MTG: Reader Prowess

Did I just f_cking win?

It’s not a line you’re used to hearing yourself say aloud. I said it today, after emptying my hand, tapping the top of the deck and seeing what the deck was going to give me, with an opponent sitting on nine, with a Gearhulk, Hapatra, a pile of scarabs and worse all sitting in front of them. But all I did, with a little fistful of mana, was untap, play three spells looking for a win, and-

Then I had lethal.

Here’s the list:

[d title=”Reader Prowess” style=”embedded”]Creatures
4 Curious Homunculus
2 Bedlam Reveler
4 Stormchaser Mage
4 Firebrand Archer
2 Jori En, Ruin Diver
4 Bloodwater Entity

Spells
3 Shock
4 Censor
3 Unsummon
4 Take Inventory
4 Strategic Planning

Lands
4 Aether Hub
9 Island
8 Mountain
1 Geier Reach Sanitarium[/d]

First things first, before we go on, these lands are bad. I do not recommend you play this deck seriously if you have this manabase. If you have UR lands already, or you can borrow them, then use those, and then this deck gets a lot better.

The basic gist is just it’s a very rudimentary blue-red tempo deck, which is fine because it gets to play a bunch of cards I really love even if they’re masquerading as something else. For example, [mtg_card]Take Inventory[/mtg_card] isn’t [mtg_card]Accumulated Knowledge[/mtg_card], and a Prowess deck isn’t a UG Threshold deck but that extended format is long gone and the only place people serve with [mtg_card]Werebear[/mtg_card] is the kitchen table. But while Taking Inventory once, twice, gets you up a few cards, what’s super sweet is Taking Inventory with a [mtg_card]Voracious Reader[/mtg_card] on the table and two in the bin, or, as you may know it, [mtg_card]Ancestral Recall[/mtg_card].

Shh, I can dream.

You play out one or two durdly creatures, beat for one or two, then go over the top with cards like [mtg_card]Firebrand Archer[/mtg_card] and [mtg_card]Stormchaser Mage[/mtg_card] for the last few points. [mtg_card]Bedlam Reveler[/mtg_card] and [mtg_card]Voracious Reader[/mtg_card] are just great big ground donkeys and they may well be worth cutting, I suppose, but I cannot stop loving the Reader for making cards 1 cheaper.

There might be too many creatures, but I’m a little stymied as to what to get rid of. You could swap some of the cards for more permissive pieces, run Baral, run [mtg_card]Supreme Will[/mtg_card], maybe shift it to a more controlling shell with things like [mtg_card]Niblis of Frost[/mtg_card].