So Amonkhet is releasing soon, and ever since they released the set's spoilers I couldn't help but notice that it contains a lot of very good control cards - and ones good against Mardu Vehicles and 4C Saheeli, too. As a control player that had been barely playing Standard at all due to the lack of control present, this was a godsend, and thus, this deck.
Now, from the name, you might assume that this deck relies really heavily on cycling, but that's not true. I feel like people seeking to get lots out of Faith of the Devoted or Drake Haven by spending all turn cycling are misevaluating them. The attached mana cost means it's not really worth it to go out of your way to get activations. However, anyone who's ever played with cycling cards in eternal formats or in long-ago Standards will know that cycling cards don't need to be justified - cycling is, itself, an incredibly strong mechanic. This deck uses cycling as a kind of deck filtering to find whatever you need at the time, and incidentally gets a whole value off doing so through Drake Haven and Archfiend of Ifnir.
Our gameplan is primarily to stop our opponent from killing us until we can get out a Gideon, Ally of Zendikar or an Archfiend of Ifnir, protect it, and swing until we win, while grinding our opponent down with incremental advantages and stopping them from stopping us. The moment you get an Archfiend of Ifnir on the battlefield with protection in hand, you've basically won against most decks - a lot of decks just plain don't run removal that hits it, and the ones that do typically don't run enough to fight through counterspells effectively; and it basically produces a one-sided-wrath every other turn with the amount of -1/-1 counters it dumps on opponents creatures, grinding creature decks to a halt. And, well, anyone who's been paying attention to Standard knows what a powerhouse Gideon, Ally of Zendikar is.
Drake Haven and isn't there to help you win so much as not lose - the incremental advantages it provides help keep you alive while you set up for the win. You'll probably only make 3 drakes or in a single game, but that's enough to matter, especially when you're not going out of your way to get that kind of incremental advantage.
Essence Scatter and Negate deal with creatures and noncreatures, respectively. In sideboarding, you should probably switch out whichever is less useful for more copies of the other.
Commit / Memory works well as both a counterspell and removal - by the time they draw whatever you put in their library, it's probably just not useful to cast any more. You can then use it to refuel if you end up super low for some reason.
Most of the time you draw Censor, you'll be cycling it, but don't let that get you down - "U: Draw a card" is a pretty good effect in its own right, especially in a deck that generates extra incremental advantages off it like this one - one that says "1U: Draw a card and create a 2/2 Drake" or "1U: Draw a card, opponent loses 2, you gain 2" or "U: Draw a card, put a -1/-1 counter on each creature your opponent controls" is really good. You'll get the chance to counter something with it early every couple of games or so, and your opponent will be forced to play around it. Plus, occasionally your opponent will be struck with a quick bout of stupidity and tap out fully for an Ulamog. Yes, this happened in testing.
Pull from Tomorrow
provides an absurd amount of card advantage. In testing, after turn 5 I rarely had less than 5 cards in hand at any given time, and often had seven or more.
You may be wondering why I'm running Hieroglyphic Illumination over Glimmer of Genius. Well, I originally had Glimmer in this deck, but for whatever reason, it ended up being a dead card most of the time I drew it - there were just too many important things to do. That, and our cards are so versatile in the first place that scrying isn't as useful for us as it is for other decks in the first place.
Torrential Gearhulk, too, does what it always does - generates massive value from recasting Hieroglyphic Illumination, or, occasionally,
Commit/Memory
or a counterspell.
Renewed Faith helps keep you alive versus aggro.
I'd like some help with finishing up the sideboard, as I always have trouble building one.
