Welcome to Yoga Class; a Guide to the Most Flexible cEDH deck

Vafnar · February 21, 2026, 7:49am

“Brewers advantage” is normally a term reserved for decks that are new or that look to play a specific strategy deviation from the norm. If you are unfamiliar with a random deck because you have never seen it, just the fact of being in the dark of the general gameplan can lose you many games. If your opponents have no idea how a deck works you are at an advantage due to them possibly mistiming interaction or using it incorrectly. The trend of specific pilots specialized in a “dark horse” deck which attacks the meta from a unique advantage is not new to cedh.

I want to discuss the advantage from a different angle. Flexibility is a strong part of this. If your deck can win from many different angles your opponents - who might be used to a different or older version of your deck - this can allow you to win under games when your opponents might not realize a key piece slips through. In my mind there is no deck more flexible to your needs than the partner combination of Rograkh, Son of Rohgahh with Thrasios, Triton Hero . More famously RogThras. I think that this deck is so flexible in fact, that I have 6 versions of the deck and want to discuss what I believe are the cards you could run. Between the 6 versions, this amounts to roughly 400 unique cards.

Yeah, I’m not reading all that. How do I find the short version?

I will acknowledge reading about one person wax about all of the different versions that he plays might be somewhat biased and long winded. I have spent the last year just playing RogThras, I have alot to say about that even if I don’t have tons of tournament performances. The core versions of my decks are all inspired by ideas and playpatterns I found from other players.

While I will be disusing the different players who inspired and built the variations in RogThras, you should talk with them directly. The RogThras DIscord is a great place to chat with many of the players mentioned throughout this. If you have questions about the deck or a specific version, I encourage you to search around and find the information.

Before going into it, some housekeeping:

Why is this so wordy? How is this designed?

When talking about what is “The Most Flexible Deck” naturally this comes with it many places to pivot and talk about tangents and inclusions.

The tangents and comparisons bring with it the fact its hard to talk about anything in magic in a vacuum. Everything relates to each other and on a sliding scale. Mindset and your approach to your games and meta will dictate the most about your experience.

I am one person, and this has been a passion project of mine for awhile. I hope you learn something and I hope you enjoy.

Is this a strategy primer?

No, but also Kinda? For advice on how to pilot the deck, I really recommend getting reps in. This is a somewhat difficult deck to goldfish if you don’t have a clear path you want to take and an objective for your hand. This deck simply cannot ignore what the matchups are for mulligan purposes. Grixis and 4 color “soup” lists have it much easier in my opinion since many combo lines and considerations are completely independent to the board in those colors. Casting Thassa’s Oracle and Demonic Consultation doesn’t have dependencies on the board outside of Rule of Law. How you could theoretically combo in this deck can create and inspire puzzles for some of the mind-boggling lines.

It’s near impossible to talk about this deck outside of context and so throughout this piece you will see many sidebars and tangents that I will go through and wrap back around to. This mainly meant o be a discussion piece on the deck and about how you can build it plus how other players build it.

I spent the last year just playing the deck and brewing my own version. I started with Sam Black’s build, discovered more breach focused ones, and found my way to the real juice. My bias will show up throughout this as I fully believe that many players overlook alot of very good cards and do not experiment enough.

A real strategy primer would stick to a single deck and dive into the way to play that specific deck. This is not that.

What about budget versions?

This is an expensive deck to build from a real world money perspective. If you are a proxy non-believer, many version of this deck are flat out not possible to build for the average American. Some versions go for upwards of $40,000 depending on the bling.

I only have 1 version in paper. That deck is made up of majority proxies and cards that I have won playing in events. I really recommend playing on Tabletop Simulator or MTGO if you are unable to play in a proxy friendly environment. There’s great communities and tournaments that fire on both which don’t get the eyes they deserve.

But what is the actual “best” version?

This is a question without a clear answer for a few frustrating reasons.

The players that are playing the deck at a very high level have wildly different lists from one another and in many cases they themselves have multiple versions of the deck running at the same time.
Due to the massive volume and popularity of the different versions of RogThras there isn’t really a definitive primer like how there is for BlueFarm, RogSi, or Kinnan. One could argue Semi-Blue or PolyTyrant are the closest to a “set-list” due to the limited number of tools for the archetypes. Both of these versions are also not widely played and/or are not nearly as good as the midrange/simic/turbo variations.
Good players will win with anything. Two of the most notable players (Sam Black and Jonathan Vick) share only 31 cards. Even what you might at first assume to be staples like Candelabra of Tawnos are not played between every version. Play what is best for your own play style and what you feel might be most adaptive with your meta?

If you want to go off of popularity, Pidgeonize’s version is the one that gained the most traction during 2025 during his run for the Steel City Invitational.

If you want to go off of conversion rate, Sam Black continues to pump out win after win, though his many versions have several pieces that many players of the deck will disagree with based on their local meta

If you want to go off of speed, Jonathan Vick’s version is by far the best at being able to push turn 2 wins. His list is under constant maintenance. If you want a deck that is “set it and forget it” I unfortunately can’t recommend it.

If you want to go off of style, my deck can do a kickflip .

I’m a visual learner, do you have any Youtube Videos to watch?

Of course!
Please check out this video as the accompanying piece to this written post. It just so happens that Jordan and I were working on RogThras projects at the same time and we decided to sync up.

Why aren’t there Scryfall or card links?

Turns out for my own sanity and for the sake of the community I wanted to be thorough, and with that there’s a lot of cards I felt that I had to at least give a passing mention to due to the wide range of applicability to different metas. Additionally, many people watch very skilled pilots like Sam Black dominate tournaments with downright bad cards then wonder why they can’t get the same results.

That last part can be boiled down to “skill difference” mostly, but there is a lot of merit to the fact many very good players are able to sneak many pet cards into their lists. This deck is flexible enough to where you can’t really tell whats amazing and whats super bad without outright losing 10-20 matches in a row or without actively tutoring and changing your playstyle.

The list of cards I wanted to talk about was…. very long. Tons of players want to talk about this deck in a vacuum and discuss how each card affects the other cards in this list. In reality this kind of deck doesn’t just thrive but preforms much better when you stop considering the cards in your own deck and start building cards according to your opponents’ decks. To communicate that core point effectively some compromises had to be made. The main one was that this article wouldn’t load Scryfall links if I tried to link every card talked about. At the end there will be a master link of all the decklists referenced as well as a Moxfield package of the obscure cards you might not see without actively looking and play testing.

Thank you for your time.

The Core 60 - Cradlefarm.

As it currently stands^[1] just over half the deck can be mostly agreed on. The core of the list answers two main fundamentals.

What can we do to best use the draw engine in the command zone? (Thrasios)
How can we use the free body in the command zone to enable that? (Rograhk)

The answer is in one card. Gaea's Cradle . Cradle is a crazy card. There’s no two ways around it. Everything we look to do in this deck is to enable the massive mana engine that is Cradle. Most decks outside of cradle itself can agree somewhere between 6-9 “effective cradles” is what you want. The goal is to have cradle out and use it as much as you can. This can be;

Searching it up like the commonly used Sylvan Scrying, Vibrance, Sowing Mycospawn, Expedition Map, and Crop Rotation.
Having a copy or alternate version of it through Growing Rites of Itlimoc, Nykthos Shrine to Nyx, Three Tree Cities or in some cases Clever Impersonator
Untap effects which can use cradle multiple times a turn like Deserted Temple, Minamo, Candalabra of Tawnos, and Hidden Strings.
Using “the chain” to grab a copy of the above

Tutor Chaining

A big trend throughout this is that you are likely going to see many tutors that interconnect.

Summoner’s Pact is being run more often to Grab Vibrance since Vibrance can grab Cradle. Likewise if the game is going late you can instead pivot to grab Formidable Speaker which can grab Spellseeker to grab Nature’s Rhythm… Rhythm can grab Cloud of Faeries untapping your stuff to grab Flesh Dupe which now copies Seeker to get Finale which gets Oboro.

1. Pact -> Speaker -> Spellseeker -> Rhythm -> Cloud of Faeries -> Clone
If clone speaker -> Breezecaller, Eternal Witness, another clone
If clone Spellseeker -> Crop Rotation, Finale, Hidden Strings, Chatterstorm

2. Breezecaller now has 6 bodies for Talon loop
3. Ewit can get back potential Snap or clone for win
4. Crop rotation can find missing land for win
If Spellseeker -> Finale
Finale -> Ewit (target finale) -> Finale....

and on it goes. So long as you have the mana the tutors can find eachother to not only assemble your win directly to the board but also supply the mana to keep tutoring when possible. If this sounds like an impossible Christmas land dream, please keep in mind the goal of this deck is to make massive amounts of mana. It doesn’t matter what version you are playing. The goal is make mana and use it. These tutor chains don’t need to happen all at once they can be spaced out or they can find other pieces in the deck to pivot to the developing board situation.

I would never expect to be able to go from Pact all the way to a second Finale in one turn without either my opponents being completely hellbent and asleep with no board, or its turn 10 and someone mistimed a removal spell throwing the game.

The full chain accessible to most decks

Summoner's Pact -> Formiddable Speaker -> Spellseeker -> Nature's Rhythm -> Flesh Duplicate (copy Spellseeker) -> Snap to hand.
Harmonize Rhythm -> Phyrexian Metamorph (copy Spellseeker) -> Finale of Dev.
Finale -> Eternal Witness return Summoner's Pact
Pact -> Vibrance
Vibrance -> any missing land (Cradle, Talon Gates, Command Tower...)
Snap -> Speaker -> Oboro Breezecaler -> Breezecaller line assembled all requirements met.
////
Snap -> Ewit -> Ewit returns Snap -> Snap loop assembled assuming no breezecaller

At any point along this chain you can pivot to a different loop or line depending on the board and current gamestate.

