Agreed on the gripes about Clout of the Dominus, that's definitely something that makes it less-optimal to something like Apostle's Blessing. It's nice to have a 1 mana investment set-it-and-forget-it way of protecting your threat, and it is possible to work around the shroud disadvantage, but doing so probably just makes the deck worse as a whole.
My experience with the deck is solely online. I can see it being a great pick at your LGS if it attacks that particular meta, but online I found it's inconsistencies and weaknesses a little too bothersome for me personally. And I think you hit it on the head: threat density. Building a deck around Nivmagus requires a different approach than building around other prowess type creatures. And since Nivmagus is one-of-a-kind in the way he operates, that means other creatures you bring in won't synergize with your gameplan as well as Nivmagus does. Kiln Fiend seems to be the best fit, but even with him it means your pacts are mostly dead in hand. Of course if you're not playing the Pact version of this deck this isn't as relevant.
I started brewing with Firebrand Archer in the mix and most of the time it seemed like a pretty good alternative to Kiln Fiend, Thing in the Ice, Death's Shadow, or Young Pyromancer. It was nice to have an outlet for indirect damage while you were going off with Nivmagus. It lowered the number of spells you needed for a lethal strike and gave the opponent another threat to answer. Unfortunately smart players will just prioritize killing Nivmagus first and in that scenario, Firebrand Archer was not the best at closing up a game on it's own. I'm excited to see if Ravnica brings us any Izzet goodies that can slot into this deck. Fingers crossed.
I'm definitely on the wagon with the Solemnity/Phyrexian Unlife combo. I think it's one of the strongest interactions in modern currently. Magic Rainbows (Please let us remember to check our privilege and use his less offensive handle) is one of my favorite content creators mainly for his desire to constantly brew into the format's current weaknesses. I think innovation like that keeps things fresh. And while Keranos, God of Storms/Kefnet the Mindful speeds up his win-con a bit from traditional pillow-fort lists, it seems to do so at the cost of resilience. Plenty of decks out there have answers to slipping out of an unprotected Solemnity/Unlife lock before they even bring in their enchantment removal. I think Magic Aids is on the right track though, there needs to be a faster win-con. The combo is excellent in an aggro-dominated meta, but if you're not winning in a timely manner then you'll still lose to a lot of the format.
If anyone ever figures out a turn 4 win-con with the Solemnity/Unlife combo, this deck will explode.
I'm currently working in a similar direction as the Keranos list, only I went the Porphyry Nodes/Hazoret the Fervent/Blood Moon route. Unfortunately Blood Moon is pretty lackluster in the current meta. But it does feel pretty sexy swinging in with Hazoret and turning redundant combo pieces into burn spells.
Nivmagus Elemental gets a bad wrap because his ability is seen as "card disadvantage" to a lot of people. But like you said, I tend not to think of Nivmagus needing to eat cards in order to grow, but rather those cards being "Pay 2 life: Creature gets +2/+2" or "0 cmc: Creature gets +2/+2". When you think about it in those terms, having half your deck being redundant Mutagenic Growths isn't all that terrible.
However, it must be said, that there is a very big distinction between Nivmagus and Gurmag Angler, and that distinction is Fatal Push. Dodging one of the most played removal spells in the format is what separates Gurmag Angler apart from Nivmagus, pound for pound. However, that's not to say a deck built around Nivmagus can't make it as powerful as Gurmag.
Unless there's some innovation or a new printing, I think the biggest hurdles for this deck will be 1) Having Nivmagus in hand on turn 1 and 2) how to protect Nivmagus once he resolves. Clout of the Dominus and Simian Spirit Guide can get pretty bonkers when you have the nut draw, but after turn 1 or maaaaybe 2, Clout gets progressively worse as your opponent gains the ability to respond to it on the stack with a removal spell.
And yes, in my opinion, 3-4 Leyline of Sanctity in the sideboard (or even main, depending on your meta) is a unfortunate necessity with the deck being so fragile to edict effects and hand disruption.
Sorry if this sounds too negative, it really is a fun deck. Getting those nuts draws and killing on turn 2 is a great feeling. But when you start inspecting its glaring weaknesses you realize that a deck like Bloo/UR Prowess is doing something similar, but doing it with much more resilience than what Elemental Shotgun can provide.
This is almost card for card a deck I created about a year ago. Only difference is I ran 4 Manamorphose in the main and 2 Clout of the Dominus and 2 Gut Shot in the side.
This deck can be incredibly explosive. It can also be incredibly fragile. It's the epitome of a "glass-cannon" deck. Turn 2 kills are more common than you would expect. Ground Rift is the star of the deck. It lets you alpha strike with just a few pacts in hand. Tainted Strike, especially paired with Gut Shot to clear the way, makes hands without a Ground Rift viable. It's a fun deck to play, catches a lot of people off guard and can most definitely steal wins.
But it's not without its problems. It folds to discard. I mean completely folds. Keeping a killer hand with Nivmagus only to have it Thoughtseized is usually game over. Kiln fiend is awkward. It's a great secondary win-con, but a lot of the time it leaves you with a handful of pacts that you can't cast. And if you do have Nivmagus Elemental out to gobble up the pacts and power up Kiln Fiend, then most of the time you don't need Kiln Fiend to win. But, he kinda works with the gameplan, is a pretty decent plan B in his own right, and can be tutored with Flamekin Harbinger, so I guess its the best we got. I found Manamorphose to be invaluable. it helps you dig, mana fix, and add to your storm count and its cost is in line within the potentiality of the turn 2 kill.
Apostle's Blessing, Pact of Negation and a suite of hand disruption of your own are pretty necessary now that we don't have access to Gitaxian Probe to make sure your Nivmagus/Kiln Fiend stays alive long enough to string together an alpha strike.
Fun deck, but you have to run hotter than the sun to survive the plethora of answers the meta has to throw at you. My $.02
The abysmal Tron match up is exactly why I dropped this deck for now, I apparently have the worst Tron match-up luck on MTGO. Which is a shame, because like you said, against the rest of the meta the deck feels pretty well positioned.
I really like the Boseiju, Who Shelters All + Entreat the Angels for the extra edge against control. Do you find it being worth it despite it being a dead card once you're into negative life?
