So, here's the story. I've been playing cEDH for about 2 years now and when my group heard of the new Oathbreaker format it took a while for us to get around to trying it out. It seems like a lot of fun and a natural move for us to make. We tried it this weekend for the first time and we think we already broke the format...
The format as a whole doesn't seem to be super fast, and a lot of the stuff played didn't seem to have the capability of ending the game before turns 6 and 7, let alone threaten early turn wins with imperfect information. Until we tried
Narset, Parter of Veils
paired with
Timetwister
as her Signature Spell. The deck is essentially just early ramp pieces to try and reliably get Narset out on turn 2. Turn 3 is the Twister turn. The goal is to dump the opening hand as fast as possible and then wheel to reload and dump more cheap ramp and artifacts that ultimately win with a Paradox/Scepter combo line and a looped deck, which, thanks to Timetwister being in the "command zone" is very easy provided infinite mana can be generated. All that's left is to find means of infinite draw, but this basically comes prepackaged with the Paradox/Scepter combos in
Sensei's Divining Top
plus a handful of instant spells that can be imprinted and the new
Urza, Lord High Artificer
for good measure.
In terms of proving a deterministic infinite mana loop there are 3 real lines to show as an example.
-
Imprint
Dramatic Reversal
on
Isochron Scepter
with at least 3 mana production total and at least 1 blue mana from mana rocks.
-
Imprint
Boomerang
on
Isochron Scepter
and have
Paradox Engine
out with at least 2 mana production total and at least 1 blue mana from mana rocks with a viable 0 cmc target in play on your board.
-
Imprint
Boomerang
and have
Paradox Engine
out as above with
Urza, Lord High Artificer
in play on your board and enough mana to cast him 4 times after bouncing him to your hand each time to create the minimum number of constructs needed to repeatedly cast him from construct mana afterwards so that each new construct then generates net positive mana.
After proving the loop for infinte mana and proving the loop for infinte draw you establish a kill loop with
Explosive Apparatus
or use
Boomerang
on a loop to bounce all opponent's permanents and create an infinite army of constructs, wait a turn cycle and then swing for the win with an infinite army. The deck is pretty consistently doing this by turn 5, can do it earlier, and will do it by turn 6 barring significant amounts of interaction from multiple opponent's (which of course are all playing with some serious card disadvantage after such an early wheel effect drops them all to 1 card in hand while the Narset deck reloads to a full grip).
I'm new to Oathbreaker and haven't played a ton of games yet, but once this deck was crafted nothing else we played in our initial Oathbreaker run could win. For those of you out there who play a lot of Oathbreaker, I'd like to ask you folks what other competitive tier decks exist and how to they fair performance wise? Are any of the cards being used in this deck banned and we just don't know? Is this an issue that is known for the format and if so would a fix be in the work? We loved the concept of the format, but if this is the only thing viable in competitive terms we probably won't play it again, especially since we doubt this list is perfectly tuned and could likely be even more optimized.
