Devotion To Everything: Building Nykthos Decks In Every Color

Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx is one of the last cards I still believe should be banned in Pioneer.  I believe the opportunity cost is too low and that lands that tap for more than one mana, both in general and particularly in this specific case, are too strong.  In the meantime, I’ve been practicing what I preach and playing with it as much as I can.

The results? Honestly, they kind of justify leaving it in the format if possible. 

While I think the card is too strong, it creates powerful incentives to do different things from what you otherwise would, and enables some awesome decks that definitely couldn’t exist without it.  From a fun and diversity standpoint, which I suppose largely overlap and as the only metric that really matters, maybe Nykthos adds more than it takes away. So, here’s an investigation into Pioneer: Are these decks sweet enough to justify keeping Nykthos around? Are any of them so powerful they require its banning? Let’s find out.

White Devotion

The strength of white as a color to build devotion to is that it’s very easy to find sticky white pips.  Specifically, White has a lot of strong enchantments and a lot of strong cards in general that cost multiple white mana.  This means most decks won’t be able to stop your Nykthos from building up to generate a lot of mana over time.

This is my current build of White Devotion.  Thraben Inspector and Knight of the White Orchid are the two best enablers and I believe both are essentially required in any attempt to play a white Nykthos deck.  Every Nykthos deck benefits from having good mana sinks, and I believe Mastery of the Unseen is the best one in White, but there are other options, like Dawn of Hope.  The next most important card in my mind has been Arcanist’s Owl. In this deck, the owl finds another spell over 90% of the time, and having a card that adds four devotion for Nykthos is incredible.  This doesn’t just replace itself, it finds your important cards, and while a 3/3 flyer for four mana is nothing to get excited about on it’s own, it’s a more than respectable body considering that it also gives you these things.

Arcanist’s Owl is absolutely strong enough to build around here, which you want to do anyway because enchantments are good with Nykthos.  In this deck, Arcanist’s Owl hits every spell except for Thraben Inspector and Knight of the White Orchid. You don’t have to push it that far, but I didn’t feel like I was sacrificing much to do that.  Always Watching looks weird in a deck with so few creatures, but plays very well here because Mastery of the Unseen makes nontoken creatures, and those creatures are small enough to be low-impact by themselves, but when you turn a bunch of 2/2s into 3/3 vigilance creatures, that’s a huge upgrade.  It also allows you to keep manifested Walking Ballistas on the battlefield after turning them face up, so that you can then add counters to them.

Walking Ballista is clearly horrible at enabling Nykthos, but great at benefiting from Nykthos.  Its inclusion should be familiar from Green Devotion decks we’ve seen.

I’m leaning heavily on Stasis Snare rather than cheaper options like Seal Away because I think it’s worth paying an extra mana for an extra white symbol (especially since you also remove the tapped creature restriction compared to Seal Away).

Overwhelming Splendor is a weird card to see in a Constructed deck, but I’ve been really impressed.  You’ll have enough mana to cast it in basically any game where you have Nykthos, and it’s very difficult for most decks to beat.  I’m closer to adding a second copy than removing the first, if I were to change this deck.

Gideon’s Intervention is worse against permanents than Cast Out, Quarantine Field, or Ixalan’s Binding, all of which could reasonably replace it, but it’s this deck’s best tool against combo decks, and I’ve had an opponent who was playing Lotus Field Combo concede on the spot to Gideon’s Intervention on Granted.

I’m splashing blue because I think the cost to doing so is very low and Detention Sphere is better than Banishing Light, and I think Dovin’s Veto is a very high-impact sideboard card for this strategy, but you could easily play Mono-White or splash any other color instead.

Overall, this deck has been able to do some impressive things in a strategic space that’s fairly similar to Golgari Field, weirdly enough.  It has a lot of raw power and a reasonable curve, plus enough answers to keep up with aggro decks. It can get run over, but it plays very well against opposing midrange decks, where it tends to go far over the top of them fairly easily.  It can struggle against combo decks, yet has some very powerful tools to beat them if it draws them. Mastery of the Unseen can function similarly to Field of the Dead against control decks, but it’s not quite as effective because it’s harder to resolve, easier to answer, and often slower to take over.

Blue Devotion

Players have been playing Blue Devotion decks inspired by the old Standard Thassa decks, but I generally haven’t seen people including Nykthos, which I think is a mistake.

This deck is very similar to a deck that’s shown up on Magic Online, but I’m not impressed by Thassa, God of the Sea, and I think Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx allows the deck to make great use of Gadwick, the Wizened and Cyclonic Rift at very low opportunity cost; both of these cards are totally serviceable without Nykthos, but game-ending with Nykthos.  Spectral Sailor is another nice nod to Nykthos that place particularly well when sideboarding in a bunch of counterspells and playing more of a flash/control game, which is why I have extra copies in the sideboard, though I could see moving those to the maindeck, replacing Cloudfin Raptor, to have even more countermagic in the sideboard to support this transformation.