I'm curious as to how your Humans match ups shakes out with your list. I found that match up to also be an uphill battle. Thalia, Guardian of Thraben + Meddling Mage usually slowed me down enough for them to get under before I could set up. A Ghostly Prison on turn 4 just doesn't cut it.
Have you tried running Ixalan's Binding? I found the card to be pretty great in the deck. It's essentially an Oblivion Ring, but for one more mana you make sure the card doesn't come back. Great against an Ensnaring Bridge, Meddling Mage, Blood Moon, or a troublesome planeswalker like Jace, The Mind Sculptor or Teferi, Hero of Dominaria. The extra casting cost was more relevant than I like to admit in a lot of cases, so I eventually settled on a 3 Oblivion Ring - 1 Ixalan's Binding split.
Against Jund or other grindy decks I found Heliod, God of the Sun to be a great sideboard option. Not only is he protected under Greater Auramancy, but so are his tokens which allows you to build a bigger board state and win through attrition. Also a valuable line against control. Throw a Pariah in there targeting Heliod and you have a secondary Phyrexian Unlife/Solemnity-esque combo, which can be a good strategy in game 2 when you're opponent is preparing for the Solemnity combo. Silence is something I haven't considered, but I like the idea of being confident in being able to land a key prison piece for just 1 extra mana. I tried real hard to like Grand Abolisher, it just never performed for me, but then again I was jamming this deck back when Jeskai control was the control deck of choice. Maybe with the UW and Miracles lists ticking up, it'll fare better.
Seeing you have some success with this list makes me want to give it a go again. I'll throw it into a comp league this weekend and pray to Heliod that I dodge the Tron match up.
I've also been working on a UW Mill deck for the past month or so and I've come up with something pretty similar (hopefully that means we're on the right track). Archive Trap is clearly a very powerful card and certainly worth going down the rabbit hole to explore if it can be viable on a competitive level. While it does certainly get much harder to use against seasoned players, with the right tools behind it, it can still be a powerhouse.
One of those tools that I've found to be absolutely crucial is Jace, Vryn's Prodigy. This guy filled every role I needed: card filtering, win condition, early blocker, but most importantly a Snapcaster effect that can cast Archive Trap for 0 (so important). This is essentially a much more versatile Twincast that doesn't have to sit in your hand dead half the time. Now this is not to say he's not soft to removal, but a Hedron Crab on 1 followed by Jace, Vryn's Prodigy on 2 gives our opponent a very awkward choice: which one to kill? If they remove both it's usually a tempo swing in our favor as our next turn Fraying Sanity comes down and it's often lights out from there. It's said in a lot of these mill discussions that a Hedron Crab unanswered will win you the game and I feel very much the same way about Jace, Vryn's Prodigy. It just opens up so many lines for this deck.
Really, you don't need any more mill power than Archive Trap and Fraying Sanity. Math wise, they do the job just fine in a timely manner. Unfortunately magic is not played in a vacuum and as I was testing I felt like I desperately needed another mill card. Missing Glimpse the Unthinkable certainly hurts, but I've found Mind Sculpt to be an acceptable concession to not confuddling the mana base any more than it already is.
Speaking of mana base, it's probably the second most important support function of the deck. A Field of Ruin is one of the few cards that can force a search. In game 1 this isn't as crucial, but after your opponent gets wise to your shenanigans they probably won't search ever again. That fact also gives us a slight edge in some of the cards that we can play. Path to Exile becomes even more amazing than it already is. Opting out of a free land in fear of a potential Archive Trap is a win/win for us. I personally found running a few Ghost Quarter still felt right. There's been plenty of times when blowing up one of my own lands (especially a Flagstones of Trokair) with a Hedron Crab out has won me the game. With Crucible of Worlds (albeit sometimes win-more) we can also put our opponent into a land prison, forcing them to use search effects if they want to stay in the game.
some neat lines the deck can take: Jace, Telepath Unbound's -3 to Snapcaster any of our mill cards or cantrip cards to help dig you into the cards you need. Mesmeric Orb + Jace, Telepath Unbound The Orb not only mills our opponent, but also dumps our spells into our graveyard allowing us to keep our hand size small for Ensnaring Bridge while giving us access to our spells through Jace's -3. Jace, Vryn's Prodigy + Minamo, School at Water's Edge (for an extra Jace activation to either dig or flip) Opt gets under your own Mesmeric Orb effect on your Upkeep step to grab something you've scryed to the top of your library. Serum Visions + Shelldock Isle provides less guess work when using Shelldock's Hideaway effect. Academy Ruins mostly to get back an Ensnaring Bridge that's been either destroyed or discarded. Trapmaker's Snare + Mindbreak Trap turns the storm/kci match up into a cake walk.
As for the rest of the deck, I think there's still a lot of room for testing and innovation. UW mill has not been nearly as explored as the UB version so there's a lot of cards to pour through and test out. Broken Ambitions for example is proving to be a lot better than I would of given it credit for.
I think in the right meta this deck can definitely be a contender, but I feel like I've reached my limit with building the deck. Smarter brewers than myself are going to have to take it from here.
I ran an WB list I posted a while back that mostly focused on this idea. Blank your opponents win-cons with enchantments while you develop your own. Instead of Telepathy I used things like Thoughtseize and Brain Maggot, then Surgical Extraction to look through their entire library. Against threat-light decks like Death's Shadow it was an easy win, but against decks with a lot of ways to win I always felt like I was playing from behind. It's not that the tools aren't there, in WU we have Runed Halo, Nevermore, Gideon's Intervention, Ixalan's Binding, Meddling Mage (though non-bos with board wipes), and the wide array of copy effects that blue offers. Green gives you access to Gaddock Teeg (which helps tremendously against some the harder match ups like Tron). Stuff like Sorcerous Spyglass and Chalice of the Void, though not enchantments, would help aid the game plan. Depending on which win-con you want to go with (Sigil of the Empty Throne, Karma, Entreat the Angels, etc) the rest of the deck kinda builds itself. A deck like Jund plays on a similar axis, where they went to disrupt your game plan through cheap removal while they establish their own cost-effective beat down. The difference is most of the enchantments we're talking about here cost much more than your average Fatal Push or Path to Exile, which could end up meaning the deck is just flat out too slow. When I ran my WB list through a couple of comp leagues this is what I experienced. Either it was a free win or it was just to slow to keep up with the power most decks are churning out. Most of the time, it was the latter. An Esper version is definitely interesting though and might be worth brewing around.
