Much Abrew: Mono-White Book Devotion (Pioneer)
Hello, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Much Abrew About Nothing. This week we're doing something that we haven't done in months: playing Pioneer! When the format first released it was my favorite in all of Magic, but the combination of slow bannings, the pandemic pausing paper Magic and lack of support on Magic Arena killed much of the hype. Where is Pioneer at today? We're going to take a really sweet The Book of Exalted Deeds Mono-White Devotion list out for a spin and find out! I'm also really curious what you think about Pioneer at the moment. Should we play it more often or continue to focus on other formats? After the video make sure to let me know in the comments. Anyway, can The Book of Exalted Deeds powerful a combo-y Mono-White Devotion deck in Pioneer? Let's get to the video and find out on this week's Much Abrew About Nothing!
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Much Abrew: Mono-White Book Devotion
Discussion
- Record wise, Book Devotion was solid. We ended up going 4-1 in a Pioneer league with our one loss coming to Jeskai Ascendancy Storm which feels like a close to unwinnable matchup for our deck since it was actually playing Cleansing Wildfire to answer our combo of The Book of Exalted Deeds and Faceless Haven or Mutavault.
- Speaking of the combo, in some ways it's much more powerful in Pioneer than it is in Standard. Being able to combo with Mutavault instead of Faceless Haven (although we still have Faceless Haven too since we can tutor it up with Search for Glory) is a huge deal. Since Mutavault can be activated for just a single mana we only need four mana to activate the creature land and put The Book of Exalted Deeds enlightened counter on it, speeding up the combo by two whole turns. On the other hand, there are more answers to the combo available in the Pioneer format, so it's not a hard lock in every matchup, although outside of our match against Jeskai Ascendancy it was always enough to win the game.
- One of the things I like about today's deck is that The Book of Exalted Deeds is more than just a combo piece. Because our primary plan is to power up Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx with white mana symbols The Book of Exalted Deeds is also a pretty insane source of ramp, adding three white mana symbols to the battlefield.
- Since we have both Search for Glory and Thalia's Lancers to help us find The Book of Exalted Deeds and other combo pieces, our deck has a pretty strong legendary toolbox sub-theme. If we don't need to find the combo we can use our legendary tutors to snag finishers like Elspeth, Sun's Champion, Ugin, the Spirit Dragon or Emrakul, the Promised End, lifegain creatures in Lyra Dawnbringer or Gisela, the Broken Blade, Tomik, Distinguished Advokist to hose Nissa, Who Shakes the World or Lotus Field and, of course, Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx to make oodles of mana.
- Another huge upside of Mono-White Book Devotion is the removal. Between Portable Hole, Baffling End and Skyclave Apparition we have a lot of removal, all of which exiles (a big upside against some of the recursive aggro decks in the format like Mono-Black Aggro) and adds white mana symbols to the battlefield to power up Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx.
- One thing we've talked about before is how part of the power of The Book of Exalted Deeds combo is how much it can impact the game without ever being used. We saw this again in one of our matches against Mono-Black Aggro where we got The Book of Exalted Deeds and Mutavault on the battlefield. Thisforced our opponent to leave up mana for removal every single turn. Rather than trying to combo we just built a big board full of creatures and beat our opponent down, taking advantage of their inefficient use of mana. Sometimes just the threat of The Book of Exalted Deeds combo is enough to win the game.
- While the deck was sweet, that was expect. What I didn't expect was how much fun Pioneer is at the moment. We played four different decks in our league running the gauntlet from aggro to combo to midrange, and nothing felt broken or unbalanced. It seems like Pioneer might actually be in a really good, fun spot at the moment, which makes it sad that it isn't getting more hype. I'm really curious what all of you think about Pioneer at the moment and whether or not you'd like to see more Pioneer content, if it is something you all are interesting in I'm down to play some more. The league, deck and format were all a lot of fun.
- Anyway, should you play The Book of Exalted Deeds Mono-White Devotion in Pioneer? I think the answer is yes, at least for the time being. Getting wrecked by the Cleansing Wildfire made me a bit nervous - if a lot of decks start adding land hate to their sideboard the combo will get much, much worse - but in general the combo felt solid and the rest of the deck felt strong enough to win games without the combo, thanks in large part to our legendary toolbox tutor plan and the absurd ramp of Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx. If you like midrange-y, ramp-ish combo decks, Mono-White Book Devotion seems like a really solid option for Pioneer, at least for now.
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. Do you was more Pioneer, or should we continue to focus on other formats? Let me know in the comments! As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions and suggestions, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive, or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
