Thoughtcast mentor
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Here are some quick thoughts on the deck I just won the Power 9 challenge with. The basic idea is to take a gush tokens deck and replace gush and islands with thoughtcast, mox opal, and seat of the synod. If you like casting first turn mentor/jace/flipped Erayo and casting devastating balances, this is the deck for you. If you like low variance and solid mana bases, not so much.
1 Erayo, Soratami Ascendant
2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
4 Monastery Mentor
1 Snapcaster Mage4 Mental Misstep
4 Force of Will
1 Balance
2 Swords to Plowshares1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
1 Sensei's Divining Top
4 Gitaxian Probe
1 Dig Through Time
1 Tolarian Academy
1 Treasure Cruise
4 Preordain
4 Thoughtcast
2 Urza's Bauble4 Mox Opal
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Emerald
1 Sol Ring
1 Mana Crypt4 Seat of the Synod
2 Flooded Strand
3 TundraSideboard
2 Tormod's Crypt
4 Disenchant
1 Engineered Explosives
2 Grafdigger's Cage
1 Containment Priest
2 Swords to Plowshares
1 Plains
2 FlusterstormA few more thoughts:
This deck has very explosive mentors, because almost every card triggers mentor and most can be cast proactively or for free, and the draw spells don't make you pick up your lands.If people go back to playing maindeck null rod/stony silence, this deck is in trouble. Eldrazi/shops are already a poor matchup. The new 1 mana disenchant should help a little.
The Urza’s baubles are in there the keep the artifact count up for mox opal/thoughtcast and provide more spells to trigger mentor or flip Erayo. They are bad but usually good enough.
I went with preordains instead of brainstorm/ponder, because there are so few fetchlands. This may be wrong, but it worked out okay so far.
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It looks to me like this deck would have difficulties beating a Null Rod. Have you found that to be the case?
this post has been edited for niceness
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10 lands is insanely low. How often did you mulligan? Maybe Jeweled Amulet over Baubles? Congrats on the win.
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You don't need a lot of lands with Mox Opal. I played a Mox Opal deck in the past in which I also only played 6-9 lands and 1 of those lands was Undiscovered Paradise simply because the deck doesn't need to make land drops.
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It's 22 mana sources (effectively less as Mox Opals and Tolarian Academy are conditional), which is more than Delver. The issue isn't the number of mana sources but the vulnerability of the mana base to Chalice, Spheres, Null Rods, Grudge, Dack, EE, etc. But if you run well and/or have favorable matchups, you get a very explosive deck.
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You do get mox opal only hands you have to mulligan, but overall the mulliganing isn't too bad. It is better than something like blue belcher, as at least you have lands. As @ChubbyRain says, the problems are the vulnerability to artifact mana disruption and sometimes the lack of color fixing. There is a tension between turning on mox opal, having access to colors, not having too many mana sources total, losing to null rod, and not playing mediocre cards just because they are artifacts.
I definitely got better than average draws throughout the tournament and avoided null rod/stoney silence/kataki etc.
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Why Urza's Bauble instead of something like Mishra's? THe value of seeing a random card instead of setting up a fetch or something?
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Regarding the baubles, Mishra's is likely better. I was just shocked Mishra's bauble was $10 online and got Urza's instead without thinking very hard about it. Especially with probe in the deck, Urza's mostly gave me redundant information.
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Why not play more lands? This deck seems super light on lands and not feesible in a larger event.
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This post is deleted!
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Have you considered testing out Paradoxical outcome? It seems incredible to me that this deck ever can beat null rod or stony silence
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Yeah, Null Rod is the issue. I still love it as a general fan of affinity decks. I'm particularly interested in trying to work U/W Fabricate into a Thirst for Knowledge-based artifact/discard deck. Hey, by the way kids. I'm brand new here on TMD, although an MTG veteran since 1993. How can one create his/her own thread here?
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@countbeckula Go to the main page (reachable by clicking "The Mana Drain" at top left of page. Select a category from the list of categories there. Once you've navigated to one of the five major categories, if you've loged-in, you'll see a "New Topic" button at the top of the list of topics in that category.
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@Aaron-Patten thanks so much!
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Thanks for sharing the deck - I love these kinds of decks specifically.
I played about 10 matches against various decks with this today - and specifically found Balance to be nearly a dead card every time I had it in my hand. I'm assuming I'm playing it wrong, or just had it while I was already ahead - but what did it allow you to come back from? Is it there specifically for insane starts from Pyromancer/Mentor?
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Regarding balance, there are definitely times it is dead. It is admittedly terrible once you start drawing cards and generating tokens, but at that point things are usually going well.
As for what it is good for, it is good at dealing with token generators, as you say. Secondly, because the deck has moxen where most decks have more land, you can often destroy your opponent's lands. Also, the fact that you can drop 3-4 artifacts on the first turn, including baubles and Sensei's top, lets you use it as a discard spell. So basically by quickly playing lots of artifacts that balance doesn't count, you can take advantage of all the aspects of the card, but only situationaly.
