So the moment I saw
Tezzeret, Master of the Bridge
I knew I had to do something with it. When I first saw it I was like, "AH HA! BREYA!!" buuut I don't own Breya and she's not exactly a cheep date. Then I immediately thought about Grixis because Grixis is just a better form of Izzet (if this gives you a sad you can at me @PhiletKane on Twitter, AT ME MAMMA RAISED NO BITCH) but the problem with Grixis commanders is that they don't really care about artifacts all that much and the ones that are run counter to what
Tezzeret, Master of the Bridge
want to do or are just kinda bad like
Mishra, Artificer Prodigy
. So I'm flippin' through my binder, defeated, until I see
Aminatou, the Fateshifter
staring back at me with her dead-lookin-ass and a surge of possibilities flood through my gaping eye-holes and behold, the most empathetic millennial deck I have ever constructed, a mess of identity crises: Aminatou's Playground.
insert run-on sentence and leave the note you made up on the spot to run as some sort of meta joke because the internet loves to be meta So its a superfriends deck but it's an artifact deck that also blinks and does miracles and in clutch moments can also be a token deck making it seem like at the surface its just a lot of cards that are smooshed together but there is a synergy there. It does a lot of things and my playtests with it have proven to be pretty successful in my playgroup at my LGS at least. Now the meta at my LGS tends to have a lot of artifact hate so it was fairly risky of me to build the deck and hope to find some sort of success in the first place. I only bring this up because I have never seen an Aminatou deck run this way and I don't want to oversell the success I have had with it, nor do I think that those victories are won through some sort of fluke.
So how does the deck do its work? Well its simple, you tutor everything until you win.
Okay, okay, it's a bit more complicated than that. There are 3 win cons in the deck, our 👏DADDY👏
Tezzeret, Master of the Bridge
and
Exsanguinate
. All of these things require us to get some fast mana. This is where
Tezzeret the Seeker
and
Trinket Mage
come into play. Getting either of these allow us to grab our mana rocks fairly quickly and using
Aminatou, the Fateshifter
or
Venser, the Sojourner
to blink them would allow us to just play with our deck in our hands for our turns. Getting
Trinket Mage
in your first 3 turns has only proven to be an absolute easy win because by turn 4 you can have your Mana Vault and Voltaic Key online and that's just kinda oppressive to have that much mana that early and its fairly consistent.
An important aspect of this deck is the amount of artifacts we create. So if the card isn't some sort of utility to the deck or a Planeswalker, it needs to bring in artifacts some how. There are a whopping 34 cards that are either artifacts or the create artifacts in some way and one of the most powerful cards is the all-star of white and the newest collective groan when that hits the table:
Smothering Tithe
. Not only is this a way to generate tons of mana, but it creates so many artifact tokens that in a fortunate round can make you just win in a single turn. Having 9 treasure tokens on the field and a fairly small amount of other artifacts can turn into loads of damage by using
Aminatou, the Fateshifter
to blink
Tezzeret, Master of the Bridge
and using
Oath of Teferi
in many cases just wins you the game. Its also not hard to build up to this type of victory either.
You know that feeling when you play a card that no one knows what it does but they are so flabbergasted that they (rudely) pick up the card and kinda scoff? Well for me that card is
Rona, Disciple of Gix
. Yeah, this card has surprised me. It might as well read "Hey you know those cards your opponents hated so much that they killed it, well its BAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK" and its tap ability works really, REEALLY well with
Aminatou, the Fateshifter
+1 ability. Now the ruling for this card means if you lose her when cards are in exile then you lose the ability to cast them even if she leaves the battlefield. Its not like
Gonti, Lord of Luxury
where you can play them for as long as they remain exiled, so keep that in mind, but when she works, oh boy she works well. She essentially allows us to regain our Tezzerets and other Planeswalkers, and if we use her tap ability like INTELLECTS we can filter the top card of our decks and essentially get another draw before our turn.
Rona, Disciple of Gix
+
Aminatou, the Fateshifter
+
Sensei's Divining Top
make for some serious "before your end step" plays.
Since this is an
Aminatou, the Fateshifter
deck we might as well run miracles. I did have
Entreat the Angels
in the deck as another win con, I may work it back in there but further testing would have to be done. Now before someone suggests that I run
Cyclonic Rift
,
Enlightened Tutor
, and
Deepglow Skate
just know that they are on my radar and will be the first things I will get ASAP. I would like some feedback but before you do that:
My LGS playgroup really, REEEEALLLY hates infinite combos and if they know that you have one in your deck then you will be subject to instant hate. So, yes I know that you could easily run
Felidar Guardian
and
Altar of the Brood
and it would be super, super simple in this deck to do so, but I won't be doing it because I want to keep my friends and acquaintances.
So that's my deck! I hope some of you try it out, if you have any feedback I would love it hear it!! <3
