Board wipe and counter your way to victory via Mindswipe and Deflecting Palm!
What? Mindswipe as a viable counter? Deflecting Palm as a 4 of in the MB! Refuge lands being ran over Temples! Shenanigans!
Let's break it down...
This format is creature dependent...unless you are playing this deck. Killing lots of stuff with 1 card is good! Countering stuff before they cast it with ETB effects is good! Not depending on creatures to win your games makes your opponents cry every time they draw a Hero's Downfall, Utter End, Banishing Light...you get the drift.
At first I took people's opinions about Mindswipe as a crappy counter stapled to a crappy burn to heart, but I started thinking. Even though this card doesn't play like syncopate without turn 2 viability, it trades just fine on turns 3 and 4 just as our hard counters do. The format is so clogged with big 3 to 5 drops, your opponent will almost always be tapping out, and even though the burn does very little at that time, the late game mindswipes are still around the corner.
So how do we actually run?
We run a lot of tapped lands. The most important land drops to hit untapped are 3 and 5, opening us up for counters and board wipes. Deflecting Palm is our catch all here to give us time to Jeskai Charm threats back to the top of the deck, or wipe the board. We have virtually no plays early game so the refuge lands are in the deck to keep us alive until we can stabilize.
The use of Deflecting Palm and Aetherspouts in the MB gives your opponents a headache. Do they try to play around the counters and swarm the board? Or would they rather invest into one huge threat? Either way, we don't care, and the result is going to be a painful experience for them!
Hyper aggro has our number preboard, but with the help of Anger of the Gods and Nyx-fleece Ram, we are sure to make a strong comeback in game 2 and 3!