Why beseech the queen over Mastermind's Aquisition? Aquisition seems much better, as it also allows sideboard silver bullet shenanigans and you don't have to reveal. I definitely think a black splash is the way forward though. Discard out of the sideboard can win match ups that I think are unwinnable with just mono white.
You know, in my recent experience running this deck on MTGO, this sentiment has some realistic value. Humans is everywhere and I cannot tell you how many times I've tutored a card with Idyllic Tutor just to have it named by Meddling Mage the next turn before I can cast it. In that match up specifically you lose the entire element of surprise that wins you that much needed game 1. Now of course, this is a corner case with just a single deck, but considering this deck is also at the top of the meta game food chain, I think it's definitely worth considering Mastermind's Acquisition. Is the utility of an Idyllic Tutor/Glittering Wish type card worth the extra mana investment? I think only testing will tell, but I can see the case for it.
Unfortunately with control decks on the rise thanks to our friend Teferi, Hero of Dominaria, I think we lost a little favor in the meta game. I was consistently pulling 4-1s in comp leagues (Tron seems to always be there to stop me from nabbing that 5-0), but that win-rate is decreasing steadily as I encounter more and more control decks. Not saying control decks are unbeatable, but as Mark pointed out earlier, not having a Boseiju, Who Shelters All-type card for enchantments makes it an uphill battle for sure.
EDIT: in case anyone's wondering, the reason Teferi can be so oppressive to deal with is because it makes it harder for us to drop key lock pieces when our opponent is tapped out, thanks to Teferi's +1. As if that weren't bad enough, his other two modes also hit our enchantments if we don't set up the hard lock with two Greater Auramancys. It's one of the reasons why I've been gravitating towards Ixalan's Binding over Oblivion Ring/Cast Out/Gideon's Intervention as of late.
Black definitely has some fun toys to play with. Being able to bring in a full set of thoughtseize game 2 is a great way to deal with those hate cards that your opponents bring in. Beseech the Queen acts as a wider Idyllic Tutor, it's a great card, but like you said producing the black mana can be taxing. Unless you work that weakness into your win-con. I had great success with 3-4 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth and Karma as my decks primary win-con, backed up by the Bitterblossom beat down with a single Death Pit Offering to give the engine a little more juice. The deck performed great. It was smooth and the game plan was solid (we won't talk about Blood Moon). Then I took it into a few leagues and it just got utterly destroyed. 9 times out of 10 I was just too slow or the deck failed to kill in time against a more inevitable deck like Tron. In a slower meta, I think the black splash is possibly the strongest addition, but it really hurts not having a way to crank out the combo pieces early. Let me know how it tests out for you, I would be interested in revisiting BW again, especially if these Teferi control lists slow the meta down a little bit.
As for the combo at large, I can't tell you how many games I've won just by dropping the Phyrexian Unlife/Solemnity pair. If that doesn't get the concede, dropping a Greater Auramancy or two usually does. I actually took the deck into a friendly league and took out my win-cons (Heliod and Axis of Mortality) just for the heck of it. Long story short I ended up 4-1, losing only to a Jace control deck that ended up milling me out. The combo is legit and in my opinion the strongest aspects of the pillow-fort strategy right now. It seems to be a well positioned answer to the hyper-aggressive linear meta we currently have (at least on MTGO).
Oh I definitely agree, I've abandoned a lot of the prison fort elements to focus on getting the lock down quicker and more consistently. You can't have both, just not enough room to pack it all in. There's been a lot of great work shared here for making the Prison Fort style of the deck pretty ironed out so I wanted to delve into the more unexplored directions. It should be noted that playing it more like a combo deck has its innate disadvantages over the traditional prison fort strategies, but it also has some strengths that those strategies don't have. Getting Phyrexian Unlife down on turn 2 and if needed the hard lock (Solemnity and Greater Auramancy) by turn 3 has proven to be very powerful in this current meta. You don't see the usual prison fort staples like Ghostly Prison or Sphere of Safety because they have been replaced with ways to consistently get your combo out before a deck can kill you with creatures. Once the lock is establish there's very few situations where a creature swinging in matters. Of course, somewhere in the 75 needs to be an answer to things like annihilator, but it's far from needed in the main board.
So my philosophy for taking the deck in this direction is as followed: Do I want to blank creature damage or ALL damage based strategies? We have access to a combo that not only stop creatures from killing you, but any damage based win con, which if you look at the meta is almost every single top 16 deck from the last couple big events, minus things like Ad Nauseam which can win through means other than damage. Combine that with the small amount of enchantment hate in proportion to other forms of hate in sideboards and main decks and it's not a big leap to think that the Phyrexian Unlife/Solemnity lock is very well positioned right now. Can the same be said for a card like Ghost Prison? No. There's plenty of decks out there that don't care about a lot of the prison effects the traditional lists are packing. So considering all this, I believe it's worth exploring an all in approach on this powerful combo.
So we know the lock is pretty solid. Cool. Unfortunately two big problems still remain: How do we get it out as early as possible and once it's out, how do we win? Sigil of the Empty Throne and Heliod can be solid win-cons, but they can also take a long time to close the game out and, as was mentioned earlier, a lot of main decks have a way to slither out of the soft lock. In my experience playing Prison fort I found the slow win-cons to be it's Achilles heel. While Axis carries it's own negatives, it can close a game out very fast when compared to Sigil or Heliod. It can win with just a Phyrexian Unlife out if sequenced carefully. Do I think it's the perfect win-con? No way. I can barely even say it's good. But it does have the ability to close a game and it has great synergy with the soft lock that we aim to create. It's funny, I'm not really having a problem with Axis winning games, what I'm having a problem with is the ramp package being partly creature based and more often than not, being removed. Lotus is performing great. I would ditch Herald and Birds at the drop of a hat if someone suggested something better.
I'm not saying any of this is right or better than the traditional pillow-fort lists, I just love exploring outside-of-the-box jank ideas.
