It's the best part of (constructed) Magic! Your new cards have arrived and it's time to build new decks. Today I'll talk about a few possibilities and go more in-depth with Time Sieve and the new Tezzeret. But first, an artifact poison deck:

Tempered Poison (Standard)

I have to credit my good friend Marc Aquino for this one. He brought it to my attention and came up with most of this list. My contribution was only the suggestion of Oust.

The deck has 12 two-drop Infect creatures, which you follow up with a Tempered Steel and then a Core Prowler (ideally) or another two-drop, or Mimic Vat, or even a Contested War Zone and pumping for a double-speed clock. Corpse Cur and Mimic Vat provide card advantage. Contagion Clasp removes pesky 1-toughness creatures against fast decks, and provides reach and inevitability against Control decks. Oust is especially hilarious removal, because you don't mind giving them life. (Can you imagine if Invigorate was legal in this Standard environment?)

Another popular topic for constructed is the Black Infect deck:

Mono Black Infect (Standard)

This is a simple version of this deck to start with, and after testing you can get it to some 2 and 3-ofs instead of 4-ofs everywhere. Are Septic Rats worthy? Maybe not, and perhaps one of the 2-drop artifacts would be better. I would at least try them out, as they're sort of a 3-mana 6/3. I haven't even tried to test this though. If they turn out to be awful, then I think I'd put in some Inquisition of Kozilek instead.

Perhaps we should move on to a deck I did try out. When we were testing M11 and Rise of the Eldrazi in the FFL, I built an updated Time Sieve deck for future Standard. The real-world version at the time had cards that would rotate out, but didn't have access to Prophetic Prism, which I suspected would be excellent in the deck. I was right, it was. Now we'll have everything we could want for the deck in Extended, especially the new Ichor Wellspring.

Time Sieve (Extended)

I'm quite happy with this build. It's been rather consistent for me, at least for a Combo deck. All of the card drawing helps, as do the eight Borderposts. You can keep almost any 1-lander with a Borderpost (and especially with 2) and a 2-drop that draws a card. I started out with fewer Tezzeret B and some Tezzeret A. Then I cast an Agent of Bolas... and wow, that card is good. If you can untap with 4 counters on Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas, you've probably just won.

I also started with only 3 Time Sieves and only 3 Open the Vaults. Mistake! Those are your two major combo pieces, and you just want 4 of each. Very rarely do I have them and not win the game, yet I've lost several just trying to draw a copy of either card. In some decks drawing extra Combo cards is bad, but here you mostly want to draw your Combo several times in a row.

I had Preordains in for a while, but I cut them because they didn't seem to add consistency (I draw so many cards already) and they cost precious mana I often wanted to use for artifacts. I certainly could be wrong here, because it's hard to test consistency enhancement without a very large sample size.

The land might not be perfect, but it's very close. The Celestial Colonnade should probably be a second Creeping Tar Pit. What I am sure of is that two creature-lands is the correct number. You need enough basics to use with the Borderposts, but while taking extra turns you sometimes win with angry lands.

Just one Mox Opal is included because I kept drawing the second one. Maybe I should suffer that just to draw it more often? Yeah, probably. Turn 1 Mistvein Borderpost, Turn 2 Everflowing Chalice and Mox Opal, oh look, Metalcraft. You can play another 2-drop artifact. Sick!

As I expected, Ichor Wellspring is crazy good in this deck. In previous versions, if you had a Time Sieve out, but no Open the Vaults and no Tezzeret, you couldn't really risk sacrificing 5 artifacts just to untap and draw a card. If you Sacrifice 2 Ichor Wellsprings in the process, however, you'll draw two more cards, and the chance that you can keep taking turns goes up dramatically. If you are holding an Open the Vaults at the time, well, let's just say I've never lost after sacrificing two Ichor Wellsprings, untapping, putting them back into play, and sacrificing them again. That's a minumum of 8 new cards you'll see, during two more extra turns.

Then I started trying to kill with 5/5 artifact creatures. I played a Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas on turn 4, turned my Howling Mine into a 5/5 and smashed my opponent with it. Then... my opponent only drew one card on their turn, because the Howling Mine was tapped! Synergy! If you still control Tezzeret and the 5/5 Mine on the next turn (read the card, the artifact is permanently a 5/5), you can search your top 5 cards for a Time Sieve, hit again with the Mine, take an extra turn, make another artifact into a 5/5 and swing for 10. It was much more effective than I suspected. Having a 5/5 is really good against Red and Jund, even if they kill your Tezzeret on their turn.

