Lead Guy Ale is a variant of Dead Guy Ale (Orzhov Midrange) that pairs Asmora board control and Urza's Saga artifact synergies with Aether Vial, Dark Confidant, and the very potent Stoneforge Mystic package.
First, let me highlight the three key synergies that make Lead Guy Ale unique from other Asmora decks:
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Aether Vial. Vial is Urza's Saga's best friend. I know that the title says "AsmoraBlade", but this is actually more of a Vial/Saga deck than anything else. Saga's biggest downside is that it is very mana intensive to activate, often taking up your entire third and fourth turn to get all the value out of it. These two turns spent ignoring your opponent while they play their spells often puts you behind on tempo, which can prove fatal in such a fast format. However, Vial lets you develop your board with creatures while you dump your mana into Urza's Saga, which usually puts you really far ahead on board by turn 4. This can quickly overwhelm an unprepared opponent.
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Vial can put an Asmora onto the battlefield so long as it has 0 counters on it. This means a turn 1 Vial can get immediate value and potentially blow out an opposing attacker on the draw. Fetching Vial off of Urza’s Saga on turn 4 to play an uncounterable Asmora with no discard requirement is surprisingly useful, and Vial can also stick around on the battlefield with zero counters to play any Asmoras you happen to draw (you only usually do this with the second copy of Vial).
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With 23 lands and four copies of Asmora, there is nearly a 50% chance that Dark Confidant flips a 0 cmc spell on your upkeep. Bob also serves as a pseudo Ovalchase Daredevil by giving you an extra card to discard to The Underworld Cookbook every turn until he draws you into an actual Daredevil.
Now let's talk about the most important card in the deck, Stoneforge Mystic. One of the biggest flaws of the Kitchen archetype is that they lack an actual factual win condition; if you take away their Cookbooks or their graveyards or their Urza’s Sagas, they’re basically 60 cards of thin air. This is what makes the recent BR version so strong; it doesn’t wholly rely on constructs to win, making it much more resilient to artifact/Saga hate. That said, it’s still very soft to graveyard hate, so it isn’t a perfect answer to this issue.
Lead Guy Ale, however, is an exception because it plays Stoneforge Mystic. The Stoneforge package (and specifically Kaldra Compleat) gives the deck a reliable win condition that doesn't get hated out by all the most commonly played hate cards for Asmora decks (Force of Vigor, Alpine Moon for Urza's Saga, graveyard hate like Sanctifier en-Vec). This brings me back to my point about Dark Confidant—while he is a less powerful justification for playing Cookbooks than cards like Urza or Kroxa, he also doesn’t rely on graveyards or artifacts to be good, which makes the deck much more resilient to hate overall.
White brings a lot of powerful sideboard cards like Sanctum Prelate and Sanctifier en-Vec to the table, and since the deck always has Stoneforge as a win condition it can afford to board into a less focused, Death & Taxes-style midrange deck to dodge hate cards. In addition, white spells stack up very well against most anti-Asmora/Urza’s Saga spells, which are typically permanents that can be hit by Skyclave Apparition and Prismatic Ending. In some matchups you can even board out parts of the Asmora package to catch them off guard—for example, against BR Darcy, you can board out 4 Ovalchase Daredevil and a Cookbook and bring in 3 Sanctifier En-Vec and 1 Nihil Spellbomb, blanking any graveyard hate they may be playing.
So, those are the big ideas behind Lead Guy Ale. I believe this BWx Vial/Saga shell has a ton of promise, and I hope some of you pick up the torch and spread the word about it—the interaction between Vial and Saga is super powerful and hasn’t been explored nearly enough!
