The dominance of the Food decks in Standard has had a weird effect on the surrounding metagame. The dual threat of Oko, Thief of Crowns and Wicked Wolf has a suffocating effect on decks that are looking to play to the battlefield, the first punishing big creatures whilst the second punishes small ones. In turn this has allowed some deeply messed-up decks that might struggle in more conventional metagames to come forward to try to fight their hardest to thieve the Food deck’s crown. Decks like Temur Reclamation or Azorius Control, at least in the way they’re currently built, have an uphill battle ahead of them when aggressive decks are a major player. Here however we see them quietly putting up impressive results relative to their metagame share.
This isn’t really a healthy way for a metagame to be, but personally I do find it immensely fascinating, and so when I was beginning my preparation for Mythic Championship VI these bizarre outliers were, for better or worse, what I was most drawn to spending my time on.
We’ll get to my unconventional Temur Reclamation list later, which is the deck I ultimately ended up registering after all this exploration, but I wanted to focus the bulk of this article on Jeskai Fires. It’s a deck that felt to me like it was putting up a good fight in current Standard in its own right. In addition to that, Jeskai Fires stood out to me as a deck that also has a good shot should anything get banned from the Food deck in the near future since, unlike some of the decks to crop up in the last couple of weeks, Jeskai Fires actually stands a good shot against the aggressive decks that are currently being restrained by Food decks thanks to Deafening Clarion.
Creatures (4)
Planeswalkers (12)
Lands (27)
Spells (17)
It’s best to think of Jeskai Fires as some strange mid-point between control and combo. You sweep the battlefield with Deafening Clarion, use pinpoint removal when needed, and have card advantage in the form of Drawn from Dreams to restock resources just like a normal control deck would. Once Fires of Invention is on the battlefield, though, the floodgates open up and it’s possible you just kill your opponent, whether by using Fae of Wishes to dig for haymakers from your sideboard; using Sarkhan the Masterless as a one-card combo working alongside any used-up planeswalkers you have sitting around; or via Fires of Invention’s favourable interactions with the haste-granting abilities we see on Cavalier of Flame and Kenrith, the Returned King.
Jeskai Fires has been through a few different iterations. Initial versions were built around the old Superfriends core of Narset, Parter of Veils; Teferi, Time Raveler; and Sarkhan the Masterless, taking advantage of Fae of Wishes alongside all of this. The real breakout moment for the archetype was when Martin Juza played a version affectionately called Czech Cavaliers in his Eldraine MPL split, which introduced Cavalier of Flame and Cavalier of Gales to competitive Magic.
I consider this a huge step forward as the Cavalier package is, weirdly, much harder to interact with than the planeswalker package. You can attack down the planeswalkers, and the Jeskai player has to try their best to stave these attacks off for a couple of turns in order to successfully kill you with Sarkhan, whereas the Cavaliers hitting the battlefield with the haste that Cavalier of Flame grants them gives their opponent very little breathing room.
Creatures (13)
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (29)
Spells (14)
For a first shot at a very different take on the archetype, Juza’s build was remarkably elegant and fully formed, but then almost overnight it was just forgotten about. It couldn’t fight the Golos decks we saw take over Standard, whereas versions that could fly over the Zombie horde via the use of Sarkhan at least stood a chance there, and so Czech Cavaliers was left behind. Once Field of the Dead left the format, however, the Cavalier builds of Jeskai Fires became a lot better. The planeswalker builds of Jeskai Fires struggle to keep their threats alive in the face of Nissa, Who Shakes the World, whilst Cavalier builds, if they can get a Fires of Invention to stick, are surprisingly effective at taking down planeswalkers with hasty Knights.
A teammate came along with this revelation and the news that he’d been having extremely positive results with a Cavalier build, most of my team quickly got on board and were impressed with the deck, and then our plans of this being a nice little secret were ruined a week later as others had been working on the deck too. Not only did a version of the deck Top 8 a Magic Online PTQ, but two identical copies made it in to the Top 16 in addition, all of these in turn a direct copy of the list that Jeff Pyka made it to #1 Mythic on Magic Arena with. The deck had become a very known quantity again.
Creatures (11)
- 4 Cavalier of Flame
- 4 Cavalier of Gales
- 1 Kenrith, the Returned King
- 1 Bonecrusher Giant
- 1 Realm-Cloaked Giant
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (29)
Spells (16)
This is my own preferred way to build the deck, though of course this comes with the big asterisk that, should a piece of the Food deck be banned soon, those Aether Gusts should likely move from the maindeck and became a different piece of cheap interaction.
Of note, I am very opposed to Fae of Wishes packages in Cavaliers versions of this archetype. Too often using Fae of Wishes to go get a haymaker from your sideboard with Fires of Invention is somehow less impactful than just making a couple of large Knights. You get some utility here and there, but not enough to make up for the deckbuilding cost.
Additionally, this deck isn’t like Golos Fires, where Circuitous Route gave you enough mana and access to weird colour requirements such that you could eventually in the same turn both search for and hard-cast most of those cards in your sideboard the fair way. Here the lack of ramp makes Granted often just feel non-functional if you don’t have Fires of Invention on the battlefield, which makes me very sceptical of the card considering you’re typically winning games where Fires is on the battlefield anyways.
