Mono-Blue Kefnet's Monument feat. Sphinx Tribal with Unesh, Criosphinx Sovereign
The main goal of the deck is to cast cheap sphinxes using the cost reduction from Kefnet's Monument and Unesh, Criosphinx Sovereign. These big flyers will be difficult to remove and will end the game quickly enough.
Tribal Stuff:
Unesh, Criosphinx Sovereign: The main reason Sphinx tribal even exists in this form at all, making all your big sphinxes 2 cheaper, its easy to overwhelm your opponents. It also refuels your hand with every sphinx played. Also, the fact that the unused cards go the graveyard, works well with our embalm creatures.
Metallic Mimic: An honorary sphinx, its a good early drop creature that permanently buffs all of our sphinxes, it also eats up alot of removal that could target our bigger stuff (or our other artifacts).
Favorable Winds: This 2 mana enchantment buffs all of out creatures since all sphinxes fly (except metallic mimic), but a 2 mana anthem is still very powerful pushing most of our sphinxes past the reach of most creatures and removal.
Kefnet's Monument: Another strange tribal card, this time focusing on our blue creature (sorry mimic), acting as a mini Unesh, Criosphinx Sovereign, making them 1 less to cast. Its also a tempo card that can keep creatures at bay till we reach our big sphinxes (yea mimic can help too!). This is even better with the rotation of Always Watching .
Sphinxes:
Curator of Mysteries: A 4/4 flyer for 4 is already above the curve but this one comes with additional upsides, working well with cycling, and just being a blue sphinx. You can also cycle it in a pinch, but why would you want to do that?
Glyph Keeper: This sphinx essential has hexproof since it takes too spells to kill it, plus it comes back in the late game so even more value. Its 5 power means it closes out the game quickly but its low toughness means that it doesn't survive very well in combat.
Sphinx of Magosi: Everyone forgets that cards printed in the welcome decks are legal in standard, and oh boy does sphinx tribal get a good one. This 6/6 flyer is massive, put it comes with its own card draw/ pump ability that will be a god-send in drawn out matchups. The only downside is that I don't know whether it rotates out when Ixalan comes in! If anyone knows the answer feel free to tell me!
Vizier of Many Faces: Not a sphinx but does its best impression of one, and the only sphinx it cant copy is Unesh, Criosphinx Sovereign (since its legendary). However, it fills up a good spot in our curve and comes with addtional upsides. Since it enters as a sphinx, it will trigger any of those abilities, it has a cheap embalm so even more recursive value and you can copy any creature. That Carnage Tyrant? Yes, please!
Spells:
Since we're a mono-blue deck, we don't have the greatest of removal, (i.e. none) since Imprisoned in the Moon rotates, but we do get a host of counter spells, though there not so great since we want to be proactive rather than reactive, however, since we have alot of cost reduction, we sometimes can have alot of free mana to use on counter spells:
Censor: A great spell to slow down the early game, so that we have time to get to our sphinxes, also cycles away when we don't need it anymore.
Essence Scatter: For dinos and any other creature heavy midrange deck.
Disallow: A catch all counterspell.
Sideboard:
This depends on the meta, but the one I provides general answers to control, combo, graveyard stratgies, and more midrange decks.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this deck, if you have any suggestions please feel free to suggest! Thank You for reading!
