Post Rotation Decks Episode 9: The New Endless Turn Combo

After getting all the way to episode 9, I have run out of nice little intros to say before all these conceptual deck ideas. So for the last few episodes, I'm just going to cut the chase:

4x Lullmage Mentor
4x Grand Architect

4x Mana Leak
4x Deprive
4x Stoic Rebuttal

1x Time Reversal
3x Jace's Ingenuity

4x Jace (TMS or Beleran, your choice)

4x Mindslaver
4x Prototype Portal

20x Island
4x Halimar Depths

This is a counterspell deck. You want to play as slow as possible, making sure you always have counterspell mana up to prevent your opponent from doing anything. Then, once they have ceased to cast spells, you use Jace to gain card advantage and dig to find your 2 pice finisher: Prototype Portal + Mindslaver. With those 2 in play, you no longer need to worry about anything your opponent does and you can take control of all their turns for the rest of the game at the low low price of 10 mana every turn. How do you pull that off? Well your only 2 creatures are Lullmage Mentor and Grand Architect. With the Lullmage Mentor, your 16 counterspells can soon become a small army of blue merfolk (which can then team up to counter spells themself). With the grand architect in play, they equal a lot of mana. If Grand Architect and Lullmage Mentor are both in play together, then you only need 3 tokens to have infinite turns.

Now the trick is that you don't control your opponent during your turn, so this is where things can get tougher, but also where Jace the Mind Sculptor is better. Either Jace should work for this deck no problem to provide a large amount of card drawing and ultimately counterspells in hand. I know Jace the Mind Sculptor is hard to get your hands on because it costs 15.5X as much as Jace Beleran. However, if you can get your hands on him, it's worth it. Jace TMS can bounce creatures back to your opponent's hand so when your trying to close out the game while controlling every one of their turns, you can use Jace TMS to remove their blockers by unsummoning them 1 by 1. I was never a huge fan of Jace TMS until I played with Mark's UW Control list and realized how insane he is by being able to single-handedly close out games. If you don't have Mindslaver combo up and running, Jace can put a soft lock on your opponent by reducing the quality of their draws (and yes you can eventually straight out win, but you never play a planeswalker just for their ultimate).

So yes, for the first time ever in this blog I am saying spending the money is important. Jace Beleran can go in almost every blue deck because he is simply recursive card advantage. However, Jace TMS is almost exclusively used in control decks because his +2 and -1 abilities control the game and if you only want to draw cards, Jace Beleran comes out a turn faster and is less intimidating.

I don't know if I will make this deck or not, mainly because the only cards I have for it are the Lullmage Mentors and the Time Reversal. Even still, just because you can't build it doesn't mean your buddy can't and besides, making decks is good practice.

Until an hour from now, peace