Decks I've been playing: Show & Tamiyo
So I've been playing Magic again. Now, I play primarily on Arena, and depending on the circumstances I tend to play a lot of Brawl. Brawl is Arena's main quasi-casual format; it's 100-card singleton, with a commander, with 25 starting life.
The main benefit, for me, is that as a singleton format you only need one copy of a card to have it for Brawl, which makes building lots of different decks dramatically easier; I end up playing around with lots of different decks because the deckbuilding aspect is as much fun for me as actually playing games.
Most of those decks I only play a handful of times before deciding they're just not good enough to be fun or they have other problems. But probably the Brawl deck I've played the most in the last few weeks is this pile, which I've been calling Show & Tamiyo.
(Actual Moxfield link)
The premise of this deck is simple: Brawl is full of uninteractive, predictable ramp decks. It's very easy and very effective to build a Brawl deck by picking one of various extremely powerful seven or eight-mana cards and playing basically the max amount of ramp spells you can play. You maximize playing your commander on turn 4 or 5, and those cards are so powerful when they actually come into play that they can catch you up and make up for the fact that the deck does nothing otherwise.
If your commander gets killed or countered, you just try again until your opponent runs out of interaction; because almost the entire deck is mana, it will always easily pay the commander tax, and those decks can play other big seven-mana threats to complement that strategy. This play pattern really suppresses any kind of control or midrange strategy in Brawl, because the ramp decks go over the top of those very easily, and it's hard to interact with their mana, especially land-based ramp.
Ugin is the poster child for this because the deck really can play almost nothing but artifact mana; Ugin itself comes with a free removal spell on the stack when you cast him, and once he's in play all your random mana rocks become Mortifies, so it's extremely easy to win with and extremely hard to interact with.
The Tamiyo deck is designed to go under all those strategies by doing something unfair a turn or two before the ramp decks can land their big finisher, using countermagic to delay them for a turn or two. One-mana commanders are inherently kind of broken in Brawl; they bring you the closest that you can get to just starting with an extra card in hand, and Mox Amber is extremely close to a real Mox if your commander costs just one mana. This list is designed to maximize flipping Tamiyo on turn 1 or 2, playing both Brawl-legal moxen and basically every one-, two-, or three-mana card that draws at least two cards. Once Tamiyo flips, you can only deal with her either by presenting a fast clock (which the big-mana decks don't want to do early) or by using planeswalker removal (which they generally don't have).
While Tamiyo is probably mostly designed as a value engine that makes Clues early and later on can be used to rebuy a spell from the graveyard, this deck plays her as a sort of doom clock. The ultimate ability is the actual point here; the deck plans to draw half its library and then immediately win the game. With the very best hands, this can be done on turn 3:
- Land, Tamiyo, mox, Brainstorm, flip and activate Tamiyo (Loyalty 4)
- Land, activate Tamiyo, Experimental Augury (Loyalty 7)
- Activate Tamiyo's -7 ability, win the game.
Though it is much more realistic to go off on turn 4 or 5, considering typical hands.
The way the deck actually wins once most of the library has been drawn is with Show and Tell, typically putting Omniscience into play. With Omniscience, you can then draw the remaining cards in your library with a Jace out and win the game. Redundancy is provided by a copy of Solve the Equation and some additional Show and Tell targets like Portal to Phyrexia.
Against interactive decks and aggro, the deck does play a good amount of interaction if its own and has the ability to 'naturally' draw into one of the various combos and win the game that way. In those matchups, Tamiyo can act as more of a value engine; a particular alternate win route here is to use her and various Regrowth effects to rebuy Time Warp multiple times.
It's rare that I really tinker with a Brawl deck this much! I expect I will shelve this for a while once I have Final Fantasy cards in hand; I plan to try to do unfair things with Noctis. But this is now an old reliable deck that actually wins pretty consistently compared to most Brawl decks I play. It gets a lot of 'groan equity'; players will scoop to a flipped Tamiyo on turn 1 a lot, presumably because they're impressed by how much I'm the good guy policing the format with a fair deck.