One of the big questions coming into Amonkhet Standard is this: how large of a role will cycling play in the format? We’ve got lots of powerful roleplayers like Cast Out that happen to have cycling, as well as plenty of engines like Archfiend of Ifnir and Drake Haven that care about cycling, but are these engines efficient enough to keep up with the likes of Delirium, Aetherworks Marvel, and Vehicles? The deck we’re looking at today is a cycling deck, but it doesn’t feature Drake Haven or Archfiend of Ifnir. Instead, it’s built around ramping into New Perspectives as quickly as possible. Let’s take a look:

Approach of the Second Sun - Amonkhet Standard | JR Break Austria via Twitter

• Creatures (8)
• 4 Shefet Monitor
• 4 Vizier of Tumbling Sands

• Instants (14)
• 2 Deem Worthy
• 4 Haze of Pollen
• 4 Renewed Faith
• 4 Shadow of the Grave

• Sorceries (6)
• 2 Sweltering Sun
• 4 Traverse the Ulvenwald

• Enchantments (8)
• 4 New Perspective
• 4 Weirding Wood

• Lands (21)
• 1 Island
• 1 Mountain
• 1 Plains
• 1 Swamp
• 4 Forest
• 1 Fortified Village
• 1 Sheltered Valley
• 3 Scattered Grove
• 4 Canyon Slough
• 4 Irrigated Farmland

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Sphinx of the Final Word
• 1 Kefnet the Mindful
• 2 Appetite for the Unnatural
• 2 Heaven // Earth
• 2 Sweltering Sun
• 3 Negate
• 4 Cast out

Buy This Deck

The idea is that you can ramp in the early turns, spending excess mana to cycle cards and dig through your deck looking for either utility cyclers or haymakers. Utility cyclers include Sweltering Suns as a sweeper, Haze of Pollen to buy you an extra turn, or Renewed Faith to gain a little life while you churn through cards. Traverse the Ulvenwald is particularly good here as you can fix your mana early or find Shefet Monitors to ramp and dig. The density of cycling cards of various types makes it fairly trivial for you to be able to turn on the delirium.

The end game of this deck is fairly straightforward. You want to ramp up to six mana and cast New Perspectives. Then you can start firing off cyclers and putting lands into play off of Shefet Monitors and untapping lands with Vizier. Then your copies of Shadow of the Grave let you do it all again. Approach of the Second Sun is your win condition; the idea being that the first copy buys you a turn, and on that turn you can cycle back into it to end the game when you untap. New Perspectives nets you a bunch of cards and makes your cycling free, which makes it exceedingly easy for you to find a copy of Approach of the Second Sun and cycle all your remaining Shefet Monitors to potentially give yourself a means of casting two copies of Approach on the next turn. If you’re able to get enough mana off of your cycling effects, it’s well within reason to win all at once.

A lot of the power of this deck comes in the flexibility of the available cycling spells. You’ve got removal in Cast Out and Sweltering Suns. You’ve got fogs in Haze of Pollen and Renewed Faith. There’s a myriad of creatures that you can play that do a great job of holding the ground, like Curator of Mysteries or Archfiend of Ifnir. You could even play random Censors to get people, if you were so inclined.

This is a wacky deck with just enough ramp and interaction to race average draws from most things in the format. You’re certainly soft to counterspells and discard, since so few cards in your deck actually matter, but when most people are playing creature-oriented midrange decks, that seems like a fine thing to do. This is exactly the kind of deck I’d want to play heading into the Pro Tour weekend, since you may not be able to get away with doing quite this much nothing in a post-Pro Tour Standard.