I've been talking about this deck on Twitter for a week or so and figured I'd see what thoughts people had over here.(*)
The basic idea was to take the Sylvan Mentor chassis but swap the red for black. Here's the current list I'm on:
Main Deck
Creatures
- 4 Monastery Mentor
- 3 Deathrite Shaman
- 1 Snapcaster Mage
Planeswalkers
- 1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
Enchantments
- 2 Sylvan Library
Instants
- 1 Ancestral Recall
- 1 Brainstorm
- 1 Dig Through Time
- 1 Disenchant
- 1 Flusterstorm
- 4 Force of Will
- 2 Gush
- 3 Mental Misstep
- 1 Murderous Cut
- 2 Swords to Plowshares
Sorceries
- 3 Cabal Therapy
- 1 Demonic Tutor
- 1 Ponder
- 1 Preordain
- 1 Time Walk
Artifacts
- 1 Black Lotus
- 1 Engineered Explosives
- 1 Mox Emerald
- 1 Mox Jet
- 1 Mox Pearl
- 1 Mox Ruby
- 1 Mox Sapphire
- 2 Sensei's Divining Top
Lands
- 4 Flooded Strand
- 1 Island
- 1 Library of Alexandria
- 2 Misty Rainforest
- 2 Polluted Delta
- 2 Tropical Island
- 2 Tundra
- 2 Underground Sea
(Not going to bother posting a sidebord since it's so metagame-dependent. In four colors there are a lot of options, though the deck really prefers to be in UW so I tend to prefer cards like Disenchant over Nature's Claim, for example, and I would definitely put a basic Plains in the board.)
I played an older (worse) version at Knight Ware a couple weeks back to mediocre results; I posted the old list, along with how I got from that to the new one, over here in a longer blog writeup. That post also has some sideboards in it.
Anyway, I'd be happy to get some feedback and thoughts on it.
(*) This is my first post on the new MD; I was a long-time lurker and very occasional poster on the old one.
Edited to tweak list formatting.