Hello all and welcome to this weeks Budget Brews, where we try to untap the Multiverse, just a little cheaper. Shadows Over Innistrad is chalk full of build around cards, so this week we're going to look at Standard yet again.
Fevered Visions is a card that I've been seeing lists floating around the net, and have run into a few control decks online optimizing the card, and after losing a few times to it I figured I'd give it a shot.
On the surface the card doesn't look like much, it's a Howling Mine effect where you get the first card draw off of it and it can Shock your opponent if they have enough cards in their hand. With that effect alone it can be a win condition. The problem is, what if people just play their spells and their hand is left empty? Then we're just giving them an extra card and they aren't taking any damage.
It turns out there's a lot of bounce spells our there in Standard right now, and in a format dominated by creature decks and planeswalkers it turns out bounce spells can put in some work.
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With 12 targeted bounce spells it's a good chance your opponent isn't going to land very many creatures, and if you're playing versus a token deck or one of the human variants a well timed Engulf the Shore will bounce everyone or everything saving your bacon.
All told the deck runs about $76CAN when you order from WizardTower.com and it's only about $20CAN in Tix if you're looking for something play on MTGO.
The deck is pretty much everything I love to play when I play a game of Magic. Draw-Go, and not let you play anything. Well, okay, with this deck you're going to let them play Magic but you're going to bounce everything they do put into play. Plus, you get to draw a card at the end of your turn, which is great for a draw-go deck where you're just going to bounce whatever the opponent plays anyway.
This is a card that differs from list to list, some don't run any and say you shouldn't be playing it, others play some number. I'm a big proponent of the card, it's great versus anything that's going to spasm the board quickly, so it'll give you more bounce. In the late game, it'll give you two draw spells. Originally I played three, but it's not as nice in multiples. If you'd like to go back up to three, I'd drop one of the Fiery Tempers for it, we're more of a blue deck than a red deck and if you can't cast Fiery to madness, there's times in the game where you wont be able to cast it at all.
How can we upgrade the deck? Well, I'm not really sure if you're looking to upgrade the deck in much of a way, unless you wanted to go a more traditional control deck. I could see Dragonmaster Outcast and Ojutai's Command playing somewhere in here, but then it's not really the “bounce” deck I was going for. For a possible more “competitive” version, I'd check out Alex Wolf's Going Rogue article where he dives into a Fevered Visions deck with a Jeskai Flavor.
The Sideboard plan is mostly to play versus control, and planeswalkers. Sphinx of the Final Word is a big flying body that can't be countered or targeted, so it's a major pain in the butt versus control decks.
One thing you don't like to see is on the opposite side of the field is Nahiri, the Harbinger because she can just blow up one of your enchantments, and if you only have one Fevered Visions out, you need to find another, and it feels bad bouncing her letting her just blow up another enchantment or up her loyalty and plus when they replay her.
Sphinx's Tutelage is a pretty awesome sideboard card, and thanks to Andrew Cuneo it's something that for awhile had it's own archetype and versus something like mono-w humans or mono-u brains you're going to have them flipping card over card.
Overall through testing the deck, I admit, can be pretty hit or miss. When it's rolling and you have the engine's humming there's no stopping it. Other games it can be clunky and you're desperately digging for another bounce spell to gain another turn and prevent a few points of valuable life totals, and a game with a Prism Ring where you can play it on turn 1, is usually in your favour.
Thanks for joining me while I untap the multiverse, and I look forward to brewing up something for next week!
Have an idea for something you'd like me to brew up? Give me a shout in the comments! You can also follow me on Twitter, @maibuddha, Reddit /u/maibuddha, or you can join my Facebook group!
