Aminatou has always interested me from a mechanical standpoint. On-release, I was hoping Aminatou, the Fateshifter would be stronger than she seemed, but was sorely disappointed when she ended up being the worst card in her own deck. Every one of her loyalty abilities requires an outside enabler to do anything, and her Miracle Sorcery synergy was janky, at best. Not only that, but she's a Planeswalker who's woefully unable to defend herself, meaning she required a creature line in order to affect the board in any long-term way. In attempting to create an Extremely Unique Card, the Wizards ended up creating a strange child who doesn't seem to do anything. The frustrating part of this was how close they were to creating something truly memorable. Flicker, topdeck manipulation, and an extremely niche bomb-effect, put together in one unit, should be extremely fun and cool, but without any self-synergy or any real ability to gain advantage on her own, I passed on the build until Something Different Happened.
Well, some Very Different Things have Happened. Aminatou, Veil Piercer was released in Duskmourn, giving us a mechanically-focused commander that skirts many of the issues presented by Fateshifter. She combos with herself, with her Surveil effect naturally empowering her Miracle effect. Her deck-fix occurs in upkeep, rather than in previous main, meaning we dodge enemy-turn mill. Additionally, Aminatou raises the value of (almost) any enchantment she hits, and lets us make use of the Miracle effect without having to actually run any (usually dead-in-hand) Miracle cards. She's deck fix, she's cost reduction, she's self-mill. Instead of begging for enablers, this version of Aminatou is the enabler.
Alongside Veil Piercer, Duskmourn introduced some extremely interesting Enchantment pieces, most notably The Master of Keys. Enchantment Breach on an extremely searchable, extremely cheap hydra-coded creature. The intended use is to pump X, mill out, and pick your favorite pieces as they appear. I assume you could then sac it for value, then recast from command zone for a smaller mill, or something like that, but i'm not going to lie, the hoops you need to jump through with this guy in command zone just don't do it for me. On the other hand, in the 99, Master of Keys is an extremely searchable, easily recurrable 3-drop Recursion Bot, and when cast for Miracle, X will always be ≥4. There's never really a bad time to drop Master (unless x=0 and your grave is empty,) and he's a valuable piece to find once you've begun your setup. Duskmourn introduced a few other notable enchantment support cards, which make up a sizable chunk of our 99. Great set, genuinely.
Duskmourn wasn't the only shift since Animatou's original release. In the same year her commander deck was printed, Sagas were released, and since then, they've become Wizards' favorite card type. They're an extremely predictable card-type, and fulfill the "ticking time bomb" vibe far better than a planeswalker waiting to ult. Not only that, but they remove themselves, letting enemy players respond to what they do rather than to the cards themselves. The most powerful Sagas are usually gated behind high casting costs, but those costs are usually more than justified by the sheer effect of the card if it were to be left alone for its full duration. Sagas are usually self-synergistic (eg. Vault 12: The Necropolis places the rad counters we need to produce zombies) and are frequently designed to grant lasting value, despite their natural disappearance. Put all these together, and you get an extremely fair group of cards that usually exist as tech to support specific strategies.
Our goal is to break them.
The most obvious method of destruction is in our Command Zone: Sagas (at least the ones we're running) are typically high-cost enchantments, and are balanced around this fact. Aminatou is capable of shaving four mana off of these. Summon: Bahamut gets to do all of that for a measly 5 colorless, luck permitting. If you've seen my Myra build, you know how I feel about luck in MTG. Aminatou fixes with her surveil effect, of course, but to-the-top searchers like Vampiric TutorGC are more than capable of fetching the exact Miracle we need the moment before we draw. Spellseeker is here to enable this behavior, and yes, you absolutely want to tutor your tutor with her. The instant-speed-to-top is powerful enough that we added instant search to an Enchantment Creature deck.
In addition to cost-cheating, Sagas can be made more powerful by manipulation of their Lore Counters. The first method is by using Counter Dorks: a rare Dork Subspecies that received a lot of attention in Final Fantasy. While most simply remove a counter (allowing us to repeat a chapter on subsequent turns), Goldberry, River-Daughter is actually capable of placing lore counters, meaning we can use her to trigger chapter abilities at instant speed. Of course, this means she's less reliable for extending chapter effects than eg. O'aka, Traveling Merchant, or Hex Parasite, who can remove lore counters every turn, but don't worry, there is a work-around.
We also exploit Flicker. We do have a few enter-triggers to work with, but we want to disproportionately target our sagas. After all, we get to activate Chapter 1 whenever our Sagas enter, which means they activate whenever we Flicker them. Barbara Wright deserves special mention here, since Read Ahead lets us pick the chapter our Sagas enter on. The Cruelty of Gix is a disgusting target for this synergy, since we're able to repeat its search effect at an almost arbitrary level with an enabler like Displacer Kitten. Flicker can also reset our other counters, removing Lore Counters from Goldberry, River-Daughter, time counters from Mystic Remora, and resetting Aminatou, the Fateshifter's Loyalty for even more flicker.