Whenever I refer to “the chain” assume I am talking about assembling this loop or in some ways going through it

Basically, tutor for a creature tutor which finds a tutor. Find Cloud of Faeries if you need mana, if you don’t you can grab your win.

We have our mana engine, we have our card engine and we have a core piece to tie them together. Where should we go from here outside of the shoe-ins^[2]? Starting firstly with winning, its typically good for every deck to have 2-3 winlines we can construct and get to in case of the either our primary one being in exile or in case our opponents interact with a win or our board while we win. The core of every RogThras deck can win with these 3 main lines.

Oboro Breezecaller combined with Talon Gates and Gaea’s Cradle with 6 total creatures on board.
Eternal Witness combined with Snap as long as you have 2GGU mana production from 2 untaps
Finale of Devastation

Fine, these aren’t “wins”. What this does is give us infinite mana or something to do with our googles of mana. If you’re playing in a tournament and you need the full win post-combat, each version of the deck has its own series of loops and levers it can pull to get to that point to enable you to pop off. Even through a potential Silence or Angels Grace effect.

Think of your deck like the Grid.

The grid is a wonder of human invention. Like have you ever thought about how we burn tons of Coal and Methane, put up Solar Panels, Wind Turbines, Hydroelectric Dams, and have built Transformers, plus put millions of miles of cables around the world just so someone can ask a glowing rectangle in their pocket “ChatGPT can you summarize this?” Modern Science is crazy… Every part of the grid is there to do a job and keep the whole system running. If its a cloudy day, the wind turbines are there to keep power flowing. If there’s no wind and its the middle of the night the dams release water to spin turbines for the night workers of the world to see. If the dams are jammed, the suns not shining, and there’s no wind, then we can fire up the Natural Gas plants to burn fuel just in case. The contingencies and redundancies within the grid are amazing.

I say all this to give a metaphor on how this deck operates. The Temur section of the color pie struggles with finding specific pieces in a cheap and flexible way. No Demonic Tutor, Diabolic Intent, or Vampiric Tutor for the quick wins. We also don’t have the protection of Grand Abolisher, Voice of Victory and Silence style cards for truly universally protected wins. What we have is good efficient card draw effects through blue, explosive rituals and burst effects through red, and lots of mana advantage, ramp, and creature effects in green.

Each card you can play functions like a different structure of the grid. There’s “batteries” to store the “power” of your deck for future turns, “power-plants” which generate the resources for you to use when playing, and “engines” which use the resources. I know “Engine” is a term used throughout MTG in other contexts but here I want to use it purely as a metaphor for what we are trying to achieve.

Commonly, the 60 cards you see across decks includes cheap and efficient ways to generate a lot of bodies at once.

Chatterstorm enables you to cast a bunch of rocks in a row early on and convert your mana into a “battery” supplying mana for a future turn.
Spingheart Nantuko at its floor allows you to turn your land drops into more bodies for future cradle activates. Additionally during Thrasios spins it can supply bodies to your board to allow you to spring for your next cradle activation

Many decks choose not to include monocolor dorks for reasons that I’ll get to later on, still though most decks can agree that a few of the low costed creatures are great for fixing the board and starting your gameplan strong.

Gene Pollinator is a 2 toughness creature that can dodge removal from Orcish Bowmaster. This deck in general is very weak to Bowmaster and is a constant consideration when thinking about the deck. Gene Pollinator is also great in conjunction with Rog as there’s always at least 1 non-land on the field to use. In versions containing Tezzeret and Mox Opal, Gene being an artifact is also very relevant.
Birds of Paradise is universally the standard for dorks. Able to make any mana of any color for the investment of 1 green pip is generally good enough for every deck. Even the faster versions looking to pop off quickly, unless they have good reason typically Birds is included. This isn’t the greatest card in the deck, but a strong number of workhorse cards is important.
Badgermole Cub has quickly become a staple. Pretty much from the moment this was spoiled until now this 2 cmc guy has proven in spades to be the most broken card printed since Nature’s Rhythm. BMC has entire puzzles and winlines dedicated to the thing and later on the full power will be talked about. 2 bodies and a boost to mana generation is always a great start.

Lets call these “batteries” and put a pin in that idea.

Now that we have effective ways to generate lots of small things in a deck full of small things lets try and add more ways to use those.

Enduring Vitality and Cryptolith Rite both effectively turn our body generation into additional mana outside of Cradle. If we have played our spells before hand we can convert all of that stored mana into a big burst of card draw via Thrasios if nothing else.
Earthcraft enables you to turn your bodies into mana the turn it comes down allowing for bigger storm turns. Effects like Wild Growth and Badgermole Cub naturally slot in nicely enabling for wild Earthcraft turns as well as some very long turns.

So we have mana in the future as well as many ways to convert and use that mana. So how do we find everything? Green is known for its efficient and effective creature tutor spells. What’s next is to figure out ways to access everything.

Nature’s Rhythm is the main connecting glue that allows you to chain multiple creatures to the board and pivot your gameplan around what you could possibly do.
Finale of Devastation is the only green tutor that can pull from both Graveyards and Library making it not only a flexible tutor but an important recursion piece if stopped.
Green Sun’s Zenith is the most efficient X tutor which can find parts of our combo when we are looking to close it out or look for good value conversion.
Chord of Calling is generally the only instant speed tutor effect at a slightly overpriced rate. Don’t let the CMC fool you, the abundance of small creatures and the possibility of huge boards makes it consistently cost 1-2 mana.
I’ll also put Sowing Mycospawn here as its an uninterruptible land tutor which can be used both as a winning lock piece, as a way to access our main plan and our backup plans.

Well we have oogles and bajillions of mana, but what do we do while spinning Thras wheels. The frank truth is sometimes you’re spinning and you just need a little bit more gas. Every deck can agree that there are a few “chargers” that functionally reload Cradle the turn you want to pop off that are just needed or free for the deck.

Candelabra of Tawnos is just free. Often times it functions as 2 mana make 5 with more upside beyond that. Untapping each other land untap effect also generates more mana as you go.
Deserted Temple. The main colorless utility source in the deck enabling you to untap not just cradle but potentially your opponents’ lands freeing up interaction they otherwise forgot to hold up mana for.
Minamo, School at Water’s Edge. While functionally an Island in alot of games, there are many where you can convert effectively UU mana into GGGGGG. Often you’ll find the trade worth it.
Hidden Strings. The most recent addition to this section, Strings has come to be a staple of the deck. Converting 1U into upwards of 20 mana in a single turn is quite strong. With Cradle and any other Untap effect on board you are able to generate a total of 4 cradle untaps precombat.

How to quickly do “Cradle Math”

This is a lesson for everyone playing AGAINST RogThras and to people trying to get better at the deck. There are many tricks seasoned players use to calculate how far they can go and what they can do in a single turn when pressured for time. I want to share some of that knowledge to try and dispel the “RogThras player takes 40 minute turn only to pass” stigma.

Step 1: Creature count

Tally up your creatures once when you start to go off. The number is probably not changing throughout your turn unless there’s a bowmaster or some kind of removal shown. Alternatively the way it goes up is through adding to it. I like to have it on a D20 at the top of my board.

Step 2: Storm Count

I know this is a pain, but trust me this will save you time and headache. Chatterstorm is an important enough card, and Flusterstorm popular enough to where you will likely need to reference the storm count once per game there have been times where I’ve paid for 6 or more Flusters, the deck just operates like that sometimes.

Step 3: Untap count

Tally every untap effect you can have in one place. Deserted Temple, Minamo, Candalabra, etc if its on board, count those separate. The original untap of cradle also counts here.

Step 4: The Cradles and your math shortcut

Now that we have everything to pop off lets get a count to begin. The “formulas” go Mana=(creatures x Untaps) - activation || Cards = mana*/ (*4 / discounts)

Discounts in this context is Training Grounds and similar effects.

Lets say you have a board of 5 creatures, Cradle, and Deserted Temple. you would make 9 floating green from that. the First cradle taps for 5, you pay 1 to activate Temple, you then have GGGG floating, tapping cradle again makes 9G total.

Getting more complicated, a board of 4 creatures, Cloud of Faeries in hand, Cradle, Deserted Temple, Candalabra of Tawnos can optimally make…… 6 cards

Cast Cloud of Faeries → trigger on stack hold priority, float 5 → activate temple go to 4 float 9 → trigger resolves float 14 →activate temple go to 13, float go to 18. → Candalabra X=2 now have 16 → cradle goes to 21, activate temple go to 20, float 25 mana with cradle. One fourth of 25 rounds to 6 with 1 green left over. Or you can do (5 creatures x 6 untaps) - 5 activation costs. ((5x6)-5)/4 (REMEMBER: ADD THE ORIGINAL CRADLE ACTIVATION)

I’ll dive back into this “power-plant” metaphor in the future of this primer. But whats widely agreed on is that these cards make up the core of every power-plant. Like in real life every power-plant is not a one size fits all solution. Instead what you are looking to do is “manage the grid”. Your goal every game no matter the deck is to float 30 mana. If you can float 30 mana you’re likely winning.

What Rog Does for Simic

Purely Simic

Interestingly enough, a wide portion of the player base does not like Red cards. Simic RogThras is a slower midrange playstyle which as the name suggests does not play any red cards. Instead it leans into the more board controlling aspects of Green and Blue using efficient interaction to stall the game to where they have an effective board state to win the game. This is the least explosive version and often leans on political skill and arguments like “I’m not on Breach…” in order to gain leverage at the table to extend the game. Of all the versions this is the most like “draw-go control” from traditional 60 card formats.

