WU Stiflenought

Phyrexian Dreadnought has always been a cool card. A 12/12 Trample for 1 is amazing, even by today’s ridiculous standard of creatures. Of course, back then WotC believed in creating interesting “build around me” drawbacks on their big creatures, which required some creativity from deckbuilders. The drawback for ‘nought caused many players to scratch their heads, and it just begged to be broken. Fittingly, a few ways to do so were printed in Blue, which is supposed to be the colour most associated with artifacts. Of course, this meant that you were actually casting a 12/12 Trample for 1U, but hey, that’s pretty good too, right? Right??

The aforementioned Blue spells in the combo are Stifle and Vision Charm. How to use Stifle is self explanatory, but Vision Charm is much less obvious. Here’s how it works: when Dreadnought comes into play, the sacrifice aspect goes on the stack; in response, a player can phase Dreadnought out via Charm. This means that when it comes to sacrificing it, the creature isn’t there and thus isn’t put into the graveyard. When it phases back in, you don’t have to do it again. Weird, creative and cool? Indeed! The funny thing is this didn’t actually work when Vision Charm was first printed, and thus the name Stiflenought instead of Visionought.

For the win! Obviously, the deck is about putting together the combo and then protecting it. Brainstorm is infamous for being able to filter through your deck to find the card(s) you need, so I won’t go into it how awesome it is. To add some more consistency, I decided to include the very underrated Intuition as well. Intuition has a few uses here - it can be used to find any of our key cards, and/or it can be a part of its own combo with Accumulated Knowledge.  Ok, so that covers putting the combo together – now to protect it. Meddling Mage and a lot of counterspells are the name of the game in that department, but they’re not the only ones. Mother of Runes is incredible as well.  Mother is the Ancient version of a modern day planeswalker. She can do so many things it’s ridiculous, both on offense and defense. Granting protection from colours allows a creature to do a bunch of things, including - block without dying, avoid removal, attack unblocked, etc. She also casts W to cast, so a T1 Mother of Runes and then T2 Stiflenought is a great way to start your day.

Stiflenought decks have been around for a long time, and I managed to find several with different colour combinations. There are a lot of options I’d considered before deciding on WU, but I don’t want to mention them because part of what makes this format so fun is how unexplored it is. So go ahead - explore. Happy brewing!

WU Stiflenought

Land:

4 Wasteland

4 Tundra

8 Fetchland

3 Island

1 Plains

Total: 20

Creatures:

4 Mother of Runes

4 Phyrexian Dreadnought

4 Meddling Mage

Total:12

Spells:

4 Brainstorm

4 Daze

4 Force of Will

4 Stifle

4 Swords to Plowshares

1 Vision Charm

3 Intuition

4 Accumulated Knowledge

Total:28

Sideboard:

4 Tormod’s Crypt

4 Disenchant

4 Orim’s Chant

2 Misdirection

1 Wrath of God