Familiars is perhaps the strongest and perhaps the most complicated deck in Pauper. It has several variations which mostly controls the turn and allow you to combo out when you have all the pieces you need. Unmolested, this deck can routinely go off on turn 4 and has little trouble winning the game on turn 5. Many of its pieces are also excellent blockers—Sunscape Familiar and Sea Gate Oracle—and can halt a beatdown deck just long enough to put all the gears into place. The deck also has the ability to go beatdown and win through Mulldrifters in the air. All the mana from step one of the combo is just as good at casting flying fish as it is as doing unfair things.
This deck can be quite confusing to play but I'll try my best to unravel it's secrets.
MY DECK LIST
With creating a Familiar deck and running it's combo you must also understand the Quantity limit for your combo pieces. More than 1 denizen is useless, more than 2 karoo lands is useless (you'll never need to untap more)
So these are the limits:
Familiars -> 4
Karoo lands (Bounce lands) -> 2
Denizen -> 1
This is JUST IN RELATION TO THE COMBOS, of course you can use more denizens or familiars to attack, block or whatever.
First, always keep an eye out for the main combo of the deck: WALL + FAERIES + FLICKER. Other combo is WALL + SNAP This is more limited cause it cannot give you infinite blue mana, just W or B, so you use it mostly for milling. You just snap the wall and wall the snap.
Esper Sage wins by assembling the Rube Goldberg contraption of Cloud of Faeries, Azorius Chancery or Dimir Aqueduct, two copies of Sunscape or Nightscape Familiar, Mnemonic Wall, Ghostly Flicker, and Sage's Row Denizen. The first three items listed are key to the engine of this contraption. With the Familiars in play, Cloud of Faeries costs a meager U and can generate seven mana (tap both lands, spend one, untap, and retap), which when you get right down to it is an absurd amount of mana for a single card.
This mana is then used to draw cards by running Mnemonic Wall and Mulldrifter through a Ghostly Flicker or to generate even more mana with Ghostly Flicker, Cloud of Faeries, and Mnemonic Wall. Once this final cog falls into place, it is only a matter of time before the deck finds a copy of Sage's Row Denizen and starts milling four cards per repetition. It does not take long for the deck to reduce a library to zero, and it can even Compulsive Research to win on the spot instead of waiting for the next draw step.
Esper Sage is resilient. Not only does it have the dual path to victory, but it can also start and restart its combo as needed. This means that on the normal "I win" turn it can go through all the motions, not win, and still be in good enough shape to go through the motions and win the next turn. This cannot be understated since so many of the cards available to fight the combo in Pauper are one-shot deals. The best way to combat this combo is to attack the graveyard with cards like Bojuka Bog, Nihil Spellbomb, and Relic of Progenitus to take out the Ghostly Flicker with Mnemonic Wall's ability on the stack. This is all fine and dandy until Esper Sage finds the second Ghostly Flicker of course.
here are some serious downsides to this deck at the moment. First, it is incredibly click intensive. While I have not piloted the deck, I have had my face pummeled by it a few times in tournaments. I always force my opponents to actually win instead of scooping up my virtual cards. The combo takes quite a bit of time, and someone who is not practiced with the deck could lose to the clock.
The first few turns are an incredibly vulnerable time. Running Evolving Wilds and Azorius Chancery, Esper Sage often ends turns completely tapped out until it goes off. Being able to take out a Chancery (or Dimir Aqueduct) while also applying pressure can go a long way to knocking the legs out from the combo player. This might not be the most exploitable hole as failure to execute on the early advantage means that Esper Sage can recover and win, but it is still important to note that this deck takes a few turns to get its pieces in place.
Esper Sage also relies on creatures to win. Mono-Black Control is a popular deck that can take out a Mnemonic Wall or Sage's Row Denizen for good. Timing a Doom Blade just right (and working around Snap), MBC can leave Esper Sage in dire straits.
All that being said, if I were looking to grind the eight-person queues for the final week, there are worse options than Esper Sage Combo. The deck is resilient and plays one of the more bonkers mana engines in the format in Cloud of Faeries. And hey, who doesn't like alternate win conditions? Right?
So assemble the deck and start playing it now. For Suggestions in improving this deck feel free to leave your comments.
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