I'm with you on Vessel of Nascency, I didn't think I'd find myself digging for a land as often as I do, definitely an added bonus of having it as the early dig spell. I can see with your deck, having to draw a very few specific win-cons that Idyllic Tutor would be better suited than Kruphix's Insight. It's a tough decision when a good Kruphix can dig you into your remaining lock pieces + your win-con but on the other hand can fizzle to its own variance.
Cool idea with Worm Harvest giving you a win-con from another axis. The more sideboard cards our opponents have to bring in the worse it makes their decks so I like the idea of putting pressure on from the graveyard.
And I'm with you 100% on Cast Out. I've had a few really good players tell me it's a wasted slot and I should be running Oblivion Ring in it's place. Once you play these decks you get a sense of how useful the cycling can be to give you that last ditch effort to dig for an unlife/solemenity/ or anything else more useful than a dead removal card. The flash is also something to note and has been clutch in a handful of situation. Definitely keeping it main deck as my catch-all.
So for a while I was running a very similar list to yours with a single Axis of Mortality as a back-up win condition. Then I started to notice that about half of my wins were coming from that card over the Heliod beatdown or flying over the top with Sigil. So I decided to go down the rabbit hole and tailor the deck around Axis of Mortality as the primary win-con. The end result looks like a weird Ad Nauseam deck, but focusing on a T3 hard-lock (Phyrexian Unlife, Solemnity, and Greater Auramancy) instead of a T3 kill. Heliod still makes the sideboard as my beatdown approach incase someone's packing Leyline of Sanctity.
what a pile of trash! I hate when a deck you think is going to be terrible puts up better results than a deck you worked hard to build. I don't know if it's just been the match up lottery or what, but this thing is holding up way better than I thought it would. I'm porting it over to MTGO this weekend and trying it out in a league to truly see how terrible it is.
So right now in the meta I think the Phyrexian Unlife/Solemnity lock is very well positioned considering how little hate people are packing against enchantments. Really, the only thing on the radar is Blood Moon and Bogles and a lot of lists don't fear Bogles enough to pack hate for it. That leaves our combo uniquely positioned to not only lock out the wide swath of aggro decks that are running amok, but also mostly safe against the types of interaction most decks pack. Hand disruption is a different story and is still quite prevalent. I don't know if Leyline of Sanctity truly deserves to be main deck, but I had room and figured why not.
The flip side of our lock combo, however, is that it's painfully slow. Most decks are swinging lethal or combing off by turn 3 on a consistent basis. For us to be competitive we don't necessarily have to win turn 3, but we should be focusing on setting up the lock as early as possible. I've been messing around with a bunch of different ramp packages and I haven't felt completely satisfied yet. I tried the Utopia Sprawl/Arbor Elf approach, but like you I felt like the constraint of needing a high forest count was just too taxing to build around. I think there's an optimal ramp package that compliments our combo, I'm just not sure what that is yet. I do believe one is needed though. Maybe not for pillow fort lists running a lot of interaction but definitely for the more "combo" versions of the soft lock.
I don't know how well this will hold up against a field of t1 decks piloted by good players, but so far it's pulling over an 80% win rate over 30ish games. I do think that number is higher than it should be though, since I've seen very little Tron or control match ups which are definitely harder match ups for this deck.
P.S. our homeboy Thrun already won me 2 games against Grixis Control. thumbs up.
Nice list. I ran something similar for a while that used the Heliod, God of the Sun/porphyry nodes combo as the primary win-con. Just from first impressions it does look like you have quite a lot of tutor power, maybe too much even? Vessel of Nascency looks needed as your only viable 1cmc drop when you're on the play or opponent doesn't lead with a creature. I absolutely love Kruphix's Insight, if I'm in green I always try to cram it in. Its' inherent card advantage is hard to pass up, especially if you're not running an enchantress draw engine along side your enchantments. Idyllic tutor on the other hand has been feeling increasingly underwhelming the more I use it. While tutoring up any enchantment is great, it always feels too slow. Commune with the Gods, on the other hand, isn't half of the tutor spell Idyllic Tutor is but it curves into Phyrexian or Solemnity which is so critically important in making these kinds of decks competitive. If it were me, I would take out Idyllic completely, you still have great dig support between commune,vessel, and kruphix and with being at 4-ofs with both Phyrexian Unlife and Solemnity, at some point you just have to trust the probability math.
Have you considered running Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx? Looks like you'd have a pretty healthy devotion number on board to give you a nice Nykthos activation which is a great way to dump mana into Heliod after you've established the soft lock. You can even chain your Nykthos drops for more mana shenanigans. You may have to give up a few Ghost Quarters or Field of Ruins to fit it though, as the colorless land count would be dangerously high and could lead to some awkward starting hands.
I always feel naked without at least a single Greater Auramancy in the main deck, especially if I'm running Starfield of Nyx as one of my win-cons. All it takes is a single removal spell to ruin your day once Nyx goes online. With at least a single Greater Auramancy, the opponent has to work a little harder to make that happen. It's bad enough that Nyx makes you lose to a single board wipe (Damnation, Wrath of God, etc.), but to lose to a single Fatal Push or Lightning Bolt feels terrible. I would suggest 1 Greater Auramancy main, and at the least 1 other somewhere in your 75, whether it's main or sideboard.
And I'm curious, is there a specific match up where you would bring Karmic Justice in? Or is it just for general interaction against your enchantments? While it's a really interesting card I wonder if it's just better to keep them from destroying your enchantments altogether (ala Greater Auramancy) than to have an enchantment that lets you trade when they do so? Unless of course this is for land destruction, in which case I think it's really neat tech in that department. Sacred Ground is something I like to play around with, mostly because it doesn't compete at the 3cmc slot, but I can see the case for Karmic Justice.
But with all that said I completely agree with you, I think green is a great way to support this shell. It offers some of the best tutor support, great sideboard cards against our worst match ups, and some really neat tools when it comes to ramping into our soft lock.
Has anyone tried Lost Auramancers with Solemnity and Phyrexian Unlife? Even tho Auramancers aren't instantly sacrificed while coming to play, they may chump block something, or you can simply play some wrath effect cards.
I tooled around with Lost Auramancers quite a bit trying to make it work. It felt the best in a deck that also used a Viscera Seer/Geralf’s Messenger combo so that Lost Auramancers cloud be sacced whenever you needed. Unfortunately I came to realize that even when you build around it, it’s just too slow. It’s a hard sell when there’s some other decent options out there for tutoring and in most situations the 3/3 body is irrelevant. Don’t get me wrong, cheating enchantments into play is great and being able to tutor for any enchanment in your deck is even better, I just personally couldn’t get it to work.
