Update

I've built a new even meaner version of this deck that splashes White for Rule of Law. Take a look: https://aetherhub.com/Deck/Public/203209

Original Description

This is the deck you play when a standard flash deck just doesn't feel quite mean enough.

Because sure, Izzet flash and Simic flash run huge numbers of counter spells, but they also run quite a few legitimate threats. This deck on the other hand is pure, unadulterated, reactive spells designed to completely prevent your opponent from playing the game.

But if we have no real threats, how do we win? We win by milling ourselves with The Magic Mirror, and then pulling a Jace, Wielder of Mysteries from our sideboard with Fae of Wishes.

If that sounds too convoluted to ever work properly, well it would be if our opponent was actually allowed to play the game. But they're not. Once we get The Magic Mirror on the board, we draw so many cards every turn, and run so many counter spells, that our opponent will be completely locked out of the game and forced to watch while we slowly assemble the win.

Deck Composition

There are a few key problems we have to solve if we want this deck to work. First, we don't want to run more than 2 The Magic Mirror because they're pretty dead in the early game, but we still need to draw them consistently. Second, there are no one-mana counterspells, so our opponent has a window in the early game to resolve some cheap threats. Therfore, we need cheap and versatile removal spells to back up our counter magic.

Our best answer to these problems are Drown in the Loch, and Into the Story. If we get enough cards in our opponent's graveyard to turn these on, then they are by far the strongest counterspell and draw card in standard, and Drown in the Loch even provides its own backup removal.

So how do we enable them? Between Thought Collapse and Didn't Say Please, we can run 8 counterspells with incidental mill on them. We then add 4 Overwhelmed Apprentice to potentially enable Drown in the Loch on turn two, fix our draws, and provide a solid blocker for our opponent's cheap threats.

Our final problem is that there are a number of powerful cards in standard right now that can't be countered. The main three we're concerned with are Chandra, Awakened Inferno, Shifting Ceratops, and Niv Mizzet, Parun, and we need an answer to all of them. Fortunately for us, all three can be Aether Gusted, and all three die to Swift End, so we include 4 each of those cards that takes care of that.

But not quite though, because there's also Dovin's Veto which can counter either of our two proactive plays: The Magic Mirror or Jace, Wielder of Mysteries. We answer this with Thought Erasure. It's a card we don't really want in our main deck because it's too much in conflict with our counter magic. Against an aggro deck casting it early loses you tempo, and late game they won't have any cards in hand. But because of Fae of Wishes, we can fetch it game one to set up our proactive plays against an opponent that might have Dovin's Veto.

The Wishboard

We're running Fae of Wishes primarily so we can keep our 1 copy of Jace, Wielder of Mysteries safe in the sideboard until we need him, but we'd be remiss to not also run at least a small pool of other cards for it to grab from the sideboard. Note also that because The Magic Mirror provides us such overwhelming card advantage, we have no trouble discarding two cards in order to activate Fae of Wishes' ability and re-use Granted in the late game.

A quick note about casting Granted with this deck: it can be tempting to grab a card and play it on the same turn, but it's usually better to save that mana for counterspells and wait one turn to play whatever key card you wished for.

First off, The Magic Mirror so we can get it out more consistently. It's our main win condition, so this is a pretty obvious inclusion.

Second, Noxious Grasp because Shifting Ceretops and Teferi Time Raveler are scary. Teferi in particular is the exception to our rule about not playing the card you wished for right away, so we want a nice cheap answer that's easy to cast the turn we grab it.

Third, Cry of the Carnarium because it's a very efficient tool for cleaning up small creatures in the late game, and happens to be good against Cauldron Familiar as well.

Finally, Turn into a Pumpkin as an all-purpose late game game answer to anything your opponent has managed to stick on the board. The food this generates can also give us some relevant life gain in some match-ups.

The other cards in our sideboard, Aether Gust, Thought Erasure, and Mystical Dispute are intended more as actual sideboard options, but they are non-creature spells, so we can grab them if we need them. As discussed earlier, Thought Erasure in particular is needed if we suspect our opponent might have Dovin's Veto.

Tips & Tricks

Once you've boarded in Aether Gust, you may want to hold Overwhelmed Apprentice in your hand in order to combo with it. The mill effect becomes much more powerful if your opponent just put something scary like Shifting Ceratops on top of their library.

Alternatively, you can return the apprentice to your hand with Tyrant's Scorn if you had to play it early.

Tyrant's Scorn can also allow you to bounce and re-use Murderous Rider.

