UW Enduring Ideal

[kombatkiwi]

4 Enduring Ideal

4 Wall of Omens

4 Leyline of Sanctity
4 Runed Halo
4 Cast Out
4 Stasis Snare
1 Dovescape
1 Phyrexian Unlife
1 Solemnity
1 Endless Horizons
1 Mobilization

4 Temple of Enlightenment
4 Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
2 Mistveil Plains
2 Irrigated Farmland
1 Hallowed Fountain
1 Calciform Pools
10 Plains

53 Cards

This is not a full 60 but I would describe this is as the core I am building off of.

It doesn't make sense to me how none of the Enduring Ideal lists seem to play Wall of Omens. It's the pefect card for a White-Devotion control/prison deck. One argument would be that it's not good alongside Porphyry Nodes, but I don't like that card either. Against creatureless decks Nodes can't even give you 1 devotion and even if your opponent does have creatures it will still eventually sacrifice itself.

Leyline/Halo don't need explanation. Powerful cards to protect yourself and both give 2 devotion each. In some ways this deck is a metagame choice depending on whether maindeck Leyline is viable or not, and I think that this is an okay spot at the moment (vs Valakut, Storm, 8-Rack etc).

Cast Out is solid removal, or helps you dig for Enduring Ideal or lands. Having removal for any permanent is important because resolved planeswalkers are often a problem for this deck.

I am playing 4 Stasis Snare and 0 Ghostly Prison, I don't like Ghostly Prison because the nature of your 'pillow fort' deck means that games often go long and the opponent will eventually draw enough lands to pay for it. Taking the creature out of play is also often important compared to just stopping it from attacking (e.g. Tasigur, Thought Knot Seer, Pikula, Freebooter). These points alone would possibly be an argument for Snare over Prison but the fact that it also provides twice as much devotion puts it way ahead in my opinion. Both Snare and Cast out having flash is also more important than it might initially seem, breaking up company combos, ravager plays, hasty titans, etc.

1 Dovescape is absolutely essential for Enduring Ideal, there are plenty of matchups/gamestates where you just find this card immediately and your opponent can't possibly win.

In some situations when you resolve Enduring Ideal you are about to die, and the card that makes it most likely for you to not die is Phyrexian Unlife, which effectively fogs your opponent for one turn no matter what (unlike Worship or Sphere of Safety, which can often be broken through by the opponent). Then the next turn you search for Solemnity, which alongside unlife prevents all damage. Form of the Dragon also does a similar thing to Solemnity in this situation while saving 1 deck slot by also being a win condition, but I hate the fact that it's not castable (you can just play Solemnity on turn 3 to gain 1 devotion and it will already be in play when Ideal resolves so you can 'skip' 1 search). Touch of the Eternal is a castable card that functions kind of like Form of the Dragon by resetting your life total, but the fact it triggers in your upkeep and not at the end of the turn means that searching for it after Phyrexian Unlife will often give your opponent a 1-turn window to kill you.

Endless Horizons is a pretty good card, it's a Phyrexian Arena that adds white devotion, there arent many cards that do this. It's also a tutor for Mistveil Plains in case you need to put a critical enchantment back in your deck. With the Amonkhet cycling lands (the UW and GW ones are nonbasic plains) it can also act as an actual draw engine.

Mobilization is the primary wincon. It's castable from hand to help ramp devotion and after comboing off you can usually make a ton of mana with Nykthos to spam out tokens. I like it better than Heliod because it's cheaper to cast. I also like it better than Sacred Mesa, as while the activated ability is worse, not having a 1W upkeep cost is better when you are trying to 'curve out' playing a card every turn to ramp devotion. Luminarch Ascension is also a good alternative but under the Solemnity lock you can't put quest counters on it.

The manabase is pretty self-explanatory, Calciform Pools should be noted for being disabled by Solemnity but is still worth including. Maybe I could add 1 Celestial Colonnade.

There are 7 slots remaining and I am not 100% sure how to fill those.

I do want 1 more enchantment win condition in case the Mobilization gets exiled somehow but I am not sure what it should be. There arent very many good options. None of the mill enchantments in blue are very good and they don't give devotion. The only other alt-win as an enchantment in UW is Near-Death Experience which is cool for giving 3 devotion but seems impossible to reliably work. The only other option seems to be a second thing that makes tokens, or maybe Starfield of Nyx?

Another approach would be to play an additional lockpiece as an 'indirect' win condition, like Zur's Weirding or Shared Fate, but I'm not sure how good these are. Another thing to consider with these blue enchantments is that it's likely that you never actually want to hardcast them before resolving enduring ideal and therefore they might as well be Form of the Dragon. (It's also worth noting that if you can assemble a lock there is a hidden win condition already built into the deck, which is decking the oppoonent with Mistveil Plains)

I have played Overwhelming Splendor and Peace of Mind maindeck for a while and have been liking them. Splendor is a good complement to Dovescape against decks like Company where you are more worried about their creatures than their spells. Peace of Mind is okay for the lifegain but is mainly included as a tutorable way to discard key enchantments so you can tuck them back into the deck with Mistveil Plains. The reason why I didn't put them in the above decklist is because I'm not sure if they're just a 'crutch' and not really needed.