So lately I've been going mad trying to brew the Solemnity/Unlife combo into something that can hold up in a competitive environment. I've tried over 30 different deck ideas (yes, I have a sickness and the only cure is more Solemnity), but the only ones that felt even remotely competitive was the Solemnity Combo paired with Geralf's Messenger and Kitchen Finks in either a Orzhov Aristocrat shell or a BWg shell using Birds of Paradise for getting the combo down faster and Commune with the Gods as tutor support. The combo was relatively fast (BWg version allowing for turn 3 wins), but annoyingly fragile. The solemnity combo isn't really on anyone's radar in terms of the larger competitive atmosphere, but even so it catches the residual graveyard hate people are packing against other threats such as dredge, storm, hollow one etc. So I finally had enough. I decided that instead of brewing under the premise of "How can I win with this combo?" I would instead approach it with the notion of "How do I not lose?". And here we are.
This has been my take on the idea of using the Solemnity combo in a prison shell:
As you can see this is pretty unconventional compared to most pillowfort strategies, but when I was looking through the top 30 most played decks in modern right now I started to realize that there are only a handful of threats out there that can win through the Solemnity/Unlife combo. So, instead of cramming the deck full of aggro defense which is largely useless once the Solemnity combo goes online (unless Starfield of Nyx is your primary win-con), I instead decided to proactively attack those threats in the aims to completely neuter an opponents deck. The early hand disruption coupled with surgical extraction lets you not only strip an early threat, but also gives you information about your opponents deck, allowing you to make relevant choices with your Nevermores or Runed Halos. Cast Out and Gideon's Intervention are there as backup in case something slips through the cracks. Win-cons are the Karma + Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth combo and a single Palace Siege for backup, both tutorable when appropriate. Sideboard is rough and ever changing.
I don't have a tremendous amount of game data, but so far on Xmage it's been not only fun and challenging to play but also feels pretty powerful when played correctly. Most of my losses have been due to missteps on my part or from fast aggro decks sometimes slipping under unlife (especially if I have to tutor for it). I'm curious to see if anyone else has thought of taking this deck into this direction and what kinda of success they've had with it.
My experience with the deck is solely online. I can see it being a great pick at your LGS if it attacks that particular meta, but online I found it's inconsistencies and weaknesses a little too bothersome for me personally. And I think you hit it on the head: threat density. Building a deck around Nivmagus requires a different approach than building around other prowess type creatures. And since Nivmagus is one-of-a-kind in the way he operates, that means other creatures you bring in won't synergize with your gameplan as well as Nivmagus does. Kiln Fiend seems to be the best fit, but even with him it means your pacts are mostly dead in hand. Of course if you're not playing the Pact version of this deck this isn't as relevant.
I started brewing with Firebrand Archer in the mix and most of the time it seemed like a pretty good alternative to Kiln Fiend, Thing in the Ice, Death's Shadow, or Young Pyromancer. It was nice to have an outlet for indirect damage while you were going off with Nivmagus. It lowered the number of spells you needed for a lethal strike and gave the opponent another threat to answer. Unfortunately smart players will just prioritize killing Nivmagus first and in that scenario, Firebrand Archer was not the best at closing up a game on it's own. I'm excited to see if Ravnica brings us any Izzet goodies that can slot into this deck. Fingers crossed.
If anyone ever figures out a turn 4 win-con with the Solemnity/Unlife combo, this deck will explode.
I'm currently working in a similar direction as the Keranos list, only I went the Porphyry Nodes/Hazoret the Fervent/Blood Moon route. Unfortunately Blood Moon is pretty lackluster in the current meta. But it does feel pretty sexy swinging in with Hazoret and turning redundant combo pieces into burn spells.
However, it must be said, that there is a very big distinction between Nivmagus and Gurmag Angler, and that distinction is Fatal Push. Dodging one of the most played removal spells in the format is what separates Gurmag Angler apart from Nivmagus, pound for pound. However, that's not to say a deck built around Nivmagus can't make it as powerful as Gurmag.
Unless there's some innovation or a new printing, I think the biggest hurdles for this deck will be 1) Having Nivmagus in hand on turn 1 and 2) how to protect Nivmagus once he resolves. Clout of the Dominus and Simian Spirit Guide can get pretty bonkers when you have the nut draw, but after turn 1 or maaaaybe 2, Clout gets progressively worse as your opponent gains the ability to respond to it on the stack with a removal spell.
And yes, in my opinion, 3-4 Leyline of Sanctity in the sideboard (or even main, depending on your meta) is a unfortunate necessity with the deck being so fragile to edict effects and hand disruption.
Sorry if this sounds too negative, it really is a fun deck. Getting those nuts draws and killing on turn 2 is a great feeling. But when you start inspecting its glaring weaknesses you realize that a deck like Bloo/UR Prowess is doing something similar, but doing it with much more resilience than what Elemental Shotgun can provide.
This deck can be incredibly explosive. It can also be incredibly fragile. It's the epitome of a "glass-cannon" deck. Turn 2 kills are more common than you would expect. Ground Rift is the star of the deck. It lets you alpha strike with just a few pacts in hand. Tainted Strike, especially paired with Gut Shot to clear the way, makes hands without a Ground Rift viable. It's a fun deck to play, catches a lot of people off guard and can most definitely steal wins.
But it's not without its problems. It folds to discard. I mean completely folds. Keeping a killer hand with Nivmagus only to have it Thoughtseized is usually game over. Kiln fiend is awkward. It's a great secondary win-con, but a lot of the time it leaves you with a handful of pacts that you can't cast. And if you do have Nivmagus Elemental out to gobble up the pacts and power up Kiln Fiend, then most of the time you don't need Kiln Fiend to win. But, he kinda works with the gameplan, is a pretty decent plan B in his own right, and can be tutored with Flamekin Harbinger, so I guess its the best we got. I found Manamorphose to be invaluable. it helps you dig, mana fix, and add to your storm count and its cost is in line within the potentiality of the turn 2 kill.
