As some of you may already know The Water Crystal is a card from the latest Final Fantasy set, for a pretty steep cost, for Pioneer, of 4 mana, the artifact lets you, whenever your opponent would mill any number of cards, add 4 more cards to that total, making cards like Ruin Crab or Mesmeric Orb almost completely insurmountable. In this case, however, we will be focusing on the Sphinx's Tutelage + The Water Crystal
combo, which says that whenever you draw a card, the opponent has to mill 6 (two from the tutelage and four from the crystal) and repeat the process every time two or more cards of the same color are milled this way. Surprisingly enough, this effect is consistent enough to mill an entire library in one trigger for mono and two colored decks, and between two and five triggers for decks with a high land count and decks that run more than two different colors.
For that reason, we will be running actual card draw instead of effects like Stock Up or Impulse, we do, however, still run two copies of Memory Deluge just so we have a chance to hold the distance against the grindier decks in the meta. We'll be running things like Consider and Deduce, the latter of which has the advantage of generating a token that we can either crack for more card draw or sacrifice for value.
Lastly, since we are actually trying to run a combo deck that does not usually care much about the board state, we're not actually trying to control the board, that being said, the meta is still really fast and aggressive, especially since the ban announcement that pretty much meant that standard mono red, and mono-red adjacent aggro strategies are now rampant in the Pioneer meta, after the ban of Cori-Steel Cutter, Heartfire Hero and Monstrous Rage in standard. For that reason, we are still running some cheap removal spells like Go for the Throat or Nowhere to Run. We will generally prefer removal in the form of enchantments that can later be sacrificed to a Beseech the Mirror, which is our latest addition to this deck and is actually what holds the whole thing together, letting us fetch and directly cast our missing combo pieces if we sacrifice a token or enchantment under our control.
Lastly, we'll also be running two Deadly Cover-Up just in case we find ourselves needing a boardwipe to survive a turn before we execute our combo.
While there are other versions of this combo deck, this one tries to be as consistent and reliable as possible, the combo is rather expensive in the current meta, four mana is nothing to scoff at when your opponents can just outright kill you on turn 3, and it doesn't help that the entire combo needs a total of seven mana to be executed fully during your turn, in order to leave as small a window as possible for your opponent to close out the game once the combo pieces actually hit the battlefield. I've found that being able to have Beseech the Mirror on time usually lets us be reliable enough that we're not leaving ourselves too open before our combo is assembled, which is one of the biggest weaknesses of these kinds of deck. As such, we can actually try and focus on controlling the board rather than digging through our deck to find the pieces of our combo, this version can run a lot more removal without having to sacrifice consistency, which is exactly what we want for combos this slow, in Pioneer. Do still note, however, that the focus of the deck isn't to stabilize the board state but rather control it long enough that the combo becomes inevitable.
