Dimir Lucky Clover with Fae of Wishes

We've been brewing every deck we can think of with Lucky Clover, but our highest win rate has also been with the deck that is both the most fun and the most out-there – Dimir. We've seen a lot of the black adventure creatures get played in the Golgari Adventures deck, but here we're supplementing them with blue creatures instead of green for Edgewall Innkeeper. This plays out much more like a combo deck than other builds, so let's get right into the decklist and card discussion.

Dimir Lucky Clover Decklist

4 Merfolk Secretkeeper/Venture Deeper
2 Cauldron Familiar
4 Foulmire Knight/Profane Insight
4 Witch's Oven
4 Order of Midnight/Alter Fate
2 Smitten Swordmaster/Curry Favor
4 Lucky Clover
4 Emry, Lurker of the Loch
4 Midnight Reaper
4 Murderous Rider/Swift End
1 Castle Vantress
6 Island (335)
1 Castle Locthwain
8 Swamp (339)
4 Watery Grave
4 Fabled Passage
1 Price of Betrayal
1 Aether Gust
1 Negate
1 Legion's End
1 Noxious Grasp
1 The Elderspell
1 Narset, Parter of Veils
1 Witch's Vengeance
1 Ashiok, Dream Render
1 Jace, Wielder of Mysteries
1 Liliana, Dreadhorde General
1 Thought Distortion
1 Finale of Revelation
1 Finale of Eternity
1 Mass Manipulation

Dimir Adventures with Fae of Wishes (Arena Formatted Decklist)

This deck is built around Lucky Clover. Murderous Rider has the most upside with it, immediately paying for itself in terms of cards and pulling ahead on mana. We also happen to be playing a ton of other adventure creatures where we actually care about the spell half of the card, unlike in the Selesnya adventures deck which focuses more on the creature side.

Emry, Lurker of the Loch is a fantastic way to get access to not only our first Lucky Clover but to get multiple copies into play as well. Merfolk Secretkeeper happens to align nicely with this plan, enabling a self-mill strategy and also getting powered up by the Clover itself.

We need more than just four artifacts in the deck to support Emry, and the Witch's Oven combo is a perfect fit. We were already looking for more payoffs if we're going to be self-milling so much, and both sides of this combo reward us for doing so. We can get away with running just two copies of Cauldron Familiar, since we only need to find a single copy. Witch's Oven simply gets better in multiples, so it's something we're always going to be happy to cast with Emry. The aforementioned Merfolk Secretkeeper also happens to be a 4-toughness creature that works well with Witch's Oven.

We've already mentioned Murderous Rider, so Foulmire Knight and Order of Midnight round out the cheap adventure creatures in the deck. The Profane Insight side of Foulmire Knight is only good against control matchups, but that's still considerable upside on a card that is just about as good as it gets at keeping us alive against aggressive decks. Order of Midnight works perfectly with this plan of trading off creatures, especially when we run a lightning rod creature like Emry. Order of Midnight is weaker in the early game in the Dimir build compared to versions with Edgewall Innkeeper since the creature half is less relevant, but we also have access to self-milling action so the Alter Fate half has more targets more quickly. When we have Lucky Clover online, this does a very good impression of Find // Finality with the notable exception that it can chain into more copies of itself since it also happens to be a creature. The Golgari version can take advantage of this synergy as well, but we have more Lucky Clovers more often and we have Witch's Oven to get key adventure creatures into the graveyard at will.

It's unclear just how many copies of Midnight Reaper we want in this deck, but realistically it's just such an all-star that we want the full four. It's just so stinking good with the Cauldron Familiar combo, and if we haven't found that yet it just draws us into it. This is the basis for our favorite Mono Black Ayara deck and there's no reason not to run the same synergies here.

Smitten Swordmaster gives this deck the combo kill element that it might need to scrape through in a tight spot or to just gain enough life to stay alive. It's hard to cram in copies of extra knights like Knight of the Ebon Legion in this build since we're trying to do so many things, but we're also more reliable at getting Lucky Clover into play so we only really need two or three knights in play for this to have an impact. When we are able to pull off our full Order of Midnight value chain, it's then trivial to drain out the opponent from any life total. It's important to keep in mind the option to cast this card early as a creature if you have nothing better to do, as it will help you stay alive or pressure planeswalkers.

Finally we get to Fae of Wishes, which adds a huge amount of gameplay and decision making. If casting Murderous Rider with a Lucky Clover in play is considered good value, try casting Fae of Wishes! You can even include two-card combos in the sideboard that would win the game, since you can just get both of them at once. Our sideboard is not fully optimized yet since the metagame is still settling, but a good rule of thumb for Fae of Wishes sideboards is to have a nice mix of cheap interaction, situational hate cards, and game-ending bombs. Some of the best notable cheap interaction in blue and black include Price of Betrayal, Legion's End, and The Elderspell. The Elderspell is a particularly appealing option if you are fetching two sideboard cards and can simultaneously find your own planeswalker to supercharge with loyalty. Cards like Thought Distortion and Finale of Eternity give us incredible options against some slower decks, but perhaps the best card in our sideboard is Jace, Wielder of Mysteries. You can relatively easily find yourself with three copies of Lucky Clover in play with this deck if the game goes long, and from there you just need to rebuy a couple copies of Merfolk Secretkeeper from your graveyard to be able to mill yourself out and win the game on the spot. Of course, if your opponent has gone through enough cards in their own deck you could potentially just mill them out as well. In a format where everyone's trying to go over the top of each other, it's nice to have the potential to just combo kill your opponent regardless of their board state.

This deck has a very strong self-mill engine built into its core strategy, so there are definitely some more payoffs that we could consider including. Fae of Wishes naturally lets us discard any crazy reanimation piece that we draw, and The Cauldron of Eternity works perfectly with Emry. Unfortunately we don't have a ton of creatures that are super impressive to reanimate with the Cauldron, so the package does take up a considerable number of slots. We've tried a few of these but without much success yet, but we will keep tweaking to try and find that perfect list. In the meantime, check out a video of us winning with the decklist above!

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Michael Schuller

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