Apostle's Blessing, Pact of Negation and a suite of hand disruption of your own are pretty necessary now that we don't have access to Gitaxian Probe to make sure your Nivmagus/Kiln Fiend stays alive long enough to string together an alpha strike.
Fun deck, but you have to run hotter than the sun to survive the plethora of answers the meta has to throw at you. My $.02
I really like the Boseiju, Who Shelters All + Entreat the Angels for the extra edge against control. Do you find it being worth it despite it being a dead card once you're into negative life?
I'm curious as to how your Humans match ups shakes out with your list. I found that match up to also be an uphill battle. Thalia, Guardian of Thraben + Meddling Mage usually slowed me down enough for them to get under before I could set up. A Ghostly Prison on turn 4 just doesn't cut it.
Have you tried running Ixalan's Binding? I found the card to be pretty great in the deck. It's essentially an Oblivion Ring, but for one more mana you make sure the card doesn't come back. Great against an Ensnaring Bridge, Meddling Mage, Blood Moon, or a troublesome planeswalker like Jace, The Mind Sculptor or Teferi, Hero of Dominaria. The extra casting cost was more relevant than I like to admit in a lot of cases, so I eventually settled on a 3 Oblivion Ring - 1 Ixalan's Binding split.
Against Jund or other grindy decks I found Heliod, God of the Sun to be a great sideboard option. Not only is he protected under Greater Auramancy, but so are his tokens which allows you to build a bigger board state and win through attrition. Also a valuable line against control. Throw a Pariah in there targeting Heliod and you have a secondary Phyrexian Unlife/Solemnity-esque combo, which can be a good strategy in game 2 when you're opponent is preparing for the Solemnity combo.
Silence is something I haven't considered, but I like the idea of being confident in being able to land a key prison piece for just 1 extra mana. I tried real hard to like Grand Abolisher, it just never performed for me, but then again I was jamming this deck back when Jeskai control was the control deck of choice. Maybe with the UW and Miracles lists ticking up, it'll fare better.
Seeing you have some success with this list makes me want to give it a go again. I'll throw it into a comp league this weekend and pray to Heliod that I dodge the Tron match up.
I've also been working on a UW Mill deck for the past month or so and I've come up with something pretty similar (hopefully that means we're on the right track). Archive Trap is clearly a very powerful card and certainly worth going down the rabbit hole to explore if it can be viable on a competitive level. While it does certainly get much harder to use against seasoned players, with the right tools behind it, it can still be a powerhouse.
One of those tools that I've found to be absolutely crucial is Jace, Vryn's Prodigy. This guy filled every role I needed: card filtering, win condition, early blocker, but most importantly a Snapcaster effect that can cast Archive Trap for 0 (so important). This is essentially a much more versatile Twincast that doesn't have to sit in your hand dead half the time. Now this is not to say he's not soft to removal, but a Hedron Crab on 1 followed by Jace, Vryn's Prodigy on 2 gives our opponent a very awkward choice: which one to kill? If they remove both it's usually a tempo swing in our favor as our next turn Fraying Sanity comes down and it's often lights out from there. It's said in a lot of these mill discussions that a Hedron Crab unanswered will win you the game and I feel very much the same way about Jace, Vryn's Prodigy. It just opens up so many lines for this deck.
Really, you don't need any more mill power than Archive Trap and Fraying Sanity. Math wise, they do the job just fine in a timely manner. Unfortunately magic is not played in a vacuum and as I was testing I felt like I desperately needed another mill card. Missing Glimpse the Unthinkable certainly hurts, but I've found Mind Sculpt to be an acceptable concession to not confuddling the mana base any more than it already is.
Speaking of mana base, it's probably the second most important support function of the deck. A Field of Ruin is one of the few cards that can force a search. In game 1 this isn't as crucial, but after your opponent gets wise to your shenanigans they probably won't search ever again. That fact also gives us a slight edge in some of the cards that we can play. Path to Exile becomes even more amazing than it already is. Opting out of a free land in fear of a potential Archive Trap is a win/win for us. I personally found running a few Ghost Quarter still felt right. There's been plenty of times when blowing up one of my own lands (especially a Flagstones of Trokair) with a Hedron Crab out has won me the game. With Crucible of Worlds (albeit sometimes win-more) we can also put our opponent into a land prison, forcing them to use search effects if they want to stay in the game.
some neat lines the deck can take:
Jace, Telepath Unbound's -3 to Snapcaster any of our mill cards or cantrip cards to help dig you into the cards you need.
Mesmeric Orb + Jace, Telepath Unbound The Orb not only mills our opponent, but also dumps our spells into our graveyard allowing us to keep our hand size small for Ensnaring Bridge while giving us access to our spells through Jace's -3.
Jace, Vryn's Prodigy + Minamo, School at Water's Edge (for an extra Jace activation to either dig or flip)
Opt gets under your own Mesmeric Orb effect on your Upkeep step to grab something you've scryed to the top of your library.
Serum Visions + Shelldock Isle provides less guess work when using Shelldock's Hideaway effect.
Academy Ruins mostly to get back an Ensnaring Bridge that's been either destroyed or discarded.
Trapmaker's Snare + Mindbreak Trap turns the storm/kci match up into a cake walk.
As for the rest of the deck, I think there's still a lot of room for testing and innovation. UW mill has not been nearly as explored as the UB version so there's a lot of cards to pour through and test out. Broken Ambitions for example is proving to be a lot better than I would of given it credit for.
I think in the right meta this deck can definitely be a contender, but I feel like I've reached my limit with building the deck. Smarter brewers than myself are going to have to take it from here.
TLDR: UW mill isn't completely terrible.