On the opening turns, pay close attention to the basics you have and the Borderposts you can play. Very often you want to put down a Borderpost turn 1 that provides a color your current basics can't. I rarely used a Borderpost simply to accelerate. In later turns, be careful about what you sacrifice to Time Sieve. Sometimes you have to keep the Sieve itself and lose a Borderpost or an Everflowing Chalice because you have enough artifacts but no Open the Vaults, and you need to be certain you can keep going. When you do Open, if you are bringing back Tidehollow Sculler and Prophetic Prism, stack the Sculler trigger first, then draw the cards from your Prisms and Wellsprings. Then, after seeing those new cards, decide if you should Time Sieve with the Sculler trigger still on the stack (most often you do want to), then the Sculler will permanently exile a card from your opponent's hand, because the "leaves the battlefield" trigger will resolve while the enters trigger is still waiting patiently on the stack. Most of the time it won't matter, because you're going off and your opponent won't get another turn. Sometimes you will Time Sieve just after casting a Sculler, though, and in case it doesn't win you the game you'll at least have Thoughtseized them (or better, for example if you you exile a Demigod of Revenge).

I was doing most of my testing against Faeries, creature-heavy Jund, and Prismatic Omen decks. Against Faeries I won about half. The problem is that I don't know yet what to side in against them in this deck. I have to do more searching to find out. Against Jund is when I started to make 5/5s more often and found that stalled long enough to win me a lot of games. If they don't have turn 2 Putrid Leech you're in good shape. Wall of Tanglecord would come in for this matchup, but it's hard to cut too much from the deck. Perhaps I would take out Howling Mines for them. Prismatic Omen, is, of course, a battle of the Combos. Tidehollow Sculler is most excellent here, and I added Dispeller's Capsule to the sideboard for this deck (and others, like Tempered Steel).

I'm confident this deck is strong enough to be a real deck in Extended, at least until everyone starts hating against it, which I doubt they will do. The deck is tricky to play sometimes, and takes a certain amount of intuition or experience to know when you can start going off without "proof" in your hand that you'll succeed. It's fun to play, but it's not for everyone, so it's unlikely to be popular enough to be sideboarded against.

Other cards you might consider:

Sphere of the Suns - A second turn-2 mana accelerator and fixer, the sphere offers a lot of value to this deck. The problem with it is that it's significantly worse than Everflowing Chalice in many situations. The chalice can be played for 0 if you need a 5th artifact to sacrifice, or a 10th artifact to drain your opponent for 20. It can also be played for 4, giving you a big acceleration in mana. In that situation it also lets you plays another card immediately, or on turn 2 you can use the 1 mana it will provide to swap a tapped basic land for a Borderpost. Sphere of the Suns can't do any of that.

Semblance Anvil - I have not yet tried this, but others have suggested it in their builds of this deck, or so I have heard. It does not draw you any cards, and in fact that it permanently deletes an artifact from your hand seems awful to me, but perhaps in a version that also plays Kaleidostone, it's worth it? I'm afraid it's too big a downgrade in card quality. If you do try this, I suggest also using Preordain, and the full 4 copies of Time Warp, because you can Anvil an extra Preordain to make your other two important sorceries cheaper.

Thopter Assembly - Yes, yes, if you have this out, and you start taking extra turns, you can go forever, and you will certainly win. But that means you had to untap after casting a 6-drop creature. Maybe you Time Sieved 5 other artifacts after casting it? Sure, but it still costs 6 mana. I think it's a bit of a win-more card in this deck. Still, testing with 1 or 2 of them might prove it's better than I think.

That's enough about taking all the turns. Let's briefly cover an update I thought of for a familiar Standard deck:

Semblance of Emrakul (Standard)

The deal here is that you want to cast a turn 1 Birds of Paradise, turn 2 Semblance Anvil (or Joraga Treespeaker), and on turn 3 play a 6-drop. Emrakul is just your backup plan.

Thrun, the Last Troll doesn't really belong in this deck. He might belong in the sideboard, but in the main deck those slots are probably supposed to be two lands and two more 6-drops. Everflowing Chalice is also possible, because it can act as either the turn 2 accelerator or the turn 3 accelerator.

I also wanted to talk about Knights for Extended, but there are 49 Knights to choose from for building this deck! I haven't had time, but I hope to figure it out for my next article. See you then!

Gregory Marques