By only running Green and Blue cards the mana base can have a lot more utility lands in it via shaving Fetchlands, Duals or otherwise fixing lands. Rograkh in these versions of the deck is mainly used to have a body for mana rocks that need him and as a free body for Gaea’s Cradle. The mana load often includes:

Dryad Arbor^[3]. Having a fetchable body function as just a tapland is nice. Not running any red cards in it also mitigates the downside of a monocolored tapland. Interestingly the density of other creature enabling mana spells like Cryptolith Rite, Enduring Vitality and Earthcraft often mean that Dryad Arbor can just be a fetchable body or something you can find with an x=0 tutor.
Mistrise Village. Once again, a potential monocolored tapland which gets to have a bigger play making role by forcing through a key spell later in the game.
Hedge Maze is often cut in higher color versions as the utility of a surveil land in cedh is very minimal. That being said, flipping it off of Thrasios is a relevant use case. This is the version that will often have that part come up the most since these games are going to aim to go the longest.
Sink into Stupor functions as both interaction and potential lands. MDFC cards have a strange relationship with this deck as oftentimes if you are manually spinning with Thrasios you actually want to hit the land side of the card in order to continue spinning. Sink though is a flexible enough piece to where you are OK with sacrificing that part of the card and instead are happy with more wide interaction.
Spellskite is an oddball. While yes its a colorless card you could run, the Simic versions tend to have this in them more frequently as their decks are made up of smaller pieces that need to be protected. Paying potentially 6 life to stuff a Bowmaster, or more likely using your political skill to manuever the board and keep certain things alive is well worth it. In some games it does alot, in others its really invisible but still changes the way your opponenets play.
The truly green leaning decks sometimes include Yavimaya Cradle of Growth. This is by no means the most common include, but it shows up here and in some of the more exotic versions.

Rog has the amazing side effect of for free turning on commander free spells like Fierce Guardianship and Deflecting Swat. The pull to this version outside of the land-base is also in its much wider interaction package.

The more widely universal land base allows for spells that would otherwise be much hard to cast giving the deck many more tools for different situations

Emerald Charm sees play in other versions of the deck, but is most prominent here. It’s one of the most efficient cradle untap effects at just a single green pip, but serves the additional flexibility of being able to destroy key threats on the board like an early Necropotence, Rhystic Study, Underworld Breach or stax effect like Chains of Mephistopheles or High Noon.
Force of Vigor is played here as in other versions that include Red its often harder to constantly have online. Force of Vigor allows you to play a tempo role in stopping wins. Destroying Necropotence, Underworld Breach, Smothering Tithe and Rhystic Studies while also being able to tempo the other players mana in hitting Sol Rings, Signets, and Moxen makes this overall fantastic board interaction
Archdruids Charm is the hardest to cast tutor for cradle, which can function as universal removal in a pinch. Make your creatures fight a bowmaster at instant speed, exile a rhystic, get your cradle. It does it all at the low low cost of GGG. The casting cost is one of the reasons higher pip decks don’t run it. The other being the 3 mana casting cost. While its certainly a flexible spell doing literally everything you might need, its not exactly efficient in what you might want it to do in any moment.

Rog in the version is here to enable free spells and allow for interaction you otherwise couldn’t run. For example

Louisoix’s Sacrifice (The French Defense) is a common tournament pick that for a single U pip and the murder of your 0/1 can interact with anything. In the late game if the board is truly stalled out you can pay full price for it, though this is never recommended. Stopping Sisay activation, Tayam spins, Gitrog Triggers on top of Thoracle wins, opponents counterspells and Ranger-Captain sacrifices makes this overall a key piece of interaction for making it to the late game.
Spider-Sense is much in the same vein of the French Defense. While being overall less flexible, it still hits a wide range of targets letting you better make it to the late game.
Flare of Duplication is another Rog Killer. The crux of Simic is that its hard to be flexible. Flare allows a new axis of flexibility to it enabling you to copy a tutor over top a counterspell or copy a counterspell pointed at your core pieces. While this version only can sacrifice Rog, its a cheap enough effect to where even if you recast Rog you’re still getting a discounted rate over hard casting.

Outside of Rograkh, the pull to a simic only playstyle is the ways this can win. While everything talked about in this section is possible in the other versions of RogThras, they become significantly easier in this version due to the modified land base and due to the overall flexibility afforded from not having as high a number of Duals and fetchlands. This deck has a few layered win lines revolving around key instants.

The Western Loops

This Town Ain’t Big Enough or TTABE for short allows you to bounce two things to hand each iteration of the loop. Rog is often used as part of the pieces to loop when a discount is needed. However the spell can just be used as cheap interaction to deal with problematic things as they come when you can’t combo.

The basics for whats needed:
TTABE in hand

Eternal Witness in play.

A Mana producer of 2UGG additional mana total. (For the baseline I will use Candalabra of Tawnos, assuming a board of Gaea’s Cradle an Island and 6 other random creatures)

Tap cradle for 7G and your Island for U,
Cast TTABE targeting both Ewit and Candalabra GGGGGGU (6G + U) floating
Cast Ewit target TTABE, GGGU floating
Cast Candalabra GGU floating, activate x=2 U floating
Untap Cradle and Island
Repeat from 2

This loop has lots of ways it can be discounted or changed. For example, Wild Growth can be a substitute for a creature, lands like Deserted Temple can also be untapped with Candalabra to generate additional mana.

For the next one, we’re going to assume Cradle isn’t available for whatever reason.

TTABE, Cloud of Faeries, and Flesh Duplicate in hand.

Basic Forest with Utopia Sprawl enchanted on it - OR - Basic Island with Wild Growth enchanted on it. Plus any other U producing land.

Float UUG from the basic and your other land.
Cast Cloud of Faeries, U floating
Untap the two lands
Tap the lands float UUUG
Cast Flesh Dupe copying CoF, UG floating.
Untap 2 lands
Cast TTABE bounce Cloud of Faeries and Flesh Dupe

This is a situation where we have the ability to produce infinite “twiddle”. as long as we can get TTABE back. This can be via Eternal Witness + Displacer Kitten or some Endurance loop or anything else, doesn’t matter. “Twiddle” functionally means all we are doing is tapping and untapping our lands over and over again. Nothing changes.

There are many board states with the card that look like they produce a win, but are really not. All we achieve with this loop is drawing out the timer.

I’m mentioning this here for two reasons;

Its a lesson in looking ahead and goldfishing. This is a deck that has loops with many steps to it. Your opponents should force you to play out every win that you have since they might be doing the math differently from you or may want to stop you at a junction further down the road. Pressure means everything, if you’re not used to playing under a timer or playing in a tournament setting I strongly recommend booting up Tabletop Simulator, Cockatrice, or even just the Moxfield playtest tab and goldfishing at least 10 games per win line you want to include.
At the tournament level a harsh truth is sometimes it’s beneficial to run the time out. The rules have to change to make this more punishing, as many players do not want to call the time on other players for the social reason of the game. This needs to be called out more and addressed. Game Rule Violations are not enforced enough at CEDH tournaments and players who are taking advantage of this need to be called out. Doing the math or doing these moves slowly then pretending you counted wrong can be avoided by simply counting ahead. Loops like the TTABE ones are possible in other decks and are sometimes run in “functional mirrors” such as Yoshi/Thras or other RogThras decks. Being a good player means spotting these ahead and getting a judge early on to watch for bad acting.

TTABE does actually enable loops that don’t require Gaea’s Cradle should it be destroyed. For the next one, we’re going to assume Cradle has been destroyed.

On board:

Earthcraft + Badgermole Cub, with Earthbent Basic Island. Basic Forest in play

TTABE, Eternal Witness and Cloud of Faeries in hand

Float UGG from basics. Cast Cof G floating.
Untap both lands, tap them float GGGU
Activate Earthcraft, Tap BMC, Untap Island. Float GGGGUU
Activate Earthcraft, Tap CoF untap Island Float GGGGGUUU
Cast TTABE target BMC and Cof. GGGGUU floating
Cast BMC. ETB target Basic Forest GGUU floating
Cast CoF, untap both basics GU Floating.
Tap the now earthbent forest, float GGGU
Cast Ewit U floating
ETB Return TTABE
Activate Earthcraft Tap CoF, untap Island. Tap Island Floating GUU
Activate Earthcraft Tap Ewit, untap Island. Tap Island Floating GGUUU
Cast TTABE target CoF + Ewit Floating GUU
Cast CoF floating U
Untap both lands, U in mana pool
Tap both lands float GGGUU
Cast Ewit, target TTABE UU in pool.
Return from 10 each time floating an additional U

Is this a 5 card combo? Yes.

Is this difficult to assemble? Shockingly no. Everything listed aside from Earthcraft can be tutored for with nearly each tutor in the deck. Refer back to the tutor chain for assembly. Most of what you are searching for early on sets this up for later use.

I also want to stress this loop is being refered to on a gamestate where cradle has been destroyed, usually via Bosejui in a game where it goes late and tutors are being used the mana from Earthcraft normally is good enough. If you’re asking yourself why didn’t the Bosejui kill the Earthcraft, that either implies 2 separate ones were used or that you didn’t have the protection to secure your late game win attempt.

Lines like these while not common are very important to keep in your back pocket should you run into overtime or need to win at instant speed. Every version of the deck is on Alchemist Refuge or Emergence Zone for this reason.

Tap Dancing Otters

Valley Floodcaller has 2 lines of text and 1 keyword.

“You may cast noncreature spells as though they had flash // Whenever you cast a noncreature spell, Birds, Frogs, Otters, and Rats you control get +1/+1 until end of turn. Untap them.”

This might be the only current deck that cares about the second line as much as the first.

