Omnath to Light was the last deck I built and tested in Pioneer. While I haven’t played the deck in a live tournament myself, I helped my old Pro Tour testing team “Sewer Rats” pilot the deck to good results in PT Phyrexia. It was a bit outdated for sure, but the core still seemed good in a relatively new environment after the recent bannings of Amalia Benavides Aguirre and Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord in August. Now, just before the release of Duskmourn, it was time to blow off the dust of good old Omnath.

I played through some leagues. The decks to beat seemed to be Rakdos Aggro, followed by Phoenix, UW Control, Jund Sacrifice, RW Tokens and Rakdos Midrange.

While the deck was doing fine against the more popular decks, it was uncapable of winning against anything else. I tuned the maindeck in order to address the current metagame on MTGO, but there were just way too many different strategies out there. I ended up with a list I liked, but which was overall just too weak for a metagame this open.

In my last league I played with the deck, I played against Lumra Scapeshift.

The deck mulliganned to 5 twice and beat me on turn 4, landing Spelunking on turn 3 setting up Lumra to mill the entire deck and finish the game with Thassa’s Oracle. Needless to say, I was impressed, and the next step was obvious:

Because my opponent played through the whole deck, I was easily capable of more or less copying the maindeck. I played through some leagues and changed some cards and was quite happy with how the deck played out.

The first goal was to find and stick Spelunking. Then things played out in a pretty wild way – you could generate a ton of mana with Scapeshift for Lotus Fields, you had Lumra and Aftermath Analyst to get all lands back, and loop over and over again with Mirrorpool or Port of Karfell to mill your entire deck.

I started with Thassa’s Oracle, which you could buy back with Takenuma, Abandoned Mire you bounced with Arid Archway while going off. Thassa’s Oracle soon became Kenrith, and was then replaced by Festering Gulch which could just do infinite damage when going off with Spelunking, Lotus Field and Lumra.

The main problem there was time.

To win a game on Magic Online, you needed like 10 minutes to go through your deck and do enough pings with desert. That was way too much to test enough games. At the same time, Duskmourn came out, and the American RC took place, giving us new decks to test with GW Collected Company and UW Lotus, which both ended up with very good results.

Company was the breakout deck of the American RC, and soon, Magic Online leagues were flooded with this deck. I liked the deck and quickly jumped on board of the hype train. But people started adapting to the deck pretty soon, packing more removal spells and answers to Enduring Innocence. While the deck still performed well, it lost a lot of momentum in the following weeks.

I started testing Wedding Announcements to help against Rakdos midrange, against which I often lost. While the card was fine in that matchup, it just didn’t really work with the deck, weakening your Collected Companies, your Thalias and sometimes even Enduring Innocence.

I ended up with two changes I like – Archon of Absolution to help beat the mirror, and Selfless Savior, which was crucial at adding curve to hands without Elves and protecting Thalias, Archons and Innocences in the right matchups

UW Lotus was another deck with very good results. It didn’t see much play at that point, but I was eager to try it out. I liked how Strict Proctor played against GW Company and their ETB effects (you see the pattern there – what’s good against GW Company has to be good in the metagame), so I tried to add more of what I liked to the deck.

I 5-0’d my first league and was very hyped for the deck, but the deck had its weak spots for sure.

As the metagame shifted towards Annex decks with lots of discard after the Japanese RC, I felt like the glorious days of this deck have passed. GW Company also struggled versus RB Demons, so I once again returned to the drawing board.

With the RC coming closer and the metagame starting to manifest, I tried to work on a solution deck.

Rakdos Aggro and GW Company both demanded cheap creature interaction, Phoenix needed to interact hard with haymakers or graveyard hate, while good enchantments seemed to be a good threat versus Annex decks. I dug up an old metagame goldie which had its few days in the sun and tried to change some cards in order to address the expected meta:

While I loved the looks of the deck (for those who don’t know me and my preferences that well: this is what a classic Nico deck looks like), it played out very poorly. It was unable to win against anything else than the meta decks (imagine running this against any Lotus Field deck), and even against those, it wasn’t as heavily favoured as I wanted it to be.

So I ended up playing some more Phoenix matches. The deck gave me something I missed on all the other decks: consistency. Also, Artist’s Talent felt really busted to play, and somewhat on a different power level than the other cards in Pioneer.

I changed very little from the list that Kanister and TSPJendrek were playing in our Discord group. I felt good about the deck, but had little faith in my own skill with the deck, since Phoenix’ play style is just completely out of my comfort zone.

In the end, I usually scored 3-2 or 4-1 results in leagues, so I felt like it was my best bet to just register this list.