Note: This is a budget deck. I know there are many cards that would work fantastically in it, but those would push it out of the price range that it's aimed towards. The total cost for this deck is about $12, and is still able to be very competitive at FNMs and other semi-casual tournaments. Anything on the maybeboard is things that would be good for the deck but would push the cost up beyond my limit. Funshade helped me build this to start with and I took my own spin on it from there.
This deck focuses on abusing the synergy between Heroic creatures and Ciphered spells. It's a hardcore board control deck that aims to either disable or sacrifice opponents creatures, (while copying the big ones,) all while whittling away at their health.
Hidden Strings is the MVP of this deck and is an extremely overlooked and undervalued card for what it does. Paired with Aqueous Form it guarantees tapping/untapping at least two permanents per turn - namely, untapping your creatures with heroic effects. If you manage to get both spells ciphered onto
Agent of the Fates
or Wavecrash Titan, you will pretty much completely control the board - especially when you get multiple heroic creatures and multiple Hidden Strings out.
Elite Arcanist is an interesting card in that it basically forces the opponent to focus it immediately. By imprinting
Triton Tactics
(ideally) or
Mizzium Skin
, you get to cast that spell as often as you like onto your heroic creatures. Having one of these out has saved many of my
Agent of the Fates
in the past.
Retraction Helix
is also incredible paired with Elite Arcanist, and lets you proc heroic triggers while adding an extra element of control to their board.
Artisan of Forms
is a similar card. Best case scenario, you copy an
Agent of the Fates
and force them to sacrifice two creatures per Hidden Strings cast. Against big creature decks, you simply copy one of the opponent's creatures, and suddenly you have a big threat for 2 mana.
With the current meta of Red Aggro and Monoblack Devotion, (the two most common types in my area,) Negate,
Mizzium Skin
, and Doom Blade are there to keep your creatures safe from kill spells. Dispel can and should be subbed in against red decks, as most of their spells are instants. Obviously, Doom Blade should be substituted out against black decks.
Soul Ransom
is a nice sideboard card when against decks that focus heavily on a certain creature to pull a big combo off, or against decks that focus on building up massive creatures, (such as R/G decks often do.) Grim Return fills a similar role - force the opponent to sacrifice a creature, then take it for yourself. Finally, Stolen Identity is very much an endgame card, and also works well against big creature decks. It's expensive to cast, but once it's out, you can copy anything the opponent tries to throw at you before they're forced to either tap or sacrifice it.
