Painter's Servant

Aazadan
Posts: 547
Joined: 4 years ago
Pronoun: he / him

Post by Aazadan » 4 years ago

So I'm messing around with an idea right now. Mostly curious if anyone else has some good suggestions here. The idea is to use Painter's Servant to name a color, and then use the named color to generate additional value on my cards.

So far I have identified strong packages in red and blue for color naming, and I think that I likely want to be able to sideboard into one strategy or the other. First, before providing lists I'm going to name what look to me like the payoff cards:

Blue - Force of Negation, Commandeer, Veil of Summer, Scryb Ranger, Mystical Dispute
Red - Torbran, Thane of Red Fell, Chandra, Acloyte of Flame, Chandra's Regulator, Chandra, Fire of Kaladesh

Additionally, Stonecoil Serpent appears to be a payoff for any name. And, if White were going to be included over another color (as mentioned, I'm planning to be RUG right now), Burrenton Forge Tender, Soldier of the Pantheon, Auriok Champion are strong includes for a primary red name (two of them being good for a black name too).

But, on to the deck. I would like to play with a decent amount of mana fixing and deck manipulation. Thus, Oath of Nissa and Once Upon A Time both seem good. If both are included in the deck, I need 45 hits with Oath of Nissa and 35 hits with Once Upon A Time. This means I have a maximum of 10 pure Planeswalker slots. Thus far I have identified Wrenn and Six and Oko, Thief of Crowns as must includes. I'm thinking 4 and 3, leaving me with an additional 3 slots. In a red payoff build, one and maybe two of those are spoken for with Chandra, Acloyte of Flame leaving me with between 1 and 2 slots remaining. I like the idea of both Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Mu Yanling, Sky Dancer. JTMS has obvious power, but I've played some Superfriends style lists before and liked what Mu does, quickly ticking up and protecting your board. Karn could be an alternate route in order to tutor artifacts.

If I play 10 Planeswalkers, and use 21 lands (supplementing some land with the dig cards), that means the entire deck skeleton is:
10 PW
21 Land
14 Creature
15 Other

So with the PW and Land covered, plus the dig spells that leaves me with 14 Creatures and 7 Others. Worth noting, the red payoffs mostly fall into the creature slots while the blue payoffs fall into the others.

Scryb Ranger allows for me to better operate on just two lands, and at pro blue can serve as an excellent blocker for my planeswalkers while Stonecoil is both a great defender and can attack very well if cast later on. I'm looking at something like this for my core: 4 Painter's Servant, 4 Stonecoil Serpent. A blue primary would then use Ice-Fang Coatl and Scryb Ranger to round out the remaining 6 slots, while a red primary would use 2 Chandra, 2 Torban, and 2 Heart of Kiran.

Finally, there are the spells. I'm thinking that a blue payoff is interested in Veil of Summer for sure, and then some mix of the 3 counterspells. A red payoff would instead want 1, maybe 2 regulators, and then some still unidentified spells, possibly Flashfreeze, or Blood Moon, or Force of Rage.

So with all of that said, here's the two possible configurations. I'm interested in a transformational sideboard between them I think, but then some additional SB cards too. And I'm not sure which configuration makes more sense in game 1. I lean towards it being red as Blood Moon can play havoc with peoples mana bases, and they'll play around it in games 2/3.

Red primary name
Decklist
Approximate Total Cost:

Blue primary name
Decklist
Approximate Total Cost:


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Aazadan
Posts: 547
Joined: 4 years ago
Pronoun: he / him

Post by Aazadan » 4 years ago

Some updates on this. Been playing it a bit more.

Both naming red and blue have been really strong. Scryb Ranger gets considerably weaker when you name blue though. Chandras and Wrenns are incredibly strong with Torbran on the field while Stonecoil has been weaker than anticipated. Lots of weird rulings as far as how the deck works due to having both Oko and Painter in it, but once you get past the need for most of the judge calls it seems to have some potential.

Been wrecking Tron as well as other midrange decks, and I'm not entirely helpless against aggro. The lack of interaction though has been an issue a time or two, and it feels like the deck really needs some sort of mana acceleration.

Aazadan
Posts: 547
Joined: 4 years ago
Pronoun: he / him

Post by Aazadan » 4 years ago

Building another iteration of this. I'm less interesting in naming blue lately, despite the inherent power of Veil of Summer I'm finding that Torbran is far and away the most powerful thing you can be doing and naming red makes him better. As such, I'm now looking into some white cards that can hate on naming red. There's multiple creatures like Burrenton Forge Tender, Auriok Champion, and Soldier of the Pantheon that really benefit from a red name. This also opens up the possibility of Ajani as a 4 mana walker. I do think I still want a small blue splash for Oko though, which is easy enough to cast off of food and Oath of Nissa.

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