into Day’s Undoing, thus allowing you first crack at playing your sweet new cards.

Or maybe you want to cast Engulf the Shores into Day’s Undoing so your opponent has to shuffle all their creatures back into their deck and rebuild with a random seven, which is probably filled with useless removal spells.

Of course, you’re gaining plenty of life during this time from a card you had to buy four copies of because you proxied on the back of every copy you’ve ever owned: Prism Ring. If not for this deck, I would’ve forgotten that Prism Ring was even a card. How do you come up with this stuff? This is some Good Will Hunting-level genius going on, albeit without the apples and emotional torment. We’ll call that a wash.

When I first looked the deck over, I stared at it for three minutes before asking, “How does it win?” Since Prison decks don’t win in traditional ways, you don’t really need a traditional win condition. The single copy of Rise from the Tides alongside the awaken mode of Part the Waterveil is enough, because your opponent’s entire deck is rendered obsolete by the time you get around to actually ending their misery, which you’re loath to do because you’re having too much fun casting all your sweet spells.

The sideboard has a nice set of creatures to bring in once your opponent quickly brings out all their removal spells because they’ve been angrily staring at four Languish in their hand for twenty minutes. Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy is great in any slow matchup like W/B Control, while Thing in the Ice gives you a great threat against Ramp and another sweeper effect against creature decks. Some counterspells give you a minimal amount of interaction, especially against cards that attack Jace’s Sanctum, and that’s about all you need, because if things go according to plan, all your opponent’s cards will suck.

However, as appealing as this all sounds, keep in mind that it may come with a “geniuses only” disclaimer attached. You’ve been warned.