This deck is interesting in that it’s a combination of the two different successful Standard Mono-Blue decks that have existed during the history of Pioneer-legal sets.  Players have been using Cloudfin Raptor, Master of Waves, and Thassa from the Theros Standard deck, but I think the payoff for Thassa isn’t worth playing a three-drop that only gives a single devotion when there are so many good options that give three devotion instead, and I think Cyclonic Rift isn’t getting the credit it deserves.

I think this deck is pretty close to being “solved” in that I think it’s basically playing the best options available at every spot in its curve, and the most interesting remaining questions have more to do with the right mix of creatures and spells and what the ideal curve is more than “What’s the best/second-best one-, two-, or three-mana creature we can play?”

Black Devotion

Early on in my exploration of Black Devotion, I overrated the impact of Castle Locthwain and moved too far away from Underworld Connections as a result.  After playing with Black Devotion, I believe it should be approached first and foremost as an Underworld Connections deck.

This Mono-Black Devotion deck is a midrange deck that’s very reminiscent of the Theros Standard Black Devotion deck, but with a substantially upgraded creature base (despite Pack Rat’s notoriety at the time).  Thoughtseize and Fatal Push are the best one-mana interactive spells in the format, and they do a great job of allowing you to trade resources to keep the game small so that Underworld Connections can take over.  And while Underworld Connections and Gray Merchant of Asphodel continues to be strong combo even into Pioneer, it has nothing on Bolas’s Citadel with Gray Merchant.

I haven’t been playing with Knight of the Ebon Legion, but I believe there are enough combo decks that you really want to be a little better at applying pressure, and Knight of the Ebon Legion is a great mana sink for Nykthos. The deck also benefits greatly from having another cheap permanent to get out ahead to take further advantage of Underworld Connections and Nykthos.

I like playing this deck largely because Gonti, Lord of Luxury is my all-time favorite card to play with, but the deck is also just very powerful, and Underworld Connections really doesn’t get the respect it deserves.

Red Devotion

Experimental Frenzy, red’s take on Underworld Connections, has the potential to get far more explosive with Nykthos, and red happens to generate devotion symbols very well.  That said, there are a lot of interesting tensions in building Red Devotion. How many spells do you want? Red decks typically use a lot of burn spells, but those contribute nothing to your devotion count.  How aggressive do you want to be?

Monastery Swiftspear wants noncreature spells, but a lot of the best sources of devotion are creatures, so it’s difficult to balance.  Here, I’m trying to take advantage of Runaway Steam-Kin with Experimental Frenzy and generally straddling roles to try to play an all-good-cards approach with the narrower but higher-impact good devotion enablers like Boros Reckoner, which is good against creatures and red decks, and Eidolon of the Great Revel, which is good against spells and slow decks in the sideboard.

Another way to take this deck is to overload on planeswalkers:

Oath of Chandra and Chandra’s Regulator offer fairly cheap and relatively sticky devotion symbols, and Chandras offer cascading card advantage.  You lose the explosiveness of Experimental Frenzy, but the planeswalkers offer a good amount of extra utility and avoid Experimental Frenzy’s drawback.

I have less personal experience with Red Devotion than the other colors.  It looks to me like there’s something here, but I’m not sure what the best way to push it is.  I’ve really only scratched the surface here:

I’m not even sure exactly how this plays out, but I have a feeling that Garna + Skirk Prospector + Goblin Warchief + Dark-Dweller Oracle can lead to crazy turns somehow, and Nykthos can really only help.

Green Devotion

Green Devotion is by far the most explored of the Nykthos archetypes, and at the moment, Gerry’s take seems to be coming out on top.

Emma Handy had a lot of success with this deck in Magic Online PTQs and advocated replacing Scavenging Ooze with Lovestruck Beast, which sounds like a good change to me.  I like most of what’s going on in this deck, but I don’t really understand completely giving up on Vivien, Arkbow Ranger, which has basically impressed me everywhere I’ve seen it played.  My first step would probably just be to play it over both Scavenging Ooze and Lovestruck Beast in those two slots in the maindeck. Yes, it’s not ideal to replace a two- or three-mana card with a four-mana card, but I think this deck’s curve can handle it and I just can’t get behind abandoning Vivien at this point.

Voracious Hydra has also been great for me, but I can understand Wicked Wolf being a better way to fill that role in this deck.

For the most part, I think this looks like a great direction for Green Devotion, and it also highlights, as seen earlier in my White Devotion deck, that in general, these strategies are perfectly capable of supporting a splash if it adds strong enough cards.

Structurally, every Nykthos deck is a midrange deck that’s trying to go over other midrange decks, in that Nykthos asks you to play to the battlefield but offers an overwhelming mana advantage if you do so. As such, it’s reasonable to directly compare them to each other, but despite playing them, I really can’t tell which is best, as every color offers unique strengths.