Each instance of the second line is a triggered ability which untaps VFC and all other Otters (and Birds). By cloning it, you can stack these abilities and respond to each instance. Recall back all the various ways you can make your creatures tap for mana. Earthcraft, Eduring Vitality, and Cryptolith Rite come into the spotlight once again.

Starting with Earthcraft, you can tap each VFC to generate 1 mana. So every noncreature spell effecitvely is discounted by 1 mana each time you cast one. Cloning it means you have 2 untap triggers. Meaning you can hold prioirty on each trigger, tap them floating 2 mana, then let them resolve individually. This nets you 4 mana on each noncreature. If you have 2 clones on VFC this means you have 3 triggers. Each trigger untaps 3 things meaning you float a total of 9 mana. The equation can get even more insane than this. Remember we have Wild Growth in this deck. With Wild growth out each untap makes 2 mana. This means VFC baseline nets 2 mana, a clone on it nets 8 mana per cast, and 2 clones nets 18 mana. Wild Growth isn’t the only way to net more. We also have access to Birds of Paradise, Utopia Sprawl and Swan Song.

Thats right, this is a deck that allows Swan Song to be a ritual in rare cases. Swan Song your own spell or if you have a Swan token from earlier in the game each Bird untaps makes 1 mana from each untap.

If you don’t have Earthcraft, the same effects can be achieved with every mana producer. The most common is going to just be a plain Birds of Paradise. While it won’t have the same exponential growth as Earthcraft, having a flat mana producer every time you cast something is very nice. To truely utilize this, you can bestow Springheart Nantuko on Valley Floodcaller and begin creating clones of it with your fetchlands and Thrasios spins. While not a common way to win its another niche line that makes winning easier

Now at this point you may notice I’ve listed 4 “niche winlines” this deck can pull off. A real beauty of being unshackled from traditional “just win” cards like Thoracle and Breach means that many layered wins are technically possible when you squint hard enough with enough mana. This deck is built to make mana and a large number of these winning spots go unnoticed.

If you find yourself searching around online, several winning players have created puzzles to solve for from both winning games and using the Eldrazi.dev app. The RogThras discord once again has an entire puzzle section if you find yourself board.

There’s other misc utility pieces that you see in the purely simic versions that don’t really slot nicely into every other category

Frantic Search. This is an oddball that comes up sometimes in faster versions of the deck. The logic goes that its a very cheap and effective way to generate a huge burst of mana for very few pips. Untapping Deserted Temple, Minamo and Cradle can effectively generate 3 cradles worth of mana, not only that but in a deck that looks to rapidly dig through cards on a winning turn having a way to do that in a spell that can refund its own cost is amazing. The crux is that its very telegraphed and often eats counterspells without political intervention. So other decks use different forms of untappers depending on the goals.
Arbor Elf. As mentioned earlier this is the version that runs Yavimaya. Arbor elf at its floor is a 1 mana 1/1…. not great but at its cieling it can untap cradle multiple times in a turn through various shenanigans. Cheap and efficient is the name of the game so for a low opportunity cost it gets the slot.
Prismatic Vista. The Simic version actually utilizes Earthcraft the best of all the other versions. Having an extra fetchalnd to get just basics is a nice include even if its not the splashiest of effects.
Elvish Reclaimer. A 1/2 body that for 2 more mana allows you to exchange any land for a tapped Cradle. Later in the game it can also be used to at instant speed find Talon Gates. Not a fast effect by any measure of the word but having extra tutors makes up for the lack of explosiveness.
Invasion of Ikoria. This might be a head scratcher as you’ll see this in a wide range of decks that include red. The given trend though from a playstyle perspective asks the question: How fast are you? Since Invasion of Ikoria can’t grab Spellseeker or Eternal Witness, the faster versions of the deck skip out on Invasion as a second “worse” copy of Finale often doesn’t make the cut. While there are cool things possible when combined with Chain of Vapor and other bounce effects, it often is cut in favor of more utility focused effects

Actually, Factually, Winning the Game

Every loop previously brought up is always an infinite mana loop. 80% of the time people will concede from there. Sometimes there’s an odd piece of interaction and you have to present a way to really win.

The real way to win in the deck will be mentioned here and is possible in every version from infinite mana onward. Various versions will have their own version to play around a given effect like Ranger-Captain or The One Ring. But this is the core.

So assume infinite mana and an uninterrupted loop. Activate Thrasios drawing 90% of the deck and putting all lands in play. Assume one of the cards drawn is a flash enabling effect. It doesn’t matter which one, it can be Alchemist Refuge, Emergence Zone, Borne Upon a Wind, Valley Floodcaller, whatever it is just go with it. Activate your flash effect and we begin.

Cast Faerie Mastermind.
Cast Green Sun’s Zennith and shuffle it into your deck.
Activate Faerie Mastermind and everyone draws a card.
Continue activating until you draw Green Sun’s Zenith
Cast Green Sun’s Zenith in response to FMM activation, then let it resolve.

Doing this loop will force everyone to draw their deck, so how do we play around all potential interaction?

Well since we had infinite mana, assemble your Oboro Breezecaller loop if you haven’t already.

Cast Eternal Witness and then use the Bestow ability on Spingheart Nantuko onto Eternal Witness. Eternal Witness and Springheart Nantuko combined allows an instant speed repeatable loop to “buyback” all potential interaction.

Using Oboro Breezecaller to bounce Talon Gates to hand lets you use the activated ability at instant speed. This triggers Springheart Nantuko letting you create an on demand clone of Eternal Witness. This then brings back any piece you might need like an eternal Mindbreak Trap to exile any and all spells potentially cast. Resolving Veil of Summer first allows you to additionally make all your spells uncounterable by anything thrown at you.

The last piece to play around is Angels Grace. This one requires some background in rules knowledge.

Angels Grace does actually nothing in many situations

So lets talk rules. What does Angels Grace actually do, how does it work and how do Silence style “Until End of Turn” effects work.

In magic the gathering according to the comprehensive rules for 514 the game first checks to see what state based effects need to end, then you discard to hand size and the game moves on to the next turn. The key part to this ordering is that a round of priority is created after effects wear off. For the purposes of Angels it wears off before we discard to hand size.

So in order to get the game to favor us, we need to create a situation where due to discards a round of priority is created. The deck has 2 ways to achieve this.

Discard a commander to hand size
Use Springheart Nantuko on Shifting Woodlands

Bounce Rograhk to your hand via Otawara and boom, you have a way to create a round of priorty on your turn.

If you’re trying to play at instant speed, Bestow Springheart on Woodlands after you use its ability to copy a creature. This will let you do it on an opponenet’s turn.

If you are trying to prove this point in game here are the relavent rules to show your friends

514.3 Normally, no player receives priority during the cleanup step, so no spells can be cast, and no abilities can be activated.

514.3a At this point, the game checks to see if any state-based actions would be performed and/or any triggered abilities are waiting to be put onto the stack (including those that trigger “at the beginning of the next cleanup step”). If so, those state-based actions are performed, then those triggered abilities are put on the stack, then the active player gets priority. Players may cast spells and activate abilities. Once the stack is empty and all players pass in succession, another cleanup step begins.

903.9. A commander may return to the command zone during a Commander game.

903.9a If a commander is in a graveyard or in exile and that object was put into that zone since the last time state-based actions were checked, its owner may put it into the command zone. This is a state-based action. See rule 704.

702.103f If a bestowed Aura becomes unattached, it ceases to be bestowed. If a bestowed Aura is attached to an illegal object or player, it becomes unattached and ceases to be bestowed. This is an exception to rule 704.5m.

704.5m If an Aura is attached to an illegal object or player, or is not attached to an object or player, that Aura is put into its owner’s graveyard.

So this was the Simic pile. Or at least a general idea of the playstyle and the cards run here. These cards are not exclusive to it, in fact much the opposite. The draw is that the cards you can run become easier to cast and consistent when you eliminate Red from your mana base. Adding some red has many benefits and moving up the sliding scale brings us to the first and most obvious include

Midrange with a dash of Red

The midrange

Lets just rip into it.

Underworld Breach

One of the things you hear a lot with different pilots who both look at the deck online and also who look at other people building the list but don’t play it a ton is “Where is Underworld Breach in the top decks?” Well here’s the thing. In temur, you just can’t find it. That about sums up this whole section.

Temur lacks Demonic Tutor plus its effective copies; this is the ability to quickly get Underworld Breach. Demonic Tutor and functional copies can also then be used in conjunction with Breach to get Lion’s Eye Diamond, that can then be used to put your hand to your graveyard to then cast Demonic Tutor again which gets Brain Freeze. Congrats from 1 card you’ve assembled the win. Each “copy” of Dtutor like Diabolic Intent gets the next piece you need.

