A tiny leaders deck with a milling theme for Jace, Vryn's Prodigy
.
This deck is one of a cycle of these I've made for each of the double-faced planeswalkers from the Magic Origins set, which I started because it seemed like a fun deck building exercise and because completing cycles makes me feel warm & fuzzy inside. Here's the full cycle (in WUBRG order), if you're interested:
Each of these decks follows an additional set of deck building guidelines that I imposed on top of the normal deck building requirements/restrictions of the format. These guidelines aren't hard-and-fast rules, exactly, but I've adhered to them as much as possible for initial construction. We'll see how well I can stick to them in updates for future sets, while keeping the themes intact and the decks somewhat playable. Here is a brief description of the guidelines:
- Each version of the commander is included. Currently this only applies to alternate planeswalker cards (e.g.
Jace Beleren
). It can be a minor non-bo when you have a transformed commander on the field and you draw the second planeswalker, but there are worse problems you could have.
- Each card whose name specifically references the commander (e.g.
Jace's Phantasm
) is included. Just the card name is considered here, not things like flavor-text.
- The deck's main strategy has to center around the commander and the cards found in rules 1 & 2.
Luckily, that last guideline isn't usually very hard to satisfy, since most planeswalkers have a pretty well-defined "thing", and it turns out that most cards that specifically reference planeswalkers in their name also tend to support this strategy. Whether or not that strategy is any good... well, you can decide for yourself. I tried to make the decks at least semi-competitive within these restrictions.
The most interesting part of building around Jace came from trying to balance general blue instant/sorcery "good stuff" (read card advantage) with the mill cards that serve as the win condition. There are better pure-mill builds, but most of them only perform at their best when the pieces are easily assembled. Blue can dig pretty well, and young Jace even helps find your pieces, but it's just plain easier when your commander is one of those pieces (e.g. the Ambassador Laquatus
+
Training Grounds
synergy). All-in-all, despite the obvious power of the commander in other formats, this deck feels like one of the less powerful ones I was able to build. I probably need to revisit the amount of card draw vs general disruption and defense the deck has, but since I have to proxy the commander anyway (for monetary reasons) I'm putting that update off for a while.
Suggestions are welcome/appreciated, but just keep in mind that I'll be trying to stick to the above guidelines as much as possible.