The key to playing this deck well is lining up your answers with your opponent's threats. This is mostly a matter of practice, but the best advice I can give you to start out is to pause each time you're about to counter something and ask yourself a few key questions:

• If I ignore this, how fast will it kill me?
  • If the answer on the order of 10 turns, that's often reason enough to let it resolve. In the late game we will have more resources than our opponent, and we can answer small threats then. In the early game though, we're even with our opponent, so we have to carefully marshal our resources in order to come out on top.
• Can my opponent play any more spells this turn, and how do I plan to answer those?
  • Don't get baited into countering the Heart's Desire half of Lovestruck Beast only to have your opponent slam down a Questing Beast. It's a bad time.
• What's the most narrowly applicable card I have that can answer this?
  • Once you've decided you need to answer a card, you have to pick the right answer. If your opponent casts Rotting Regisaur, and you can either counter it or kill it with Tyrant's Scorn, preserve your counter and go for the scorn.
  • Note that which cards count as most "narrowly applicable" will change based on your opponent's deck. Most of the time Murderous Rider's Swift End is more narrowly applicable than a counterspell. But if they have any uncounterable cards, then the counterspells are more narrow.

Sideboarding

Most of this we've already covered in the wishboard section, so let's talk about those last 8 cards.

Well, actually, first let's expand on the role Turn into a Pumpkin plays against food decks a bit.

The Cauldron Familiar / Witch's Oven combo is problematic for because we're a slow enough deck that it's possible for the cat to deal 20 damage by itself, and because both these cards cost 1 mana so they're tough to counter consistently. Not to mention Trail of Crumbs is a similarly cheap-and-therefore-difficult-to-counter spell, that can allow our opponent to out-card advantage us in the early game.

Turn into a Pumpkin solves all these problems. It provides life gain to save us from the cat, and it can answer both Trail of Crumbs and Witch's Oven if our opponent manages to resolve them in the early game.

Next, we run 4 Aether Gust mostly for the uncounterable cards mentioned earlier, but it also hits a bunch of relevant threats in general. Nissa, Who Shakes the World, Trail of Crumbs, Korvold, Fae-Cursed King, Embercleave. Lots of good targets.

3 Thought Erasure are strong options against any deck that lacks pressure in the early game, and are absolutely essential against any deck that's running Dovin's Veto.

Finally 3 Mystical Disputes because they are indispensable against flash decks, and a strong answer to Teferi, Time Raveler and opposing Thought Erasure.

Note that our 1 Noxious Grasp is firmly part of the wishboard, not the sideboard. Even against decks where it lines up well with our opponent's threats, it's more useful being fetched with Fae of Wishes then hiding as a 1-of in your deck.

Known Issues

This deck's nemesis is mono-red Cavalcade of Calamity. If they're on the play, and get a creature turn one, and Cavalcade turn two, that will usually spell doom. And because all their threats are so cheap, they can often sneek them through even in the later stages of the game. That's not to say the matchup is unwinnable. Cavalcade is very draw dependant, and Overwhelmed Apprentice is a surprisingly good blocker against them, but it is an uphill battle.

Game one against Esper Control feels a bit sketchy. Tyrant's Scorn is almost completely dead in the matchup, and their Thought Erasure can be devastating. This plus the fact that we need to cast the Granted half of Fae of Wishes and get Thought Erasure from the sideboard before resolving The Magic Mirror puts us on the back foot. Game 2 and 3 feel a lot better though.

And at first I thought these were the two most problematic matchups for this deck, but as I kept testing I came to see two different matchups as our most problematic. These matchups were ultimately the reason I updated the deck with a splash of white for Rule of Law.

Simic Ramp is a matchup I assumed would be extremely favourable. Because all their impactfull spells cost 5 or mor mana, I figured counterspells would match up well against them. The problem is that because Hydroid Krasis' card draw effect is essentially uncounterable, they can just slowly build up a mana advantage, refill their hand with Krasis, and then next turn cast more game ending threats than we have mana to counter.

Witch's Oven presents the same problem to us that it does to all counter based decks: they have hugely impactful plays at just 1 mana. This allows them to either sneak an oven past us turn 1, when we can't possibly counter it, or set up something like Mayhem Devil + Witch's Oven on turn 4 when it's unlikely we'll have the mana to counter both. The original deck did have something of an answer for this in Turn into a Pumpkin which could answer the oven in the late game while also giving us some extra health to endure Cauldron Familiar ETB effects a bit longer, but it wasn't nearly enough. If the opponent got more than one oven on the board, or drew enough cards off Trail of Crumbs to re-play the oven alongside another threat in the late game, we were just dead.

Final Thoughts

This deck is evil. It should not exist, and it takes a special kind of sadism to enjoy playing it.

But I'll admit, sometimes I have that special kind of sadism. There's a twisted satsfaction in playing a deck so oppressive that, in my testing, it caused multiple Simic Flash players to either rope out in frustration, or rage quit before game two.

I probably shouldn't feel proud of this deck, but I do.