Apart from this there are a number of cards I have tried which are good sometimes and underwhelming at other times:
- Nevermore/Gideon's Intervention
- Privileged Position / Greater Auramancy (More important in matchups where your opponent can Decay Unlife through Dovescape)
Copy Enchantment (Notable for comboing with the above pair to give your entire board hexproof while having more utility than just playing 2x Auramancy)
- More anti-creature / removal cards like Sphere of Safety/Ghostly Prison/Faith's Fetters/Prison Term/Detention Sphere etc

I liked Suppression Field in a format with Twin/Pod but I'm not a big fan at the moment. Azcanta seems like a good card in theory but in a deck of all permanents I think it might be too hard to flip it.

Apart from that you can just play some generic good card like a planeswalker, Path to Exile / Supreme Verdict, and I have even played 1 copy of Mana Tithe before. Ardent Plea might also be okay just as a free devotion but this is obviously very underpowered. Having a couple of additional threatening cards (e.g. Elspeth Suns Champion, or maybe even Sigil of the Empty Throne, even though it does nothing after Ideal resolves) is good because otherwise the deck is so threat-light that you can struggle against people who play counterspells.

The reason why I play blue over any other splash is to play Spreading Seas in the sideboard, because Tron (both versions but especially the Sylvan Scrying one) is by far the worst matchup (they have many ways to wipe your enchantments but all of them are expensive: All is Dust, Ugin, Karn, Worldbreaker, Ulamog, Oblivion Stone etc). An example sideboard would be something like the following
1 Boseiju
3 Spreading Seas
3 Stony Silence
3 Rest in Peace
1 Aura of Silence
1 Curse of Exhaustion
1 Anti Land-Destruction card (Terra Eternal or Sacred Ground)
2 Porphyry Nodes / Wrath

[Mr. Safety]

I would think you would still want 1x Form of the Dragon somewhere in the 75. Some other cards I would consider:

Meishin, the Mind Cage
Reverence


The old sequence was Dovescape, Meishin, Form. Such a cool combo/prison deck!

[twndomn]

this list is nowhere being on par from other Modern forums.

If you're going for Blue, how could you Not run Monastery Siege? How about Peer through Depths?

[kombatkiwi]

I would think you would still want 1x Form of the Dragon somewhere in the 75. Some other cards I would consider:

Meishin, the Mind Cage
Reverence


The old sequence was Dovescape, Meishin, Form. Such a cool combo/prison deck!

Meishin is just outdated I think, there's no reason to use this card over other options.
Reverence might be ok, it's close to a lock with Overwhelming Splendor (barring +1 counters or Auras or whatever) and 2 Devotion is nice but against many of the aggressive decks the creatures all have 3+ power (Humans, Merfolk etc) so it doesn't really do anything by itself.
Lightmine Field would be ok too but it prevents you from attacking with Soldier tokens.

I think at least 1 Elspeth Sun's Champion maindeck is a good decision, _maybe_ 2 (but definitely not more). The 2nd ability is a good combo with wall of omens.
I tried playing Zur's Weirding maindeck and as expected I hated drawing it.
Even though Overwhelming Splendor is kind of 'narrow' it's still a big bomb that often helps to stabilize so I will keep it for now, but I think that I'm almost at the point where I would say that Peace of Mind is uncessary (ie. I get more annoyed with drawing it than I seem to actually need it). With the blue splash maybe Monastery Siege or Trial of Knowledge / Oath of Jace / Sphinx's Tutelage is better, if this is effect is even warranted. Otherwise the plan to get enchantments out of your hand is to just Endless Horizons to fill your hand up quickly and then start cleanup discarding. There aren't even too many matchups where the game is decided by 'search for specifically X card ASAP or lose'. (Especially because the only card in the list that can't be cast pre-Ideal is Dovescape).

Teferi's Moat might be decent as a sideboard card
Merfolk:Blue
Humans: White
Elves: Green (they always seem to have Chord into Rec Sage but still)

EDIT: (Replying to twndomn)
I don't browse other forums too much, I just check lists from Starcity or MTGTop8. The only card which I see used sometimes that I haven't mentioned is Ensnaring Bridge, which I don't like because it doesn't give devotion. I don't think Peer is good because it only hits Ideal or itself, Monastery Siege is card disadvantage and doesn't give devotion either, but maybe 1 copy is fine (especially because sometimes you draw multiple leylines or other cards that don't help in certain situations).