Temur flat out cannot do this beyond 1 card. Gamble. Gamble is for what amounts to a single red pip a demonic tutor with a chance to Entomb your target. Gamble introduces layers of variance (as the card name suggests) however there are other more political tools at your disposal that you can sneak into your build. Intuition and Gifts Ungiven both offer two different options at being able to search out a range of cards at once. Without the inclusion of Sevvine’s Reclamation or other reanimation spells like Animate Dead, Necromancy, or just Reanimate as well as the lack of “non-piles” (3 functionally identical cards like those found in Malcolm or Dargo based decks) both options become wildly inconsistent and need different support pieces, some players have experimented and have found several that work;

Shifting Woodlands is a common tech land that is functionally a way to become another copy of the graveyard. After putting multiple types in Grave like Breach/LED its possible to turn delirium on from the moment it hits the field. As a side note; folks, delirium is always on. There’s been 0 games that I can recall where it wasn’t on.
Six. The legendary creature (unlike the number) can help you recast and try winning from the graveyard from the moment deployed or tutored for. There are some lands based builds of RogThras currently being experimented with that also lean on Icetill Explorer and mill cards like Hedron Crab in order to better leverage this effect (and others)

Players have also tried the other approach of having more possible combos with Underworld Breach in order to make it more consistent to assemble

Malevolent Rumble milling 4 cards allows you to achieve a similar result to Grinding Station with LED. The loop is a little hard to grasp but basically when you sacrifice LED for the first time you then can cast Rumble twice since the Eldrazi token made allows you to get an extra mana for the next one. Then the second iteration onwards of this loop lets you cast Rumble 3 times using the green mana from LED combined with the Eldrazi spawns. The loop in general is card neutral once you get passed the first Iteration. This achieves (functionally) your deck in exile and is used to find and setup Brainfreeze wins.
Colossal Skyturtle is a hated or absolutely loved card. Personally I land on the hated side of things. Admittedly in the European meta it seems to be more popular as showcased by Ryley Evan’s top finish with it in there. Ironically, that build does not feature breach, but its used in other versions with breach in order to get it back should it be countered. Channel is a crazy mechanic and stapling it to a bounce spell as well is even better, even if both are overcosted.

SO whats the big deal? “Breach is the most broken combo in the format.” Yes. Outside of Thoracle, there isn’t really any competition. The combo itself is self-protecting. As you go through the loops if someone has a Rhystic Study you are finding more protection for your own combo to eventually shut out all possible interaction anyway. The real issues arise when you take a more holistic view of the deck though.

RogThras (no matter the version) is a synergy deck. What synergy means in this context is that all other cards feed into eachother. We’re trying to up the consistency of the deck by having cards that play into each other’s strengths. The more we make other cards good the more it makes the deck overall good. So lets total up what breach hurts.

Enchantments are just hard to find. Making it difficult to assemble the combo within a single turn. Each card of the combo is so popularly known from other decks any one of them being tutored for is a red flag, making politics more difficult.
Breach being a red card and an Izzet combo makes the rest of the mana base slightly worse. Instead of utility lands like Emergence Zone or Urza’s Saga, you have to concede more room for fixing lands like Volcanic Island, Taiga, and possible rainbow lands.
Breach needs to have a graveyard of cards in order to function. This being a generally board based deck makes it difficult to fill the graveyard without also being in the situation of having many of our pieces in graveyard. This is likely a boardstate or game we are losing and need a fast solution, breach being a card that can’t be found on demand creates a large swing in variance in these games.
Brain Freeze and Lion’s Eye Diamond are both entirely dead cards without Breach.

So what does breach do for us then?

Breach provides a completely board state and commander agnostic combo for us to win with under the condition that we are able to find it.

The dedicated playerbase of the deck is extremely split. I invite you to follow the discussion and read some of the historic comments of why the combo does or doesn’t work in the deck.

Lowryn. A new way forward

The rest of this section is going to be talking about a small red package alongside the core and Simic.

It’s interesting to me how a few new cards can radically change the approach of a deck. It’s also why it’s so impossible to talk about anything in a vacuum. Lorwyn 2026 brought with it 4 key cards which radically presented new ideas in the red-lite versions of the deck and really tore into the idea that you can completely ignore red. Those cards in no particular order are: Vibrance, Formidable Speaker, Hexxing Squelcher, and Summoner’s Pact.

That last one isn’t a new card, but it was overlooked for a very long time, and with it came a package and a whole new season of testing ways to get things through. It just so happens that 2 of the new cards are prime targets for it, and Pact before was being flirted with as a way to break through the board. It doesn’t hurt as well that the set before brought 2 more powerhouses that just happen to fit into this build with The Cabbage Merchant and Wan Shi Tong, Librarian. One draw engine and one mana engine, of which the mana engine can be found with pact in order to pay for pact next turn.

A purely midrange build looks to assemble a high-velocity of cards. The gameplan is simple:

First, we deploy mana. Use Rograkh early on in conjunction with small mana pieces like Springleaf Drum, Mox Amber, and Gene Pollinator to deploy a small board.
Once we have a bit of mana out, get a draw engine going. Mystic Remora and Rhystic Study are the classics but the newly minted Wan Shi Tong, Librarian and even Thrasios himself can fill this roll. Hopefully in this step we have the interaction ready to stop the turbo onslaught.
Start the mana production. Batteries need to be deployed and fuel needs to get on the board in order to turn the cornor and push to our win. Earthcraft, Enduring Vitality, and Gaea’s Cradle are the main ways we get that. This can also be in the form of “transformers” or discount pieces like Biomancer’s Familiar or Training Grounds. If you can activate Thras 2 times vs 1, you’ve effectively “generated” 4 mana via activations.
Get the board big. We have alot of small stuff we can use and alot of mana. On our turn, get as much of our stuff out, and setup to win at your next chance. We have flash effects like Valley Floodcaller, Alchemist Refuge, and just alot of instants plus activated abilities to be able to win ontop of everyone else.

So you’ve acheived lots of mana

Infinity and Beyond

Let me actually walk through some ways to get that “lots” number. I’ve mentioned Oboro Breezecaller and some of the other cards a few times but let me actually explain for those of you who might be confused why I keep bringing it up.

To present infinite mana lets pretend your board is Thrasios, Rograkh, and 2 bird tokens (the specifics don’t matter) once you have Oboro Breezecaller in play. You just need Gaea’s Cradle and Talon Gates of Madara. You’re going to:

Tap Gaea’s Cradle for 6+ mana.
Activate Talon Gates of Madara’s ability to put it from your hand onto the battlefield.
Tap it for mana.
Use the floating + to activate Oboro Breezecaller bouncing Talon Gates of Madara to your hand and untapping Gaea’s Cradle.
Repeat this loop generating one each time (If only tapping for 6 with Cradle)

Talon Gates can be used after you have infinite green mana to filter for all other colors of mana you could need. It can also be broken at any time allowing you to cast any key card you might want in between such as Thrasios or Faerie Mastermind.

This loop can be modified in many ways. Using Wild Growth on Cradle effectivly counts as 1 for the creatures, Biomancer’s Familiar counts for 2 creatures since it also discounts Breezecaller’s ability. This also makes Training Grounds count for a creature as well.

Oboro doesn’t just need Talon Gates though, the most common alternative being… Dryad Arbor? You read that right. Assuming you once again can hit that creature count, when combined with Springheart Nantuko and any landdrop, you can;

Tap Gaea’s Cradle to add at least 5x G. Floating mana: GGGGG
Trigger Springheart Nantuko’s landfall trigger. (This can be a Thrasios Activation, Fetchland, or just a land drop. This includes Gaea’s Cradle itself in some situations.)
Resolve the landfall trigger, paying 1G to make a token copy of Dryad Arbor, which will trigger Springheart Nantuko’s landfall trigger again. Floating mana: GGG
Holding priority on that triggered landfall ability, activate Oboro Breezecaller using GG, bouncing the token Dryad Arbor copy you just made and untapping Gaea’s Cradle. Floating mana: G
Tap Gaea’s Cradle to add at least 5x G. Floating mana: GGGGGG
Loop through steps 3-5, netting G every loop. Floating mana: Infinite G

Springheart Nantuko also can produce infinite mana without Oboro Breezecaller. You can instead use a wide range of Badgermole Cub combinations, like Earthcraft. For this first example, lets start with Chain of Vapor.

Cast Badgermole Cub, on ETB targer a basic land.
Bestow Springheart Nantuko targeting Badgermole Cub.
Trigger landfall (same situation as before). Tap Badgermole Cub through Earthcraft to untap basic land, float (U/G)G, pay for Springheart Nantuko trigger, create a copy of Badgermole Cub, on ETB target land other than your earthbended basic land.
Cast Chain of Vapor and target any nonland permanent you control other than Earthcraft, Badgermole Cub or Springheart Nantuko.
Resolve Chain of Vapor and choose to copy it, sacrificing earthbended land (not the basic land) and targeting the copy of Badgermole Cub.
Earthbended land will return to the field and trigger Springheart Nantuko, hold priority on the copy of Chain of Vapor and tap Badgermole Cub copy to untap basic, tap basic floating (U/G)GG.
Pay for Springheart Nantuko trigger. Badgermole Cub copy on ETB targets the land you just sacrificed.
Repeat steps 5-7.

The key to understanding this loop is that each time you are copying Chain of Vapor you are targeting the newly minted token of Badgermole Cub. The sequencing on this is that between the targeting of Chain and the copying, there will be the landfall triggers to keep returning a new token to hand.

Springheart Nantuko and Badgermole show up in many combos together. You can check out the combo section of the RogThras Discord to find many more. These 3 are just some of the easier to execute within a live game.

What really seperates what I’ve said from the simic version? Well outside of mentality, your interaction and your timing is going to change by a few options.

Redirect Lightning is another new card being mentioned here as an effective copy of Deflecting Swat. Life is not something we care about, and honestly if this costed 10 life, I’m sure people would still run it the same.
Hexxing Squelcher is crazy. Fundamentally this is a 2 mana psyedo-Grand Abolisher in red. Not much more to add.

You’re also going to be running a different suite of mana producers

Volcanic Island and Taiga are actually worth mentioning. Many Simic core decks full on skip on these lands to include just a few extra slots of utility. The amount of utility that the simic decks can squeeze out of their mana base is a real pull and giving that up is noteworthy.
Tinder Wall is a hit or miss include you see in versions including higher CMC cards such as Displacer Kitten or Tezzeret, Cruel Captain as a way to get one large piece out faster. Not ever deck runs it as often times you’d rather have a more consistent mana piece, but if your splashing red its a heavier consideration.
Relic of Legends is a much more interesting add. From hands containing Mana Vault on turn one you can get out both commanders and have 5 mana turn 2 (assuming vault is tapped). This is the mana requirement for several noteworthy cards, including Seedborn Muse.