4 Hedron Crab
3 Jace, Vryn's Prodigy
Instants & Sorceries
4 Archive Trap
3 Mind Sculpt
2 Trapmaker's Snare
4 Path to Exile
3 Serum Visions
1 Opt
3 Surgical Extraction
1 Echoing Truth
Artifacts
4 Mesmeric Orb
3 Ensnaring Bridge
3 Fraying Sanity
Lands
4 Field of Ruin
2 Ghost Quarter
1 Academy Ruin
1 Shelldock Isle
1 Minamo, School at Water's Edge
1 Oboro, Palace in the Clouds
1 Flagstones of Trokair
1 Ipnu Rivulet
4 Flooded Strand
2 Hallowed Fountain
3 Island
1 Plains
3 Leyline of Sanctity
3 Tormod's Crypt
2 Broken Ambitions
1 Stony Silence
1 Mindbreak Trap
1 Torpor Orb
1 Elixir of Immortality
1 Crucible of Worlds
1 Leave No Trace
1 Supreme Verdict
You know, in my recent experience running this deck on MTGO, this sentiment has some realistic value. Humans is everywhere and I cannot tell you how many times I've tutored a card with Idyllic Tutor just to have it named by Meddling Mage the next turn before I can cast it. In that match up specifically you lose the entire element of surprise that wins you that much needed game 1. Now of course, this is a corner case with just a single deck, but considering this deck is also at the top of the meta game food chain, I think it's definitely worth considering Mastermind's Acquisition. Is the utility of an Idyllic Tutor/Glittering Wish type card worth the extra mana investment? I think only testing will tell, but I can see the case for it.
Unfortunately with control decks on the rise thanks to our friend Teferi, Hero of Dominaria, I think we lost a little favor in the meta game. I was consistently pulling 4-1s in comp leagues (Tron seems to always be there to stop me from nabbing that 5-0), but that win-rate is decreasing steadily as I encounter more and more control decks. Not saying control decks are unbeatable, but as Mark pointed out earlier, not having a Boseiju, Who Shelters All-type card for enchantments makes it an uphill battle for sure.
EDIT: in case anyone's wondering, the reason Teferi can be so oppressive to deal with is because it makes it harder for us to drop key lock pieces when our opponent is tapped out, thanks to Teferi's +1. As if that weren't bad enough, his other two modes also hit our enchantments if we don't set up the hard lock with two Greater Auramancys. It's one of the reasons why I've been gravitating towards Ixalan's Binding over Oblivion Ring/Cast Out/Gideon's Intervention as of late.
As for the combo at large, I can't tell you how many games I've won just by dropping the Phyrexian Unlife/Solemnity pair. If that doesn't get the concede, dropping a Greater Auramancy or two usually does. I actually took the deck into a friendly league and took out my win-cons (Heliod and Axis of Mortality) just for the heck of it. Long story short I ended up 4-1, losing only to a Jace control deck that ended up milling me out. The combo is legit and in my opinion the strongest aspects of the pillow-fort strategy right now. It seems to be a well positioned answer to the hyper-aggressive linear meta we currently have (at least on MTGO).
So my philosophy for taking the deck in this direction is as followed: Do I want to blank creature damage or ALL damage based strategies? We have access to a combo that not only stop creatures from killing you, but any damage based win con, which if you look at the meta is almost every single top 16 deck from the last couple big events, minus things like Ad Nauseam which can win through means other than damage. Combine that with the small amount of enchantment hate in proportion to other forms of hate in sideboards and main decks and it's not a big leap to think that the Phyrexian Unlife/Solemnity lock is very well positioned right now. Can the same be said for a card like Ghost Prison? No. There's plenty of decks out there that don't care about a lot of the prison effects the traditional lists are packing. So considering all this, I believe it's worth exploring an all in approach on this powerful combo.
So we know the lock is pretty solid. Cool. Unfortunately two big problems still remain: How do we get it out as early as possible and once it's out, how do we win? Sigil of the Empty Throne and Heliod can be solid win-cons, but they can also take a long time to close the game out and, as was mentioned earlier, a lot of main decks have a way to slither out of the soft lock. In my experience playing Prison fort I found the slow win-cons to be it's Achilles heel. While Axis carries it's own negatives, it can close a game out very fast when compared to Sigil or Heliod. It can win with just a Phyrexian Unlife out if sequenced carefully. Do I think it's the perfect win-con? No way. I can barely even say it's good. But it does have the ability to close a game and it has great synergy with the soft lock that we aim to create. It's funny, I'm not really having a problem with Axis winning games, what I'm having a problem with is the ramp package being partly creature based and more often than not, being removed. Lotus is performing great. I would ditch Herald and Birds at the drop of a hat if someone suggested something better.
I'm not saying any of this is right or better than the traditional pillow-fort lists, I just love exploring outside-of-the-box jank ideas.
Cool idea with Worm Harvest giving you a win-con from another axis. The more sideboard cards our opponents have to bring in the worse it makes their decks so I like the idea of putting pressure on from the graveyard.
And I'm with you 100% on Cast Out. I've had a few really good players tell me it's a wasted slot and I should be running Oblivion Ring in it's place. Once you play these decks you get a sense of how useful the cycling can be to give you that last ditch effort to dig for an unlife/solemenity/ or anything else more useful than a dead removal card. The flash is also something to note and has been clutch in a handful of situation. Definitely keeping it main deck as my catch-all.
So for a while I was running a very similar list to yours with a single Axis of Mortality as a back-up win condition. Then I started to notice that about half of my wins were coming from that card over the Heliod beatdown or flying over the top with Sigil. So I decided to go down the rabbit hole and tailor the deck around Axis of Mortality as the primary win-con. The end result looks like a weird Ad Nauseam deck, but focusing on a T3 hard-lock (Phyrexian Unlife, Solemnity, and Greater Auramancy) instead of a T3 kill. Heliod still makes the sideboard as my beatdown approach incase someone's packing Leyline of Sanctity.
I call it.......BAD NAUSEAM
4 Birds of Paradise
3 Herald of the Pantheon
4 Lotus Bloom
Dig
4 Spoils of the Vault (I'm in love with this card)
4 Vessel of Nascency
1 Idyllic Tutor
Lock
4 Phyrexian Unlife
3 Solemnity
3 Greater Auramancy
4 Leyline of Sanctity
2 Cast Out
2 Axis of Mortality
1 Sigarda, Host of Herons
Lands (21)
4 Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
1 Mistveil Plains
2 Horizon Canopy
2 Temple Gardens
2 Overgrown Tomb
1 Godless Shrine
4 City of Brass
2 Plains
2 Forest
1 Swamp
1 Heliod, God of the Sun
1 Thrun, the Last Troll
1 Sigil of the Empty Throne
1 Ensnaring Bridge
1 Porphyry Nodes
1 Journey to Nowhere
1 Runed Halo
1 Pariah
2 Nevermore
1 Rest in Peace
1 Sacred Ground
1 Stony Silence
1 Rule of Law
1 Choke
what a pile of trash! I hate when a deck you think is going to be terrible puts up better results than a deck you worked hard to build. I don't know if it's just been the match up lottery or what, but this thing is holding up way better than I thought it would. I'm porting it over to MTGO this weekend and trying it out in a league to truly see how terrible it is.
