I feel I need to see
The One Ring in a real game - the deck wants to ramp early and massively draw late, and this does not sequence amazingly with that. In a goldfish scenario, the card felt like a contingency plan for things not coming together. It did fine when I ended up needing to cast it early, but I never wanted to. I should be over the moon with it as a piece of reliable, Patron-independent card advantage, but the fact it takes a while to rev up ended up unimpressive in a vacuum.
I like the direction
Radagast the Brown is hinting at, rewarding creatures with creatures, but that's not going to lead to exciting Patron includes. This is not a bad thing, as usual. They simultaneously printed a tall draw though, so in the tall draw goes.
The deck is quite creature light, so there's a very real chance that the promise of dumping in free stuff will actually yield little to nothing. Still, just paying eight mana for seven cards is perfectly acceptable. If ripping multiple tall draws in one turn, try to sequence this one toward the end in the event some of the 12 creatures make it to hand - popping in a free
Nyxbloom Ancient feels pretty good
Taking out the long earmarked
Diviner's Wand, which takes ten mana to get you your first card. Yeah yeah, MTGS me, Wand is better once you're swimming in mana like crazy. But March is better at getting you to that point.
I took the chance to re-read my various Patron musings, both the old MTGS thread and this one, to remind myself of the deck's evolution, known weak points and include considerations. Dear reader, dropping update posts with such ramblings in your own deck threads is likely going to be useful to future you at some point, I do recommend it. It's interesting to see changes in perspective - when I built
Daxos, I was brainstorming what toolbox answers to include in here. Now I'm looking at the list in horror, seeing 10 tutors and 33 lands, and see freshly-on-Nexus me addressing the tutor thing. The comments continue to hold, as the combos and swarm both depend on a narrow set of complementary cards and having efficient or versatile tutors on tap tends to bridge the gameplay gap. The land thing never really came up in various games and goldfishes as the deck tends to power out Patron just fine. Doing some dedicated goldfishes confirmed this fact - the list reliably hits enough land drops and ramp to make it to Patron, and once on Patron the real fun begins.
It was interesting to read the update posts around the time of the mulligan change, with the list starting to depend less on sculpting a hand out of weird what-if cards and instead running a bit more land and the bits of unconditional draw green can reach. Kind of similar to what I ended up doing in
Ghired over the course of a few rounds of swaps, stripping the deck down to a few core modules and aggressively streamlining its ramp to help get there. There's not a ton of ramp to streamline within this deck, as I'm missing a single
Rampant Growth variant that's actually runnable... wait, I'm missing a
Rampant Growth variant in here?! Taking a leaf out of Ghired's book, I now no longer am. Cheap ramp is very useful, and if I'm aiming for maximum explosiveness then
Into the North is actually more potent than
Grow from the Ashes, even if old me has a point about the latter's long game utility. Can't have been that amazing since it promptly got cut for
Nyxbloom Ancient though
Adding yet another piece of ramp on top of the colossal mountain already in place is not a terrible idea either - a big part of the deck's resilience is its ability to pay its way through disruption and still ultimately do the thing. Patron is largely a stay-in-your-lane sort of deck, not really interacting with the opposition beyond what is absolutely mandatory.
Reclamation Sage doesn't get used a lot, and as such can make room. Bit of a pity as I coughed up for the
pretty old border one not too long ago, but this will slightly improve the deck's performance given current gameplay patterns. All other interaction is involved in combo lines in some fashion.
I considered potential weak spots and includes, to no further action.
Jaheira's Respite looks absolutely atrocious on paper, but it covers a known weak point in the deck's deployment and plays fine. It's hard to capture this sort of card's utility when goldfishing, and the actual game reports in the thread where it comes up are positive toward it.
Rings of Brighthearth got mentioned as situational at some point, and that's not an incorrect assessment. However, it still incidentally helps out with stuff en route to becoming a Patron mana doubler, e.g. copying
Khalni Heart Expedition or
Steve. After that, pickings become rather hypothetical. Earlier in the post, I mentioned that tutors are either efficient or versatile. I could whack
Green Sun's Zenith or
Worldly Tutor as they don't allow for an
Eternal Witness-mediated chain. I could whack the
Planar Portal variants as they cost an arm and a leg. Thing is, all these are battle-tested, and the Portal variants got a bit of second wind with the introduction of flip-into-play cards (and Respite to a lesser extent) into the list. Reducing the tutor density would mean a necessary increase in business spell density, and there are no business spells calling out for inclusion at this point. Or maybe go for the reverse angle and take out some business stuff?
Ant Queen would be the one to go in that case, but as mentioned a few posts back the
Earthcraft combos end up a lot easier with her.
Regrowth could be argued to be a disposable piece of utility not part of any of the combo chains, but the list is very sorcery dense and happy to recur spells. If anything, maybe more recursion should be considered?
I tried goldfishing
Skullwinder as an Eternal Witness that can also chase out Patron via snake offering, but unsurprisingly found myself with very few options for recurring spells early, and treating him as a three-mana one-shot Patron accelerant just did not feel worth it in goldfishing. I also goldfished
Emerald Medallion, as after all this is a mono-coloured deck. I rarely played enough spells in the lead-up to Patron for the discount to matter, and sometimes the Medallion was inferior to a basic two-cost accelerant when artifacts became involved. And there are still putative two-cost accelerants that could be ran - there exist two-drop land auras like
Fertile Ground. Land aura wise, the most tempting includes would be the ones that
ramp two due to Earthcraft implications. However, these would compete with four drop land ramp spells in the deck, which are both more resilient and responsive in the ramp they offer. Maybe the cuts for these would be elsewhere, increasing the four-drop density, but I am quite happy with my ramp package as is and the deck does need some non-ramp cards in it too. Maybe go for some more tall draw? Stuff like
Life's Legacy and
Momentous Fall is destructive without being repeatable like
Greater Good, so it would be more narrow in application. Is it still worth it to pay an effective 12 and make Patron summoning sick to see seven cards? I did a few goldfishes, though fewer than in earlier scenarios, and outside of pairing Patron with haste the answer was mostly no - part of the appeal of the current deck setup is I still have the power to do Patron untap stuff in other people's turns if a combo fails to come together, and this removes that power. Maybe I dismissed
Shared Summons too easily - after all, it enables a tutor chain by landing in the bin, and its 2.5 mana per creature overhead is technically not that horrible compared to the current high-end of two. Yeah yeah,
Chord of Calling has three, but if you start chaining then it's two for subsequent ones in practice. Plus taking out Chord would be crazy.
In the end, the viable putative includes largely remain the things that have been rattled off in thread many a time before.
Boringclex is a doubler, albeit one that does not accelerate out Patron, which is keeping him out of the list. Reactive spells like
Heroic Intervention and
Tamiyo's Safekeeping are hard to evaluate in goldfishing, I'd have to get some proper playtest games in to see them in action, and Patron tends to stomp all over the playgroup as is. As such, I can't imagine being able to collect enough data without making the guys miserable, and the games would also likely be skewed by the knowledge I'm starting out with a reactive spell in hand.
Skullwinder does technically join the fray, while his performance as a
Blood Pet in goldfishing wasn't admirable it is still an interesting option to keep in mind. Yet nothing in the list feels inferior to these.