Jeskai Ascendancy
isn't on the banlist for Noble yet, so I figured I'd give the deck a shot. Without disruption, the deck can consistently kill by turn 4, and turn 3 is common.
Jeskai Ascendancy
and a mana dork means that cantrips are free. Use Jeskai Ascendancy to loot whenever you have a creature or land in hand, to find more cantrips. If you draw Crimson Wisps, you should play a mana dork and give it haste, to give you another mana dork. Once you have 2+ mana dorks, you build up mana while you keep cantripping through your deck.
Treasure Cruise is absolutely nuts in this deck. Because the deck plays
Feldon's Cane
, it's worth noting that you want to avoid delving away cantrips if you can, though my (limited) testing has yet to run into a situation where you actually activate
Feldon's Cane
.
There are two win conditions in this deck: first is attacking with a couple large mana dorks. The other option is to use Retraction Helix to bounce
Feldon's Cane
an arbitrary number of times (you need 2 mana dorks to do this), and attack with 9001/9001 mana dorks.
Other win conditions that might be worth playing include Fireball, Grapeshot, or Empty the Warrens. Empty the Warrens only needs you to cast 7 spells and hit your opponent with a mana dork to win next turn. Grapeshot and Fireball don't require attacking, but Fireball requires 21+ mana, and Grapeshot requires a storm count of 20, which is difficult to achieve without using
Feldon's Cane
to reshuffle your cantrips back into your library. Shriekhorn is cute and a legitimate win condition (repeatedly bounce it to untap/reset it), but I doubt that it's a good idea.
In terms of mana, the deck is basically Simic (UG) splashing red for Crimson Wisps.
Fun fact: City of Brass was printed at uncommon in Arabian Nights. It's possible I should be using Gemstone Mine in its place, though.
As far as numbers, I'm not sure how to split Ponder and Preordain. So far, I've been inclined to say that Preordain is superior, and Ponder is probably the first card I would sideboard out in a given matchup.
