Pioneer Peak: Mardu Mentor (Pioneer, Magic Online)
Welcome back to another episode of Pioneer Peak! This week, we're playing a deck that I've been extremely excited to take for a spin as I love Monastery Mentor. I originally played an Esper variant but I decided this week we'd drop the blue for red and play a Mardu variant! The original list was piloted to a 5-0 by Zxrogue. I took that list and modified it to more of my liking and this is what it came out to...
Gameplan
Our main threats are Young Pyromancer and Monastery Mentor.
The deck is loaded with a bunch of cheap spells so we can fire off a ton of them all on one turn to amass a silly amount of tokens all over the place. Some of those cheap spells are wonderful disruption spells like Thoughtseize. We also get value out playing cards like Kolaghan's Command to buy all of our threats back after they're removed.
In the event our creatures are dealt with, we also have a set of planeswalkers to help us claw our way back in. Chandra, Acolyte of Flame is beautiful when curved right into a Chandra, Torch of Defiance as this expedites our ultimate process by a ton. We also get to use Acolyte of Flame as a way to recast spells like Kolaghan's Command, Thoughtseize, and other juicy spells all over again. Her ability to make two elemental tokens helps trigger our revolt! Chandra, Torch of Defiance is a perfect way for us to draw cards while also providing us with some removal. Even better, the additional mana can lead to some early activations with Soulfire Grandmaster! Gideon, Ally of Zendikar needs no introduction. He's just a solid body that keeps making more tokens. It also doesn't hurt that we can emblem immediately so our tokens can take over the board!
Matchups
With the way is currently configured, we're going to struggle against aggro decks or anything that goes crazy wide as we don't have any sweepers so we're hoping to dodge all the go wide strategies and run into the more midrange/control strategies. We should have a fairly decent matchup against a ton of the field since our answers are many and quite diverse. A deck that is really popular right now is the Twiddle Field deck and I have to imagine if that or Nexus of Fate picks up, cards like Lost Legacy will, unfortunately, be needed.
Conclusion
Well, our worst matchup was our last match! Selesnya Knights goes wide way too fast for us and never really lets us get our footing but we ended up winning all of our other games so a 4-1 league isn't bad. I think moving forward, I'm looking for more card advantage and definitely a ton more sweeper effects post board. I think the best sweeper we can get that won't completely obliterate our board is something like Witch's Vengeance so it might be worth it to give that card a try. I think a new list would look a little more like this
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-Your Friendly Neighborhood AsianAvenger
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