Much Abrew: UW Jace Embalm (Historic)
Hello, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Much Abrew About Nothing. It's almost time for Zendikar Rising, but in the meantime, we're heading to Historic this week to play a deck built around what might be the worst Jace of all time: Jace, Cunning Castaway. While Jace, Cunning Castaway might not be all that good, it can make a lot of copies of itself with its ultimate, which makes two non-legendary token copies. Add Anointed Procession and Mythos of Illuna to the mix to make even more copies, and we can potentially end up with hundreds of Jaces on the battlefield (although in reality, this isn't super likely). Can enough copies of a bad planeswalker make the planeswalker good? Will we even finish a match or just repeatedly crash Arena with copies of Anointed Procession? Let's get to the video and find out; then, we'll talk more about the deck!
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Much Abrew: UW Jace Embalm
Discussion
- Record-wise, we ended up 3-2 with UW Jace Embalm and surprisingly didn't manage to crash Arena a single time!
- More disappointingly, we never managed to go too crazy with Jace, Cunning Castaway. While we did manage to ultimate a couple of times, it was never while we had Anointed Procession on the battlefield. While Jace, Cunning Castaway does have some synergy in our deck, with the +1 allowing us to loot embalm creatures like Champion of Wits and Sunscourge Champion into the graveyard, the –2 making tokens we can double up with Anointed Procession, and the ultimate potentially being insane in the right situation, in general, Jace, Cunning Castaway still felt pretty bad, often just plussing a couple of times for little value before dying. We might have to revisit the idea after Zendikar Rising is released and see if Jace, Mirror Mage changes the equation.
- While we didn't manage to go off with Jace, we did do some sweet things with our embalm creatures, at one point gaining a massive 64 life from embalming a single Anointer Priest, which is a crazy amount of value for just four mana.
- Mythos of Illuna is insane in the deck. Not only can it copy an Anointed Procession, which quickly spirals out of control (and crashes Arena), but it also can copy any permanent by any player, making it a weird ramp spell and a sweet way to snag a copy of our opponent's most powerful creature or planeswalker (and potentially multiple copies if we have Anointed Procession). Outside of Anointed Procession itself, it's probably the best card in our entire deck. It's that good.
- UW Jace Embalm is really, really good against aggro decks. The combination of a lot of early-game blockers and tons of lifegain from Anointer Priest, Sunscourge Champion, and Sacred Cat makes it really hard to lose to decks like Burn or aggro.
- Perhaps the biggest issue with the deck is that most of our cards are underpowered unless we have Anointed Procession (or better yet, multiple Anointed Processions) on the battlefield. While we have a lot of card draw to dig for the enchantment, games where we don't find it (or manage to resolve it and have it stay on the battlefield a few turns) often feel like we're bringing a knife to a gun fight, with our deck lacking the raw power to keep up with the Uro, Titan of Nature's Wraths and Teferi, Hero of Dominarias of the Historic format.
- Overall, UW Jace Embalm is a really fun deck to play (although it might be better without our namesake Jace) although more in the middle of the scale, in terms of how competitive it is. The good games are insane, like crash Arena, gain hundreds (or millions) of life, and draw our entire deck with one card insane. On the other hand, the bad games (where we don't stick an Anointed Procession) are pretty bad. In some ways, UW Jace Embalm feels like an Against the Odds deck. It can do crazy things but doesn't do them consistently enough to be a true top-tier competitive option in Historic. Still, if you want to crash Arena and make as many Jaces as humanly possible, UW Jace Embalm is the way to go!
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.
