Originally Posted by
Eldariel
I think Sphinx might very well be what this deck needs to be a thing again. It does necessitate a slower build but honestly, Scry 3 in the opener turns basically every one-lander into a godhand. I feel like the card reduces the variance of your opening turns by so much that it's worth going through a bit of trouble to fit it in. The first and foremost problem for this deck has always been that you win some, you lose some; sometimes your opener is just garbage or you have bad runner-runner draws. Over the years we've combated this problem with everything from SoFI to Trinket Mage to Thirst for Knowledge to Looter il-Kor to Mulldrifter to Misthollow Griffin to JTMS but this is the first card that doesn't cost mana to accomplish what we want. That's incredibly valuable. It's also a fine rate creature on its own right at the cost. Of course, the problem is that with so many UU costs in the deck it becomes difficult to justify all the colorless mana; there have been few enough good 2U and 3U cards in the recent memory (Zahid and Sai are the only ones that come to mind and they both want a few more artifacts than we'd traditionally run) and with the creature power level being continuously pushed, that's a bad place to be at comparatively. Figuring out the manabase is the big part. If you get that down (it may now be right to look at less than 4 Cities though unfortunately that does reduce the consistency of the turn 1 Chalices, which is where many of our free wins come from).