So right now in the meta I think the Phyrexian Unlife/Solemnity lock is very well positioned considering how little hate people are packing against enchantments. Really, the only thing on the radar is Blood Moon and Bogles and a lot of lists don't fear Bogles enough to pack hate for it. That leaves our combo uniquely positioned to not only lock out the wide swath of aggro decks that are running amok, but also mostly safe against the types of interaction most decks pack. Hand disruption is a different story and is still quite prevalent. I don't know if Leyline of Sanctity truly deserves to be main deck, but I had room and figured why not.
The flip side of our lock combo, however, is that it's painfully slow. Most decks are swinging lethal or combing off by turn 3 on a consistent basis. For us to be competitive we don't necessarily have to win turn 3, but we should be focusing on setting up the lock as early as possible. I've been messing around with a bunch of different ramp packages and I haven't felt completely satisfied yet. I tried the Utopia Sprawl/Arbor Elf approach, but like you I felt like the constraint of needing a high forest count was just too taxing to build around. I think there's an optimal ramp package that compliments our combo, I'm just not sure what that is yet. I do believe one is needed though. Maybe not for pillow fort lists running a lot of interaction but definitely for the more "combo" versions of the soft lock.
I don't know how well this will hold up against a field of t1 decks piloted by good players, but so far it's pulling over an 80% win rate over 30ish games. I do think that number is higher than it should be though, since I've seen very little Tron or control match ups which are definitely harder match ups for this deck.
P.S. our homeboy Thrun already won me 2 games against Grixis Control. thumbs up.
Have you considered running Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx? Looks like you'd have a pretty healthy devotion number on board to give you a nice Nykthos activation which is a great way to dump mana into Heliod after you've established the soft lock. You can even chain your Nykthos drops for more mana shenanigans. You may have to give up a few Ghost Quarters or Field of Ruins to fit it though, as the colorless land count would be dangerously high and could lead to some awkward starting hands.
I always feel naked without at least a single Greater Auramancy in the main deck, especially if I'm running Starfield of Nyx as one of my win-cons. All it takes is a single removal spell to ruin your day once Nyx goes online. With at least a single Greater Auramancy, the opponent has to work a little harder to make that happen. It's bad enough that Nyx makes you lose to a single board wipe (Damnation, Wrath of God, etc.), but to lose to a single Fatal Push or Lightning Bolt feels terrible. I would suggest 1 Greater Auramancy main, and at the least 1 other somewhere in your 75, whether it's main or sideboard.
I really like the Thrun, the Last Troll idea as an answer to control match ups (which can be horrendous for us). I usually run Eyes of the Wisent alongside Choke, but I'm curious to see how Thrun works as a replacement to Eyes of the Wisent.
And I'm curious, is there a specific match up where you would bring Karmic Justice in? Or is it just for general interaction against your enchantments? While it's a really interesting card I wonder if it's just better to keep them from destroying your enchantments altogether (ala Greater Auramancy) than to have an enchantment that lets you trade when they do so? Unless of course this is for land destruction, in which case I think it's really neat tech in that department. Sacred Ground is something I like to play around with, mostly because it doesn't compete at the 3cmc slot, but I can see the case for Karmic Justice.
But with all that said I completely agree with you, I think green is a great way to support this shell. It offers some of the best tutor support, great sideboard cards against our worst match ups, and some really neat tools when it comes to ramping into our soft lock.
I tooled around with Lost Auramancers quite a bit trying to make it work. It felt the best in a deck that also used a Viscera Seer/Geralf’s Messenger combo so that Lost Auramancers cloud be sacced whenever you needed. Unfortunately I came to realize that even when you build around it, it’s just too slow. It’s a hard sell when there’s some other decent options out there for tutoring and in most situations the 3/3 body is irrelevant. Don’t get me wrong, cheating enchantments into play is great and being able to tutor for any enchanment in your deck is even better, I just personally couldn’t get it to work.
This has been my take on the idea of using the Solemnity combo in a prison shell:
4 Thoughtseize
3 Inquisition of Kozilek
4 Surgical Extraction
4 Idyllic Tutor
Enchantments
3 Phyrexian Unlife
2 Solemnity
2 Greater Auramancy
3 Leyline of Sanctity
4 Nevermore
2 Runed Halo
2 Cast Out
1 Gideon's Intervention
2 Karma
1 Palace Siege
4 Caves of Koilos
3 Godless Shrine
4 Marsh Flats
1 Mistveil Plains
2 Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
4 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
3 Plains
2 Swamp
1 Cranial Extraction
2 Wrath of God
2 Stony Silence
1 Rule of Law
1 Cast Out
1 Gideon's Intervention
3 Leyline of the Void
1 Starfield of Nyx
1 Form of the Dragon
As you can see this is pretty unconventional compared to most pillowfort strategies, but when I was looking through the top 30 most played decks in modern right now I started to realize that there are only a handful of threats out there that can win through the Solemnity/Unlife combo. So, instead of cramming the deck full of aggro defense which is largely useless once the Solemnity combo goes online (unless Starfield of Nyx is your primary win-con), I instead decided to proactively attack those threats in the aims to completely neuter an opponents deck. The early hand disruption coupled with surgical extraction lets you not only strip an early threat, but also gives you information about your opponents deck, allowing you to make relevant choices with your Nevermores or Runed Halos. Cast Out and Gideon's Intervention are there as backup in case something slips through the cracks. Win-cons are the Karma + Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth combo and a single Palace Siege for backup, both tutorable when appropriate. Sideboard is rough and ever changing.
I don't have a tremendous amount of game data, but so far on Xmage it's been not only fun and challenging to play but also feels pretty powerful when played correctly. Most of my losses have been due to missteps on my part or from fast aggro decks sometimes slipping under unlife (especially if I have to tutor for it). I'm curious to see if anyone else has thought of taking this deck into this direction and what kinda of success they've had with it.