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This past weekend, I had a blast playing some War of the Spark Limited at the Prerelease! A regular stream viewer and supporter, Jake P, reached out to me and told me that he recently purchased a game store and he would love it if I came out to his store to make a guest appearance for the event. The store is located in Utah and, man, I couldn't stop talking about how beautiful the mountains were. As someone who has lived in Florida for much of his life, having an entire horizon and landscape filled with mountains was just surreal. I think most of our conversations were focused exclusively on the scenery and I'm pretty sure I ended up being at least a little bit repetitive.
Either way, I had a great time, and the Limited format seems like it's going to be a pretty fun one, with a lot of interesting and challenging decisions to make thanks to the inclusion of so many planeswalkers (that aren't, in fact, very game breaking, much to my relief).
But today we're here to talk about Standard again! A few weeks back I told you all about a Jund Demons deck that stream supporter JoshVS submitted, and it ended up being pretty solid. This week I want to discuss another JoshVS submission, this time of the Grixis persuasion.
A week or so ago I was invited to participate in the War of the Spark Early Access streamer event on MTG Arena, courtesy of Wizards of the Coast. (Thanks, Wizards!) It was an awesomely fun event and I asked viewers to submit some decks ahead of time for me to try out with the new set. Never one to turn down a challenge, Josh submitted the following, making sure I knew it was just a rough build and that it might not be very good.
Elderspell Control | War Standard | JoshVS, Early Access Event
- Planeswalkers (14)
- 2 Kasmina, Enigmatic Mentor
- 2 Liliana, Dreadhorde General
- 2 Narset, Parter of Veils
- 2 Sarkhan the Masterless
- 3 Dovin, Hand of Control
- 3 Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God
- Instants (12)
- 4 Chemister's Insight
- 4 Sinister Sabotage
- 4 Tyrant's Scorn
- Sorceries (7)
- 2 Cry of the Carnarium
- 2 The Elderspell
- 3 Thought Erasure
- Enchantments (2)
- 2 The Eldest Reborn
- Lands (25)
- 1 Island
- 3 Swamp
- 3 Dragonskull Summit
- 3 Steam Vents
- 3 Sulfur Falls
- 4 Blood Crypt
- 4 Drowned Catacomb
- 4 Watery Grave
One thing that's worth noting is that this was played only in MTG Arena's Best-of-One format, as that was all that was available during the event, which is why there isn't a sideboard present. Even so, we managed about a 5-1 record with the deck when we were playing it, and it felt very powerful, especially for an untuned version.
If you want to see the deck in action, you can find some matches with it here.
The deck is focused around two very specific cards:
Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God
This guy is poised to be one of the premier Planeswalkers in the format, and he does a lot of work here, most commonly acting as either a two-for-one or a Hero's Downfall. Being able to copy the abilities of any other Planeswalker on the battlefield is also really useful.
But the big value here is the ultimate, which is not often the case in Standard . . . or any format, really. Nicol Bolas allows you to literally win the game on the spot thanks in no small part to -
The Elderspell
We don't want too many copies of this card, despite it being part of our combo, solely because it can only destroy Planeswalkers (and not creatures as well). We also have a lot of ways to draw cards, so finding it shouldn't really be (and never was) a problem.
One thing that ended up happening quite a bit was us killing one or two of our own Planeswalkers in order to ultimate Nicol Bolas and win the game immediately. I was pretty surprised at how consistent this happened. In fact, in terms of win conditions, this felt downright broken after a few matches.
While these two cards were heavy hitters, and formed the backbone of the deck, there were quite a few others that also pulled their weight.
Sarkhan the Masterless
This was a card I didn't give much thought to initially, but really managed to impress me in this deck. You have so many durdley-but-versatile little Planeswalkers, that if you play and activate this on a board with two other 'walkers, you could easily swing for eight that turn, killing opposing Planeswalkers or dealing a sizable chunk of damage to the face.
Making a 4/4 Dragon is also just totally fine and can hold back a good number of creatures in Standard. If you use this ability before you use Sarkhan's plus ability, you're usually just giving yourself another four damage next turn. Four more if you include Sarkhan himself being able to attack.
Liliana, Dreadhorde General
Yeah. Okay. This card is just as good as you think it is. She starts at a high loyalty, and she basically wipes the board with her -4 ability, especially if you can use something like Tyrant's Scorn beforehand to make sure the opponent sacrifices something valuable.
Another card that seemed to work wonderfully in the deck was Kasmina, Enigmatic Mentor, acting as both a way to protect our potential Thief of Sanity (see below) or our actual Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God, while also adding bodies to the board and letting us loot. This is another planeswalker that can we can leave on the board at one loyalty to target with The Elderspell in order to win the game, which can be vital.
Two cards that always seem to impress me, no matter what the deck, are Thought Erasure and The Eldest Reborn. Both of these seem to have only gotten better with more Planeswalkers in Standard. If possible, I could see finding room for the fourth Thought Erasure.
In testing, unfortunately, there were a few cards that didn't really hit the spot for us, despite our successful record. One of them was Cry of the Carnarium. The card can be great, but it just didn't feel suitable in the main deck against the decks we faced. If we want an effect like that, which I wasn't sure we did, something like Ritual of Soot might have served us better. The other card that Josh and I agreed wasn't great was Narset, Parter of Veils. Granted, we didn't play against any dedicated control decks. Unless you are playing against those, I don't feel like Narset is really doing very much.
In a more recent version of the deck Josh replaced the Narsets with copies of Jace, Cunning Castaway, which is an interesting inclusion that allows Nicol Bolas to make two copies of itself if he has five loyalty thanks to Jace's third ability. I could see this being fairly strong, despite requiring some set up.
The sideboard Josh added to the deck is as follows:
Thief of Sanity might be one of my favorite cards in Standard, so it's nice to see the full playset here, although I would absolutely love finding room for them in the main deck, especially since we don't actually have any sweepers of our own to worry about. It's possible that the Jace, Cunning Castaway package is too cute (especially when his +1 is virtually a blank for us), and we could cut both of those, along with the two Cry of the Carnarium, for three copies of Thief of Sanity and one more Thought Erasure. Or the full four copies of Thief of Sanity. Whatever!
The sideboard is also a much better place for the Narset as well. I'm not sure we'd need four Duress if we're bumping up to four copies of Thought Erasure in the main, but I guess we're not really sure what the metagame is going to look like, and I imagine we're all pretty scared of the potential Esper Control decks that emerge. In fact, this entire sideboard looks geared toward dealing with those.
I would definitely find some room for a sweeper or three in the sideboard for the matchups that need them; even something like Finale of Eternity could possibly be great here. The main problem we had with the deck, though, was occasionally missing our third Black source on turn five for Nicol Bolas himself. Considering our mana base, however, it seems like this is just the nature of the beast for such a prohibitive mana cost. The only Black land we're not maxed out on (in addition to having three basic Swamps) is Dragonskull Summit, which I think is fine.
This deck kind of shocked me with how well it did, while also being very fun to play, especially for a preliminary brew. I'd love for you folks to give it a try in the near future, while Standard is still new and fresh, and let me know in the comments what you think about the deck or what changes you might make! Thanks so much for reading, as always. Love you guys, and I'll catch you next time!
Frank Lepore
