This is my best attempt at an Improbable Alliance deck, it's going to be inherently weak against Shifting Ceratops as most of the answers are in blue, but the sideboard kinda makes up for it with the Heartfire although that's slim at best. Other than that I think this deck can be quite solid with some fine tuning even though I feel the Simic Flash matchup is going to be a rough one no matter how you draw.
Feel free to make suggestions and let's see what we can do with this deck
Okay so post Pre-release #1 that was hosted on AetherHub I have a couple of fixes that need to be made, firstly Saheeli, Sublime Artificer isn't bad but it's really crappy to draw her when you have one of the other two (Irencrag Pyromancer or Improbable Alliance) out, and you'd mush rather be drawing card draw spells, so she needs to go, secondly the Chemister's Insight feels quite bad because of it's mana cost, 4cmc is way more than this decks want's to be spending on a draw 2, I have an Into the Story in the "Maybeboard'' as a 4 mana draw 4 is a great way to get back into a (story) game when you're down on resources. My third take away from the performance of this deck in the event is that both Castle Vantress and Castle Embereth were meh at best, I very rarely used them as anything other than just lands because with Castle Embereth it kinda feels like a "win-more" ability because once you have enough faerie tokens to start swining at your opponents face you've kind won already, you've effectively buried your opponent in card advantage so I'm going to be removing Embereth from my list and replacing it with either a Mountain or another copy of Temple of Epiphany. As for Castle Ventress the scry 2 is pretty great but at 5 mana (okay not mana but tapping lands kind of mana) it's a bit pricey for an effect that gets mitigated by the fact that you are discarding quite a lot of cards with all of your looting effects, so this Castle will also be replace with either an Island or a Temple of Epiphany. Other than these couple of cards feeling sub-optimal the deck feels quite competitive, the adjustments I want to introduce to this deck are purely to adapt to the meta that I've experienced so far, I'm not saying by any means that this is going to be the best deck in standard ELD or that it is even going to stay competitive in any form, it's just kinda fun when you demolish your opponent with the amount of value you generate from drawing cards.
Some of the improvements I'm looking at are in the "Maybeboard", some of them are just because I like the idea of them but not really proper considerations. I think both Faerie Vandal and Pteramander (codename: Peter) are solid inclusions to the deck as the can be blockers early on and difficult to deal with beaters in the late stages of the game. The black splash I'm thinking of introducing is for specific matchups and for specific cards that I feel the deck can't deal with efficiently such as Oko, Thief of Crowns which is probably going to be a standard all-star and staple for the next 2 years (permited that WoTC doesn't whip out it's massive "Competitive Diversity" hammer and smash Oko's crown under it).
The real surprise to me was how well this deck faired against Simic Flash, and the only reason it deals so well with a deck like that is down to Niv-Mizzet, Parun. He single handedly won 90% of my games agains Simic Flash, if I ever survived to turn 6 or 7 to cast him, that being said the sideboard will have to be tweaked to allow for early game interaction and a better removal suite to help the deck survive long enough to come online. My solution to this is possibly dipping into black because it has an amazing array of clean removal spells to deal with pesky Shifting Ceratops and Questing Beasts and the like.
The other major concern is the deck's absolutely dreadful matchup against any from of Oko, Thief of Crowns deck. I faced 2 in the Tourney and got my gluteus maximus handed to me quite badly both times. The walker is an extremely difficult target to deal with in the colours that the deck has access to. By the time Oko, Thief of Crowns is cast this deck is still kinda setting up it's engine and Oko just runs away with the game. So depending on how the meta shifts in the next couple of weeks the black splash might become a full third colour in the deck and should allow for more ways to deal with these pesky thieves.
Another tricky matchup is Golgari but more specifically Rotting Regisaur, his backend is just too big to deal with properly with a single spell which is why I'm considering adding a Beacon Bolt either sideboard or possibly mainboard as it can answer the dinosaur (or any other beasty, looking at you Questing Beast) cleanly without having to stock up on burn spells and firing them off all in one turn to kill the beast(s).
So based on my experiences with the deck I will be tweaking it and entering in the next Pre-release event with an updated version of Improbable Alliance and it will most probably be a Grixis variant rather than an Izzet deck. I honestly feel this deck could be able to run with the big boys of the current meta because it does have access to a veritable smorgasbord of efficient answers for all the hay makers I've faced in the first Tourney.
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Opt
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Land (22) | |||
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Mountain
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Island
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$12.34€11.970.96 | |||
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$15.00€14.920.92 | |||
$5.53€4.180.15 | |||
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Swamp
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Planeswalker (4) | |||
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$0.24€0.100.03 | |||
$0.15€0.050.03 | |||
$0.39€0.240.02 |
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