It is pretty disgusting, huh? The really odd part is that I stumbled across the combo in a weird way.

I have seen some decks online that use the Mystic Reflection + Nyxbloom Ancient + Phylath, World Sculptor combo to make a lot of copies of the Nyxbloom Ancient . And then the decks just use it to make big shark tokens or to play out what they have in hand. Or to instantly resolve a Midnight Clock or similar.

So I decided to put the decks I saw online together and found out I only have one copy of Midnight Clock and 1 copy of the Nyxbloom Ancient . So I proxied the elemental because it's so expensive to get and I wanted to playtest for a while and decide if I wanted to invest in more copies of it. And I had to figure out another way in standard to dig into my library and fill my hand as good as the Midnight Clock or as close as I could get.

So I did a scryfall search for draw cards and found Niko Aris . The Shard tokens you create when you play Niko let you scry and draw. And I had gotten a playset of them for collecting reasons. So I put 1 Midnight Clock and 3 copies of Niko Aris in the deck. They were going to be placeholders until I got more copies of the clock! I still had not figured out what I had on my hands.

Then I started playtesting the deck and realized I can make an insane amount of Shard tokens that will let you scry and draw through your whole deck with the psycho mana this deck can produce.

I had already known the Epitaph Golem was in standard because I am a fan of using Reito Lantern with Sunforger as a kind of recursion engine in decks and had marked it as useful before. I found the Stonework Packbeast when looking for a way to funnel the mana the deck produces into for the Tergrid's Lantern before I decided that was an mean way to win.

Then I added the Archon of Sun's Grace when I realized the Nyxbloom Ancient and the Shard tokens were enchantments.

So the whole deck sort of developed just because I was playtesting a janky deck idea I did not have all the cardboard for.