Apart from that, the only changes to bring my list in line with other decks that are already out there is to up the numbers of Ghostly Prison and Suppression Field, which I am not strongly against doing, but I already addressed this in the first post. Is there anything else you specifically meant by 'nowhere being on par with other modern forums'?

[twndomn]

"THE" Enduring Ideal thread is a primer thread started on 2012 and still active today in a different forum. A simple Googling would have save everyone's time.

[kombatkiwi]

"THE" Enduring Ideal thread is a primer thread started on 2012 and still active today in a different forum. A simple Googling would have save everyone's time.

It's just another MTGS thread going around in circles, posting lists that aren't much different to the ones that first came out when people realised that Leyline + Nykthos was a combo. This thread is not 'I have no idea how to build this deck, please help', I was going for something more along the lines of 'I have a somewhat different approach to building this deck than the norm, can we discuss why it is/isn't a good idea'. If you're just trying to say 'salvation has solved it, sorry' in the most recent pages you can see stuff like people thinking Solemnity will disable PWs, or that Overwhelming Splendor will disable PWs, it's not exactly a hive of inspiration. The decks still look the same for the last 2-3 years and they aren't winning tournaments.

The only potentially useful thing that I can glean is that everybody seems to think Suppression Field is really good, so maybe I'm off in my evaluation of that? It would require a bit of a decklist overhaul because it makes all of Mobilization / Cast Out / Cycling Lands / Elspeth much worse.

The disappointing thing is that there seems to be no wincon that
A) Is castable
B) Gives white devotion
C) Doesn't use an activated ability
D) Doesn't need to have counters put on it

Maybe Starfield of Nyx meets all of these criteria but exposing your other enchantments to creature removal seems a bit risky.

Another option is to play Lotus Bloom and be more of a 'combo deck' like Shayne Morris at Roanoke, but I'm not sure I like this much, I think it might be more consistent to just focus on Nykthos.

[Mr. Safety]

I like Nykthos a lot better than Lotus Bloom if you're not going 'all in'. Playing both for an all-in setup would be cool, but not necessarily better.

Ghostly Prison, Supreme Verdict, and other anti-agro cards are certainly good sideboard options. My thought with Reverence is that it creates a lock with Dovescape tokens (which is what Meishin used to do. Meishin also makes attakers with 3+ power almost negligible as threats.)

Form of the Dragon fits all of your requirements for a win-condition that works with Suppression Field, and it can deal 5 damage to creatures as well as opponents. I don't think there are any commonly played flyers in modern with 5 toughness or more. Starfield is still probably your best option, simply because once it triggers you have hasted enchantment creatures that are pretty beefy. Even if they have Path/Terminate/etc to kill your enchantments, they are still not going to win. You get a new "creature" every turn with Enduring Ideal. Your big worry is Supreme Verdict on that front.

[twndomn]

It's just another MTGS thread going around in circles, posting lists that aren't much different to the ones that first came out when people realised that Leyline + Nykthos was a combo. This thread is not 'I have no idea how to build this deck, please help', I was going for something more along the lines of 'I have a somewhat different approach to building this deck than the norm, can we discuss why it is/isn't a good idea'. If you're just trying to say 'salvation has solved it, sorry' in the most recent pages you can see stuff like people thinking Solemnity will disable PWs, or that Overwhelming Splendor will disable PWs, it's not exactly a hive of inspiration. The decks still look the same for the last 2-3 years and they aren't winning tournaments.


Another option is to play Lotus Bloom and be more of a 'combo deck' like Shayne Morris at Roanoke, but I'm not sure I like this much, I think it might be more consistent to just focus on Nykthos.

You're overly generalizing. If you look at Miracles thread on this source forum, it is also going around in circles for years. The same Blood Moon vs Back to Basic circle once every other months, it's universal in all forums for all established concepts.

User drmarkb has over 3000 responses on that forum, a lot of his posts are on this archetype, it's just faster to get deck expert's opinion than throwing an idea onto a virtual discussion wall and see what sticks, what bounces back.

One card that saw a lot of play in both Dragonstorm and Enduring Ideal is See Beyond. I think its worth testing.

Why would I cast a CMC 2 Sorcery to see 2 cards on top of my library when I can cast CMC 2 Instant to see the top 5 of my library via Peer? You're either looking for Ideal, or for some kind of spell that can save you from dying next turn, hence Ideal, Path, board wipe like Verdict are the most logical library digging targets. Sure, See Beyond can allow you to put uncastable Enchantment back or find another land, that's so little to gain when you most likely just need something to combo off or to save yourself.

Basically, kombatkiwi has objections to many typical card choices on established threads regarding this archetypes in a vacuum. This is basically the same as a new graduate student being ambitious and refuted established journals and common wisdom in that domain for the sake of novelty. Write couple tournament reports on your "novel" build, then we can have constructive discussion.