What happens when Skyship Weatherlight returns to home port after years of sailing the multiverse? This deck demonstrates by unloading artifacts all over the place until you run out of playmat to put them on.
The basic idea of the deck is to get out Jhoira and keep her alive long enough to play the rest of your deck in one turn. Every time you cast an artifact, you draw a card. Most of the artifacts are mana stones or mana discounts for other artifacts. Eventually you’re playing mana stones for less mana than they cost, and the only thing left to stop you is running out of artifacts in hand. To avoid this, the deck includes X draw spells and plenty of artifacts that draw additional cards. There are a few protection spells for Jhoira, but the biggest protection is the massive amount of mana available to recast her.
After playing Elsha of the Infinite as a spellslinger deck, I intended to build it into an artifact storm deck. When I read Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain, I decided she’d make a much better commander for this deck. The main problem I had with Elsha was getting stuck when I couldn’t play the top card. After playing this deck I can say that drawing a card after playing an artifact is more effective than just being able to play the top card of the deck.
I think I should start adding a standard evaluation section with my impressions of the deck. Something like this:
- Power level: 8
- Fun to play: Yes
- Fun to play against: once, maybe?
- Optimal number of opponents: 0
This is a pretty fast deck that’s very fun to play and has a variety of win conditions, but don’t expect your opponents to have much fun watching you play every card in your deck. There’s interaction, but it’s mostly in the form of preventing other people from interacting with you, or recovering when they do.
I like how this deck provides a place where horrible cards can have their day in the spotlight. I don’t think I’ve ever actually used a Barbed Sextant before, but once your engine is running, drawing 2 cards for 0 mana is great.
The deck originally had a primary win condition of self mill with Jace, Wielder of Mysteries, though it also won with creatures or Psychosis Crawler as well, usually more quickly. Tuning up the deck with additions like Aetherflux Reservoir mostly reduced the length of the last turn rather than decreasing the turn count before it won.
This deck was originally built with cards I had on hand, and then upgraded with 5-10 singles. As I tuned it, I noticed several things about exactly which janky artifacts and support cards work best:
- Card draw is better than land tutoring in this deck, so I dropped cards like Wanderer’s Twig. Tutors also slow down an already slow deck, so removing them is best. The deck doesn’t need any of its slow fetch lands either.
- Artifact casting cost is eventually discounted to 0, but activation costs aren’t. You’ll rarely want to spend mana on an activated ability, but color fixers like Terrarion are useful since they don’t actually use the mana, and they help you fix your colors to cast Braingeyser.
- Mana discounts really speed up the deck. I added the Mages before I had enough discount cards, but now they may not be needed.
- Clock of Omens is awesome, don’t forget to use it!
- Mind Over Matter can be a great sink for all the lands your hand is bound to fill up with.
- I really have no clue why I have 8 mountains and 7 islands. There aren’t any red cards, don’t do that.