This list and primer will be maintained on Moxfield now.
This deck works and plays very similarly to my Queen Marchesa Aikido deck here. I consider this deck to be an expansion of my Marchesa Aikido deck, as 4c gives the play style a huge amount of flexibility. Learn to play this deck well and you will feel unstoppable.
The general idea is that you want to redirect attention, removal, and attacks to your opponents by limiting your perceived threat level, pillowforting, and/or making it more advantageous for your opponents to swing at each other (giving things double strike, unblockable, or just making it not worth the resources to swing at you, etc.). If you play this like a normal deck, racing every game to get your value engines and wincons online, you will not do well (or, you'll win your "fair share" of games, likely 25%). If you play this deck as a unassuming, non-threatening political grouphug deck, you will win 50% of your games, simply because opponents will not mess with you, won't understand how you win or what you're up to, and then when you make your moves no one has gas left to stop you.
Make no mistake, an aikido deck is largely a control deck. But it operates slightly different than a traditional control deck, and if you play it like a conventional control deck you will lose. You don't need to, and shouldn't, be trying to police the game. There are very few things that actually threaten this deck, so act surgically and save your interaction for when it's really needed. This is also why group hug elements actually help this deck. Since most wincons don't scare us, and actually help us, you ultimately come out on top when you help everyone draw and ramp into their wincons, and draw all your interaction and value engines in the process.
You have fogs and combat tricks that punish attacks directed at you, or even turn them into wincons. You also have cards here that use your opponents' wincons or otherwise punish them for overextending.
Value engine staples are key for making a "bad" deck like this functional in anything above a battlecruiser meta. There is some balancing to be done depending on meta, as powerful staples are threatening and attention grabbing themselves, directing players to turn resources against the caster. If possible, less threatening more subtle value engines should be used, or you should match your meta, otherwise you will be spending more resources trying to keep your value engines on the board, and the more times you Boros Charm in response to a board wipe, the more your opponents will gang up on you.
Speaking of value engines - this deck sometimes runs grouphug effects. Heartwood Storyteller is a mainstay in this deck, purely because of the sheer volume of draws. Your opponents are likely not equipped to handle this many draws, and each discard step can sometimes cause a bit of hand disruption. Players will primarily keep their wincons, as no one wants to discard a wincon, and will keep some interaction, likely discarding the rest. In this way, grouphug can help us in several ways. There are of course political and social brownie points it will earn you, but by enabling opponents to play their wincons and interaction you will now give them the means to beat each other to fragile life totals, have ammo to use against them to finish them off, and will have blown what little interaction they managed to hang onto on each other (since everyone is playing out their wincons). I know it sounds reductive, but seriously, just pick up the pieces and put them out of their misery once they're broken and exhausted - it works every time.
If you've come here from my Queen Marchesa deck/Discord, there are pros and cons to considering K&T over Marchesa:
Assuming a moderate budget is no issue (I MPC proxy a lot of cards so I wouldn't be fair for me to make accurate judgements on budget deckbuilding), 4c is vastly more powerful and flexible than Mardu. K&T provides similar benefits as Marchesa in the command zone. Both provide card advantage and a decent blocker, though K&T trades being a rattlesnake for repeatable ramp, which in my opinion is a great trade. Both are open ended and unthreatening, not giving anything away. In fact, Queen Marchesa is become a lot more popular so K&T actually flies under the radar more. Both are generally well liked by opponents even, as they introduce potential benefits for our opponents. Both are relatively low to the ground mana wise. You can also think of it in terms of card options: you gain Simic. perhaps the most powerful 2-color pairing in Magic in exchange for black. You lose tutors and a lot of good rattlesnakes or other pillowfort-y cards in exchange for ramp, draw, and a more robust interaction and aikido suite. The loss of Inkshield, Rakdos Charm, and Delirium hurt the most, for sure, but that is all I miss and the options that Simic adds are very worth it. I mean seriously - you can Sunforge for uncounterable counterspells, for a creature tutor, graveyard recursion, tap all blockers, on top of the usual removal and aikido spells offered in Mardu. That is huge.
As far as cons - it is much easier to over-tune or over-power 4 colors than it is 3 colors. Why is this a bad thing? I imagine if you enjoy a deck like this, you value "fun" games of Magic, for you and the table. No one has fun if you're pub stomping. It is far easier to go a little too buckwild with all the value staples in 4c than 3c. This also will instantly make you archenemy which is the opposite of what we want. In Mardu, you can tune all you want, and unless you start running combos and fast mana, there is a ceiling that you will hit very quick in terms of value engine staples which will actually ensure that your deck can hang at higher power as well as lower power tables and scale pretty well both ways. In 4c, you have to be more mindful about your power level. This is why you'll notice I've excluded some notable cards - such as Consecrated Sphinx, Rhystic Study, Burgeoning, Dryad of the Ilysian Grove, and often even Smothering Tithe, as well as numerous tutors and free spells (especially counterspells and Deflecting Swat. Even now I am constantly alternating between powering up and powering down the deck. With how this deck plays out each game, it's a lot less clear whether or not the deck is of a higher power level than the pod because it has very few inherent wincons and no means of taking over the game in sheer value because we rely on opponents so much to win. However, if you can manage to stay alive long enough to get yourself ramped with card draw going, or a Sunforger online, you will be incredibly hard to kill when it comes time to start deleting players from the game.
If you made it this far and want more details on how to play the deck, just go read my Queen Marchesa primer linked above - the playstyle, cards choices, and decks that this deck is weak to are all the same as my Queen Marchesa list.