There’s also some Misc stuff that changes due to the playstyle shift.

Apple of Eden starts popping up. More on that card later.
Final Fortune begins to pop up for the more speed oriented players. FF is an incredibly strong card since it begs to ask the question: “Whats the best untapper?” and answers with “The untap step.” Many times in cedh you really just need that one extra turn in order to win, and a huge pull to being in red really is just the ability to have that extra turn at instant speed for 2 mana. Picking your window right can make or break your games.

Sing me a Song.

A sidebar for a moment. This is a deck that often brings with it alot of mana. An alternative to Underworld Breach some players prefer is Song of Creation. Song gives you the chance to just rip through your deck. These sub-variant-variant decks are often jammed with more ways to “reset” cradle and untap it or other untappers. For example Emerald Charm shows up with a high frequency in Simic builds but is nearly always a slam dunk in the Song Variants.

Song of Creation unfortunately being an enchantment makes it impossible to tutor for, so it suffers from the same problem as Breach in that aspect. The combo of Song really is just Song. There’s no other pieces, this deck makes enough mana and has cheap enough effects overall, and plays enough interaction to where once Song resolves its a slam dunnk win.

The problem is resolving it. Any thinking player reads Song and goes. “No that has to die” and you are immediately faced with 3 silences, 3 force of wills, and 3 mindbreak traps. If someone was sandbagging interaction, thats it you drew it out. There’s not much political room you have with it either. Since we have 2 cheap commanders in the command zone, plus a deck with a total CMC of almost 100, its nearly impossible to convince a good player to let it resolve without massive reprecussions or some kind of trick.

Datatog (a popular stats person) once ran the numbers (pre-Avatar) and found that Song of Creation decks had a higher winrate than Underworld Breach variants. However, when looking at the data as a whole both cards preformed better independantly than they did together, I’m not trying to suggest that one is better than the other or that this one stat is the end all arguement.

My intuition from playing the deck and from playing different versions tells me that this is largely correct. I have had better overall winrates when my deck is only playing one at a time. I prefer Song of Creation overall but recent tournament results do point to most winning players focusing on Underworld Breach instead. Song of Creation is in my eyes a very smart include if you want to lean into a version of the deck that doesn’t has breach, but also wants to splash red for the other effects like Hexxing Squelcher, Final Fortune, and… Gamble.

But First! Tezzeret

I couldn’t find anywhere else to slot this in.

Tezzeret Cruel Captain is an amazing piece for this deck in particular since it acheives a number of things all at once we want to happen

It finds cradle
It untaps cradle
It gets more creatures into play

Now you might read Tezzeret and say to yourself “It doesn’t do any of that.”

Tezzeret finds potentially 4 very important cards. Those are Candalabra of Tawnos, Expidition Map, Gene Pollinator, and Vexxing Bauble. Basically from 3 generic mana you can fix your board to find whatever you might need.

Pay an extra 3 and get yourself the land you need to hand. Start by finding and Casting Expidition Map, and boom your done.
Pay an extra 2 and you can get a cradle untap. Start by finding and casting Candalabra of Tawnos effectively making this a Hidden Strings when you need it to be. On later turns if you manage to protect it, you can use it to untap Candalabra before you have the loyalty to -3 him again.
Pay an extra 1 mana and you can get a body. I’ve talked about Gene alot in this piece already so I wont go into it too much here, but pretty much if you have the other pieces in hand and you just need to get something more into play, you can find Gene and play it to meet your creature count.

Lastly, this is a deck that does run Displacer Kitten. Not every version but many do. With Kitten and Tezzeret so long as you can trigger Kitten on your turn you can search out every Artifact cmc 1 or less. Order it correctly, and you can get them all into play tapped. This will feed the crap out of a rhystic study, but man. Getting a surge of 6-13 artifacts in play is certainly a fun trick.

I’m bringing Tezzeret up here because I do want to mention that yes - it finds LED. This is a noncreature, colorless way to get LED into your hand for the Underworld Breach combo. This is a rare point where technically outside of breach itself including Tezeret in your builds means that you can tutor our your other pieces in a very disjointed fashion. If you stumble int oa few random pieces and have Breach already in hand you can assemble it from Spellseeker and Tezzeret.

Tezzeret is mainly used as a “power-line” or more commonly called “glue” in alot of builds. Its not that he does 1 thing amazing, its that there’s a colorless highly flexible card that enables you to just go and do things better than you could before.

Take a Gamble.

I really think the hallmark for what seperates the decks that play red and the true Simic players is simply risk-tolerance. Everything that I’ve said about the differences between midrange lite-red and true simic has come down to the number of situations that each respective group is ok with their deck being “good” in.

Many of the Simic choices boil down to covering more ground and using more space in the deck for simply “getting ahead of the-next.” You want to have a use-case for your utility and you want to have that swiss army knife of possibilites. What the core few Red cards do is they shift the game just 1 turn faster. That one turn brings with it a range of consequences. You’re no longer running as much utility in your lands and you are running ways to cover and win faster. The simic versions often are running more clone effects like Croaking Counterpark, Flash Photography, and Clever Impersonator, whereas the midrange focused decks are more likely to be running more cards that get you to your win and allow you to win from different states.

“Manual spinning” is where you combine a board involving Gaea’s Cradle and Oboro Breezecaller where you also do not have the last piece and you instead using your land drops to sping through the deck hoping for finding your win. This is a time consuming process since it is entirely non-deterministic and banks on hitting a range of tutors or specific cards before running out of mana. The more cards that can act in tandem with this the more likely manually spinning gets you there. Once you start this train, theres often no going back. Gamble is the hallmark of this you can spin and spin and a 1 cmc version of what your looking for is often all you need. Effectively you want Crop Rotation or Talon Gates and if you don’t hit those, you need something that gets you there.

Quick Manual Math that isn’t entirely accurate but might be what your thinking in game

Depending on your starting situation, every X tutor can offer the solution. Spellseeker gets Crop Rotation which gets Talon Gates of Madara. So when you start this train you need to consider.

How many cards are in my deck? (About 70-80 assuming we’re in the mid game- late game)
What are the chances Talon gates is on top? (Normally, very low. Thrasios allows you to look at 2 cards, 1 blind. So out of those 80 cards you have 2 chances. This is a 2:70-80 ratio or 2.5% chance)
How many cards in my deck can find Talon Gates? (Normally, low. Depending on land tutors you have 4-5 assuming none used. This means Crop Rot, Sylvan Scrying, Sowing Mycospawn, and Vibrance. starting at 80 cards all with 2 looks, you have 2 chances to see one of 5 cards that get you there. This means its about a 5:80 ratio twice over. ~6.25% chance)
How many cards in my deck can find something that finds Talon Gates? (Normally, low. Assuming none used all we get is Spellseeker since that grabs Crop Rotation. However if something has been used you can slot in EWit as a way to “buy-back” the one which was used. in this situation we are going to just add Spellseeker which means you’re at 6:80 ratio. A scorching ~7.5%
How many cards find the thing that finds another thing that finds Talon Gates? (Normally, higher than you’d think. Now Each to-battlefield tutor can grab Spellseeker, meaning Finale, Chord, and Nature’s Rhythm are live. To-Hand tutors are also fine, but are very mana intensive. Lets add Formiddable Speaker to this area to and since Summoner’s Pact grabs that we can add that here. Another 6 cards brings our ratio to 12:70-80 which is 2 looks at 15-17.1%

Now that we have that rough number, lets now think about the mana we have to start.

Whats the Cradle Count? (Lets assume its 6 and talon gates is a flat win.)
How much “fuel” do I have on board? (Fuel for your power-plant in this case is the number of lands, Each time you activate Cradle you make 6 mana, with 4 going into Thrasios and 2 going into Oboro you’re completely neutral. This means you have a number of untaps equal to the number of lands you have that are not cradle.)
How much “fuel” is in the deck? (Because each iteration of this loop doesn’t generate mana, each spin that hits a land off the top effectively didn’t change the board as long as the land isn’t specifically Dryad Arbor. This makes every land functionally non-effective)
How many “fuel carts” can I hit? (Additional Untap effects like Cloud of Faeries, Hidden Strings or Candalabra of Tawnos, allow you to net mana when they are deployed. This number goes up after each is respectively played since they then turn on additional pieces like Clones or flicker effects to then enable more mana generation. If you have extra mana from other untapped lands or floating this also includes Deserted Temple and Minamo as long as you have a land drop since you get 1 untap from Oboro itself and then from playing + activating the land.)

If you would like to do the exact math for this, please I welcome you to. Alot of factors go into this within each indivdual deck and depending on your playstyle you can make this either extremely consistent, or completely non-viable.

Gamble changes the whole equation. Being the most flexible tutor in all of temur while you’re spinning wheels you can at a whim go for a different plan. Its one of the cards that lets you stop and think of a clear line. Often times, with the mana presented you find Nature’s Rhythm its castable from graveyard which allows you to still win even if its discarded. The way you acheive that will change depending on your starting board state. Often it involved finding Spellseeker after which finds Crop Rotation or Snap.

If Crop Rot, find Talon Gates, win with Oboro
If Snap, Snap Seeker. Untap, Cast Seeker, find Finale. Cast it X=3, find Ewit, return Snap.

Gamble bridges both playstyles. It enables you to run the slower Simic ideas while also functioning as a very flexible tutor to enable your gameplan to pivot at the flip of a coin.

