Against the Odds: I Broke Arena with Master of Waves! (Pioneer)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! After a super-long wait, Pioneer Masters is finally here, which means the final piece of one of my favorite decks—Mono-Blue Devotion—is on Arena for the first time: Master of Waves! While Master of Waves is super strong when played fairly in a blue devotion deck thanks to the sheer amount of bodies it adds to the battlefield, it's even more exciting when played unfairly, like with Mystic Reflection! Our deck's primary goal is to build up blue mana symbols for devotion; play a Master of Waves; and, with its token-creating trigger on the stack, target it with Mystic Reflection so that rather than 1/0 Elementals, Master of Waves will make a bunch more Master of Waves, potentially giving us hundreds of bodies and thousands of power! How good is Mono-Blue Devotion in Pioneer now that Master of Waves is here? How many Master of Waves does it take to break Arena? Let's get to the video and find out on today's Against the Odds!
Against the Odds: Master of Waves Devotion
The Deck
Our deck today is pretty simple. Step one is to find Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx, our most important card and by far the best devotion payoff. Nykthos gives us all the mana we need to pull off our crazy shenanigans!
Of course, we need a bunch of blue pips on the battlefield for Nykthos to make mana, so a huge chunk of our deck is cards that do things we want (like draw cards, be removal, or tutor) that also happen to up our blue-mana-symbol count. We've got Spectral Sailor, Pond Prophet (which is a massive new addition to the deck), and Gadwick, the Wizened for card draw. We've got Merfolk Trickster, Harbinger of the Tides, and Brazen Borrower for removal and then Thassa's Oracle. Oracle is especially strange in the deck since we don't really plan to use it to win the game (although I guess that could happen). Instead, it's basically a tutor, letting us dig X cards deep in our deck, where X is our devotion to blue, to find Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx, Master of Waves, or whatever else we need.
We also have Leyline of Anticipation, which does double duty in our deck. First, it gives all of our stuff flash, which is helpful in general but doubly so when it allows us to flash in our combo on our opponent's end step to avoid sorcery-speed removal and win the game the following turn. Second, if we have it in our opening hand, it gives us two free blue mana symbols. If we ever get a hand with multiple Leylines and Nykthos, look out!
Finally, we have our combo: Master of Waves and Mystic Reflection. One of the biggest upsides of our combo is that both pieces are strong on their own. If you watch the games with the deck, you'll see we got several wins just by casting Master of Waves fairly. Meanwhile, Mystic Reflection can be used as a weird removal spell. If our opponent plays a bomb creature, we can target our worst creature with Mystic Reflection and make our opponent's bomb enter as a harmless 1/1 rather than a game-ending threat! But the real power of these two cards is using them together.
As I mentioned in the intro, the deck's main trick is to use Mystic Reflection to target Master of Waves with Master of Waves' token-making trigger on the stack. Let's say we have a relatively low devotion count when this starts, with just a single Merfolk Trickster on the battlefield. The first Master of Waves will make three more Masters, and each of these will up our devotion count, increasing it from three to six. So now, each of these new Mystic Reflection versions of Master of Waves will make six Elementals (giving us 18 in total), while each Master of Waves will also pump all of those Elementals, making them into 4/3s, giving us something like 80 power! And this example is with an extremely low devotion count. With higher devotion (or with multiple Mystic Reflections), it's pretty easy to make hundreds of tokens and thousands of power with this trick . . . assuming Arena doesn't crash along the way.
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, we technically went 12-4 with the deck, although I don't put much weight in the record considering this was in best-of-one during early-access day. The more important thing is that the deck felt surprisingly solid. Sure, the combo is flashy, hilarious, and game-ending. But even when we didn't draw the combo, we still managed to pick up a lot of wins, in large part because of Master of Waves! If you like drawing lots of cards, making tons of mana, and maybe breaking Magic Arena, keep Master of Waves Blue Devotion in mind! It's super fun to play!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