The Tithe Takers in the sideboard are a very odd inclusion, but I was finding the counterspells out of Azorius Control and Temur Reclamation frustrating to fight through and Tithe Taker goes some way towards fighting those decks alongside the closing speed Legion Warboss presents. It’s an extreme plan, but you have so many cards to sideboard out in those matchups that you can afford to spend this much sideboard space against them.
One of the big draws to the deck for me, on top of it actually just being good, is that the sequencing of your spells when you have Fires of Invention on the battlefield is so fascinating when all of a sudden your lands become tools and your spells cost nothing. So, some advice on how to approach choosing your plays when Fires of Invention is on your side of the battlefield:
- Fabled Passage works incredibly alongside Cavalier of Gales’s enters-the-battlefield trigger, allowing you to shuffle away any bad cards you place back on top of the deck. For this reason, your best fifth land drop is often Passage as it allows you to play this land drop, cast the Cavalier of Gales with your Fires, and then sacrifice your newly played Passage post-Cavalier trigger.
- Castle Vantress works similarly well alongside Cavalier of Gales. With Fires on the battlefield you get to run a very similar line on your fifth turn as you would with the Passage: cast your Cavalier of Gales, place back a couple of bad cards, and then use your Castle to scry them away.
- Castle Vantress is just generally impressive in the deck so much so that I really want to be playing the full four copies. As well as these positive interactions with Cavalier of Gales, it also lets you take advantage of all your mana whilst Fires sits on the battlefield, aggressively scrying away lands and digging towards whatever spells you most need. Sometimes you end up scrying in your upkeep if you’re desperate to find something to do with your turn, though you have to be careful that your opponent isn’t holding open Aether Gust; using all your mana to scry in your upkeep and then having your Fires Gusted away before you can cast anything in that turn is devastating.
- Cavalier of Flame’s discard trigger works very weirdly with Cavalier of Gales. You’ll often sequence Gales first, leave your good cards on top of the deck and keep your bad cards in hand, and then cast Flame afterwards to discard away those bad cards and draw the good ones you hid on top. Sequencing this way gets as many bad cards as possible permanently out of your deck, fuels the Cavalier of Flame’s death trigger as much as possible too, and ensures you have access to as much information as possible before the discard trigger hits the stack.
- There are a bunch of things to keep in mind in terms of your manabase and how it interacts with Fires. You want to have at least half your lands produce red mana if possible so that you can maximise how many times you can activate Cavalier of Flame’s activated ability in the same turn, and this consideration will often influence your Fabled Passage fetches and what lands you choose to keep access to off the various Cavalier enters-the-battlefield triggers. If you expect a game to go super-long, you can keep playing out lands to get to the point where you can activate two different copies of Castle Vantress in the same turn, but for shorter games it is not unreasonable after a point to hold lands in hand to discard to future copies of Cavalier of Flame.
- If your two spells for the turn are a Cavalier of Flame and a sweeper, you can typically kill an opposing planeswalker by removing all your opponent’s creatures to clear a path for a hasty attack. If the sweeper is Deafening Clarion, you’ll want the Cavalier on the battlefield first to ensure you gain some life in the process.
- Time Wipe in combination with an Elk’ed Cavalier of Flame accomplishes the same thing since Time Wipe lets your reset the Cavalier. Teferi, Time Raveler similarly lets your reset Elk’ed Cavaliers.
- If you have both Kenrith, the Returned King and Cavalier of Flame on the battlefield, you typically will maximise the damage you’re dealing by activating the haste plus trample ability on Kenrith once and then pouring the rest of your mana into your Cavalier.
- Mystical Dispute still technically works with Fires on the battlefield, just only on your turn. Just because Fires limits you to casting things on your own turn doesn’t mean you’re limited to working at sorcery speed, which makes countermagic that can work towards defending your own spells much more appealing than it might be otherwise.
Reclaiming the Wilderness
On a quick ending note, the list I’m battling with this weekend at Mythic Championship VI:
Creatures (2)
Lands (25)
Spells (33)
I was already a fan of Temur Reclamation but had some concerns about the deck, and so was planning on registering Jeskai Fires. Then, a day and a half before the decklist submission deadline, I tried out Improbable Alliance in Temur and I was taken aback by the card. I know some people have had more lukewarm experiences with it, but for me it really solved a lot of problems.
Improbable Alliance is a cheap threat that sneaks under countermagic and punishes opponents who want to keep saying go with countermagic open rather than developing their own threats, makes you much more threat-dense in the face of Duress, provides an attack force that can peck away at planeswalkers when needed, and really helps prevent those otherwise all too common games with Temur Reclamation where you have a lot of mana and not nearly enough to do with it.
Most notably, it fundamentally changes the dynamic of the games as you’re no longer limited to just twenty life. A stream of chump-blockers means the breaking point at which you just can’t survive any more is much less clearly defined, meaning you aren’t forced to always be racing your opponent’s clock in the way you were beforehand.
I suspect this build of the deck gets quite a bit worse once the Food decks leave the format, since it struggles against aggressive decks, so have fun with it whilst you can. I’m certainly hoping for some good games with it this weekend.