The downside of Gamble is obvious though. When it fails (and it will one day) mannnnn its rough. Discarding your win in an otherwise slam-dunk game sucks. Gamble is by far the best tutor and using it correctly means that you are going to be calculating what the result of it is before you tutor. That takes a long time to develop and likely will not be an easy first couple of games. Start with the lines that are mana intensive but guarenteed. Then ease yourself into higher-risk positions.

The Problems with Temur. Actually Speeding Up

Let’s talk about why Temur is bad for a second. I’ve spent alot of time discussing the pros of playing the deck but let’s acknowledge the bad.

The combos are all mostly 3 card combos. We have very few “2 click wins” where all we need to do is get a few core cards in hand.
Our tutors are limited. Pretty much, its creatures or bust. The few cards that are able to search for multiple card types like Intuition get marketly worse when we are also missing specific cards for the “combos” they traditionally search for.
The board matters. Other color combinations don’t need to care about what exactly is in play or whats going on. Combos in Dimir+ or Boros+ can win the game agnostic to the boardstate. Each Temur combo has a list of prerequestits that must be met, if your opponenets do not understand that part and your politics are poor, you can have many games end without any input on your part.
Its hard to ever be the fastest. No matter how you slice it, other decks can just win first. RogSi and really all Grixis decks can get Thoracle out and win, Mardu decks can deploy a silence and jam through Rhystics. Temur is on average slower than that.

None of this stuff is really there to argue against outside of specific cards. The way you approach a faster mentality in Temur has to fundamentally attack and reason differently than the way a Grixis or Mardu deck functions. So lets tackle the question: How can we go faster?

For those of you that know my background with this deck, you might be surprised I’m mentioning it this late. Truthfully, the other main ways to play in Simic and Midrange are just more popular, so I want to at least give those the time proportional to that before I dive into what I think makes this so gas.

You mentality is going to shift a small bit. Instead of the playpattern

Mana → Card Engine → Mana Engine → Card Engine → Win

You’re switching it up to

Mana → Mana Engine → Mana Engine → Win

How can this work?

This is my version

To really dive into Temur Turbo you gotta think about whats bad about it and play in a way where the turbo part cancels it out. You can’t be afraid to cast your risky spells. You’ll lose some games, but thats ok. In this version you’re going to be running more risk in general. The math works out when you build the deck right.

Starting with the easy ones

Wheels. I’m talking Timetwister, Wheel of Fortune, Windfall, Wheel of Misfortune, and Will of the Jeskai. We are playing fast and we are playing to deploy everything we can. We still have a bunch of small fodder and small fuel. Wheels are the fastest way to reload your hand and have the highest upside. Wheels have always been a hallmark of playing fast and this is no different. You’re going to be mulling ALOT in this deck now. You’re looking for 3 mana turn one hopefully and this comes with it alot more unkeepable hands. Wheels provide a nice out for you when you get really unlucky. Ancient Tomb → Simian → Wheel is always live.
Underworld Breach, but not the combo. So turns out, Breach is just a broken card. My personal version of Temur Turbo didn’t run it for the majority of the time. It comes in and out. Honestly for me at least it didn’t win more than it won. I stopped playing the full combo and I was able to get more wins. Again Breach is just a broken card. When playing it alongside all of the tutors we run as well as the ritual effects we are going to churnning through the deck. Breach feeds into that
Jeska’s Will. At this point, we are just playing red cards. With that comes adding in some of the best red cards we can. JWill happens to be a massive ritual that lets us dig a small bit deeper. I’ve had some of my most explosive turns with JWill and the things possible are wild.
Ragavan. On the note of “good red cards” since red is consistent in the mana base now, its good to have a strong turn one play which can be followed up with more mana. The cards are nice and sometimes you get lucky, most of the time Ragavan doesn’t flip anything of note though. A small rule I follow, if you see a Demonic Tutor. You cast it that turn. Our colors struggle with finding what we want and the occasions where we can find it we absolutely have to take that chance.

Those ones are pretty obvious includes. We’re playing red and we’re tyring to play turbo, makes sense. Lets get into some other options that come with the territory. Afterall this is a “creature storm” deck, we want to have creatures to use with Gaea’s Cradle.

Remember that power-plant I was talking about? Imagine a solar farm for a second. A big array of pannels collecting energy to be used. There’s lots of ways to get more resources from your deck. These here are mainly going to be like those Solar pannels generating you extra resources for your winning turn. That doesn’t mean these are being deployed on your winning turn, in fact in most cases you’re putting these out long before. What that means is that we are getting these out in order to setup for when we want to win

Birgi. Cast Spells make mana. The main goal of this version and the main theme is making mana. We have our card draw source in the command zone, so we are going all in on the mana part. The times where we’re good on mana and need cards though Harnfell acts as an amazing way to convert what we have in hand into more gas to win. A flexible engine which can be both mana and cards when we need it to be is exactly what we are looking for.
Now lets talk Geralf, the Fleshwright. I’m playing some weird ones, but I promise this is stronger than you think. What ties this version together is going to be the general gameplan. Deploy-reload-deploy. Keep going. We’re not passing turns beyond a certain point, every turn can be a winning turn and with that in mind stapling “make a zombie” to every spell we cast after Geralf is huge for cradle. Sandbag some of your cheaper stuff in hand and navigate in a way where you can get geralf out alongside your cheap stuff. This makes cradle so much more explosive when you need it to be, plus the fact that all of the zombies have extra power/toughness compared to your board means that we have some added protection against Bowmasters. Storm is the name of the game and this is one of the few storm cards that doesn’t care what you are casting. Any spell is a zombie.
Vivi Orniter. This is going to be the first mana battery talked about that functions as a wincon as well. When played alongside the Eternal Witness + Snap loop, this converts your infinite mana into a win. This also means that if you don’t have enough creatures, you can win from a mana neuatral loop. Outside of that loop, each time we play a non-creature tutor or mana rock, we are effectively storing mana for the future. The mana we use to cast those spell that turn can then be converted the next turn to fuel your card draw and continue storming.
Storm-Kiln Artist has been a somewhat experimental pick inspired by some Blue Farm decks testing the waters on more interactive builds. I’ll be honest, I do not have much experience with this nor has it come up frequently in myu research. However the players that are playing it have told me they’ve experiences good things, and as a somewhat bulky creature that refunds the cost of spells (and also helps turn on Mox Opal) I’d be neglectful not mentioning it.
Saheeli, Sublime Artificer is much the opposite. This is a pet card of mine that has been in nearly every one of my builds. You can do some really silly things with this, the main pull is being able to copy core cards that enable shockingly explosive turns. Displacer Kitten, Badgermole Cub, Candalabra of Tawnos, and Expidition Map just to name a few. Most players disagree with me on this one. This is my post, if they wanna make one slandering my goat, I’ll be the first to dislike it.

Tracking Tricks

At this point I’ll admit. On turns where you’re popping off, there’s alot you gotta keep track of. From your triggers to your opponenets, to your tutor targets, storm count and mana. It’s a big mental load.

If you decide to actually play this version I really reccomend putting a row of dice at the top of your mat. I use multicolored d6 and two d20 spindowns. Get into the habit of tracking storm, even when you don’t think you’re going to win. If you float mana less than six, use your dice of the respective color.

If you ever are floating more than 6 mana, just write it down. If you see me at a tournament you’ll recognize my somewhat chaotic setup as I always have a notebook on me for tracking things in the game. I write out all my notes and write out when im floating mana if im going through a big turn. I use spindowns when my opponenets ask me to track more quickly but when I have time I just write it out. The numbers get quite large and when you’re going through alot of actions and triggers it can be hard.

Organizing your board also goes a long way in speeding up your process. Here’s my quick setup for going fast.

Starting with the left side of my matt anything that makes a generic creature token goes there. So Springheart Nantuko if it is not enchanted on something will be there. All generic tokens that add to the creature count are on the far left of my matt with the creature count above the play area. Always seperate the dice from the matt so you are not accused of cheating. The reason the dice are by the tokens is so I remember to increase the count while I’m putting a new token on the board.
As you get towards the center of my play area, I keep all my triggers that have a unique effect. These are front and center so I can’t forget them, key targets for each trigger are placed by them. So my Candalabra of Tawnos will be directly next to my Displacer Kitten. Likewise all creatures that are core to my gameplan are in the middle. Spellseeker, Ewit, Cloud of Faeries, Badgermole Cub, and Forbidden Speaker are right there.
The right of my matt are creatures that are combo cards and cards that are either off or on. So Oboro Breezecaller gets its own part on the right as does Biomancer’s Familiar.
Below my creatures on the left are my triggers. Rhystic Study, Mystic Remora, Saheeli, and Birgi all are in this area.
In the true center of my playmatt are the creatures that have some kind of text that changes the texture of the board. Kinnan, Enduring Vitality, and Hexxing Squelcher get a space here so that way It’s unmistakeable that they are in effect.
At the bottom are my lands, the lands from left to right are ordered by how little they impact the game. Gaea’s Cradle is always to the far right, then the untap lands, then any basic lands, then other utility lands, then the purely mana lands. Note that the basic lands are closer to the center of the play area than the Utility lands so that way I know what I have for possible Earthcraft turns.

This is just what works for me, everyone is different, but most importantly come up with some kind of system. This speeds up the game alot and makes tracking clear and easier for everyone involved. Specifically any judges that might come along and have questions onto the current state of a game.

We have some passive mana generators and some ways that we can collect mana to be used in the future, but what about payoffs to use?

Lilysplash Mentor is a card that never quite got to be in the spotlight. Overshadowed by Emiel and with Dockside being banned it never found a home. Its an underutilized card that for 1UG lets you flicker a creature. This is the second new wincon. The keen eyed among you might remember Cloud of Faeries exists and wins the game so long as you have a Cradle count of 4. The real power of this is that you can flicker your tutors. Spellseeker, Formiddable Tutor, and Eternal Witness are the main ones enabling you to go nuts. Note that this doesn’t work with Sowing Mycospawn since that’s a cast trigger, nor does it work with Vibrance as thats a trigger dependant on how it was cast.
Empty the Warrens. Any Pauper enjoyers? You might be tempted to look at this like you look at Chatterstorm. Fundamentally its not. Chatterstorm can make a bunch of bodies for a small amount of extra mana. Empty the Warrens rapidly floods the board for a large investment. Casting 3 spells into Empty brings 8 bodies. More than likely that will be the final cast of your turn, and going into your next one you can utilize that to win. The other scenario is where you are flush with mana and you can cast Empty the Warrens to blow the game wide open. There have been many games where I was able win even after a bosejui destroys my cradle simply because the extra bodies can be used for so much. Earthcraft is a massive payoff letting you go mana positive from a 4 cmc battery the turn you cast it. Its expensive, but really give it a shot.
Capture of Jingzhou. As with Final Fortune lets ask the question; Whats the best untap? This time though lets talk about how expensive this is. 5 mana for an extra turn is a price to pay. In slower paced metas where you have an extra turn to setup some kind of protection being able to lock in another turn is an absolutely massive win. Temporal Manipulation alongside of Capture functions as 2 extra ways to capitalize on your big mana starts letting you untap to win “next turn.” For faster metas these cards become much harder to use as without that extra turn of protection or the ability to protect your extra turn you will more than likely eat a counterspell and be forced to pass to another player primed to win.

So we have some payoffs and we have some mana generators, but theres some other oddballs I’m running and the other turbo players have agreed on that are pretty good that need a discussion.

Apple of Eden is back. This being a turbo deck and a deck where we are constantly watching cardboard move, understand that this serves as a way to stop someone entirely. Shunt out a hand or use it on someone to steal a few key cards. A huge weakness of Temur is the fact is lacks precise searching. Taking even 1 tutor gives us much more than you can imagine. I’ve been able to assemble boards where I minted 3 copies of Ranger-Captain of Eos and I’ve made boards where I’ve had multiple Breaches in play. Apple is a fantastic card that I highly reccomend you play if you intend to play turbo for its utility and for its shockingly high upside. Just hit the guy with Rhystic and 6 cards in hand.
Ghostly Flicker has been in and out of my personal deck for some time. Its a way for you to reload multiple times over, flickering both Cradle and Candalabra or two tutors like Speaker/Ewit. Ghostly flicker also combos with Eternal Witness assuming you have enough creatures on board. Its a nice utility piece that feels like its always live.
Thunderclap Drake I am not currently on. However a shoutout to the main pioneer of this version. This is his pet card, a cost reducer that allows you to copy a spell up to 2 or possibly 3 additional times is amazing. Sac it and copy really anything and you are bound for a win. The real downside is how much of a target it is. The Orcish Bowmaster matchup is already rough and being more vulnrable to it hurts that much more. It sucks to have a 2 mana investment get blown up from your opponenet drawing a card, and believe me it will get hit first. When it sticks though it is perfect.

The Silences of Temur

Hexxing Squelcher while being the most recent protection piece is not the only one printed even by a mile for our colors. Most of the protection pieces that we have access to within Temur are more expensive or they have some kind of caveat. It’s generally agreed that a few of these effects are good and are important for the build.

Before Squelcher, the main one that everyone would play was Vexxing Bauble. Deploying this on your winning turn or finding this from an Urza’s Saga allows you to stop any potential free countermagic people could be holding up. Now the true bane of the deck is still Silence and theres no way around that from something so cheap. While Squelcher is generally easier to tutor for being a creature, Bauble can be found from a number of random sources layed throughout the deck as an option when our other needs are met.

The standard pick for most non-white silences is Veil of Summer alongside its lesser played Autumn’s Veil. Both of these simply make your spells uncounterable for the turn barring Red Elemental Blast. Casting a Veil at the start of your turn is a classic flare to see if anyone has any interaction and if not it gives you the classic greenlight to go off. You can change up your timing slightly to try and bait out a counterspell first, or you can use it on another players turn to try and sneak wins overtop of them.

More experimentally, Tidal Barracuda was run for a very long time. Its a card that plays much better than it reads and its something that most players are not used to playing with. Usually when tutored in it acts as a 4 cmc version of Grand Abolisher. Since no one is really used to playing with it, it throws off most players timings, since you (the player running it) knows how this works you can manuever and sneak in your win overtop the other players or wait until your turn for your protected win.

Alternatively, in this mana intensive deck we make great use out of Vexxing Shusher, the first Lorwyn protector. For the cost of an extra Green mana we effectively cast a counterspell that never costed a card slot. Shusher has the additional benifit of allowing our opponenets to cast spells and us make the uncounterable for one reason or another. We can have our opponenets use their resources in hand and instead keep our interaction and protection for protecting our own wins.

Lastly the most recent one outside of Squelcher is Spider-Punk. A card most people tried a few times then threw away, I kept in. In Grixis and other higher colors, it can’t be utilized super well compared to Grand Abolisher or other White silences. Here in Temur though, you can use your super good politics to force through unfavorable trades for your opponenets else throw the game to a 3rd player. “Trade your Tymna with Spider-Punk or I pass to the RogSi with this up.” Its the small Micro advances like these that make me like Spider-Punk much more than other options like Conquorer’s Flail.

While these ones are some of the more popular, there are many more that you could run. I’m listing these ones primarily because they have the most political interplay. There’s room for skill expression that allows your creativity to shine. This will reward your skill the more you play with these cards.

And now we finally get to talk about the other things that change. There’s been a large focus on utility and a focus on fixing in this disucssion and when talking about the simic versions and the lands the midrange versions use.

Lets throw that to the side for a second and ask ourself “Whats the point of lands?” I dont want to get to high in the sky for this but lets really get into the weeds. Lands are there so we can cast our spells and make the deck function from turn 1 onwards. A properly built landbase should allow us to cast whatever we want when we need to as we need to.

So lets talk risk again. When you add more colors, it should be harder to cast your spells. At least that’s how the balancing logic goes. You can’t have all of the oclors in the game and there be no downside, else you’re playing a different game. You can start to add some utility lands and more lands that let you do what your deck wants instead of having purely mana fixing lands.

Ask the question: “How hard is it to have my turn 1 look like X?” Then ask the question “Does the utility of taking out some lands make up for this theoretical loss?”

Getting to the point: Let’s cut the rainbow lands. No more City of Brass, Mana Confluence or Command Tower, make room in the deck for more ways we can win.

Nykthos Shrine to Nyx. There is no replacement for Gaea’s Cradle. However even the pale imitations of Cradle do a damn good job at making a bunch of mana. If we have Thras, Gene pollinator, Wild Growth, and Ewit, Nykthos makes GGGG each time its used. we need 3 pips to break even, everything after makes it positive. So add 3 to each possible cradle combo and thats the mana it takes to win. Note: Many cards in the deck have double pips of the same type, Vibrance, Ewit, and Enduring Vitality count for 6 total green pips with 3 creatures.
Three Tree City is a shockingly good cradle. Name whatever token maker you want and suddenly you’ve got yourself a dream of a situation. If you just cast Empty the Warrens suddenly those 8 goblins net you 6 mana of any color on demand.
Branch of Vitu-Ghazi. My real favorite. This is a sorcery speed Talon Gates of Madara. The disguise mechanic is technically “casting” a spell so you can use the disguise part to get it into play and win via flipping and redisguising it forever. This nets you infinite mana and lets you win in the exact same way as Talon Gates. Disguise is a funny thing though since it alongside morph is techincally a “special action” and the rules for that get weird espcially since it doesn’t really use the stack, but the mana trigger does. Just know: you need flash to do it at instant speed. What Branch really does is change the math on manually spinning. Now, Talon Gates is not your only hit. The colorless land part really does suck though.

Now that I’ve completely shattered your trust in me by suggesting something so outrageous. Let’s close this whole thing up shall we?

There’s more to say but not enough time to say it

I’ve played this deck for a full year as of March.

I tried to say everything I wanted to by an artifical deadline I set for myself. I haven’t even had the chance to talk about Semi-Blue or the lands builds and the exotic versions of the deck. I’ll be adding an addendum to this piece later on once I have more time.

It’s been a blast making this, check back in a “““few””” days if you want to know the history of the deck, who Jonathan Vick is, and also how Sam Black and Semi-Blue are two sides of the same coin.

-Vafnar

This post was drafted Jan. 2026 after the release of Lorwyn. Spoilers for the next set have not started. ↩︎
The shoe-ins for this deck are Rhystic Study, Mystic Remora, Force of Will, Mental Misstep, Fierce Guardianship, Deflecting Swat, Sol Ring, Mox Diamond, Mox Amber, Gemstone Caverns, Ancient Tomb, and Tropical Island.

While not every deck runs all of these cards, these are cards that are nearly unskippable and require specific justification to exclude either for playstyle or for local play reasons. Since these cards are generic powerhouses I will not be going over what makes them strong nor why you should run them. Good cards are good, I don’t really know how to expand on that.

Additionally while fetchlands, deserted temple, minamo, Otawara, Bosejui, Wild Growth, and Lotus Petal will be mentioned throughout this, I can’t really expand on them individually. They will be talked about in conjunction with other cards, on their own. The floor really is just “They are good mana producing sources with extra utility.” ↩︎
With the release of Springheart Nantuko and Badgermole this is more a staple due to the combos possible and that have been discovered alongside other cards talked about later and truthfully Im 3 weeks into writing this and cant be bothered to move this so move on. ↩︎