Shattered Pact: Standard Supreme Jump-Start

Note: This article was translated from Chinese by AI and may contain errors. Read the original Chinese version.

Before We Start

Murders at Karlov Manor brought us back to Ravnica for the fourth time, along with a batch of powerful two-color cards. Add the five-color domain mana base available in the Standard card pool, and Niv-Mizzet, Supreme from March of the Machine: The Aftermath finally has a great environment to step onto the stage. Let’s build it and see.

Card Breakdown

Niv-Mizzet, Supreme

Flying, hexproof from monocolored
Each instant and sorcery card in your graveyard that’s exactly two colors has jump-start. (You may cast the card from your graveyard by paying its mana cost and discarding a card in addition. Then exile it.)

As Ravnica’s living Guildpact and the founder of the Izzet League, Niv-Mizzet, Supreme gives jump-start to every guild-colored instant and sorcery in your graveyard. Not only does it lack the “can’t be countered” debuff of Lier, Disciple of the Drowned, it is also a 5/5 flying, hexproof-from-monocolored finisher that, in the current metagame, dodges almost every form of removal other than bounce and sweepers. The deck is built as follows:

Decklist

To pair with Niv-Mizzet, Supreme, the new set gave us a trio of Jeskai-colored cards: Lightning Helix, No More Lies and Ill-Timed Explosion, covering cheap removal, counterspells, life gain, card draw and sweepers all at once. Lightning Helix is an old card with a great effect: it improves your early survival, and late in the game you can jump-start it for a lethal blow. No More Lies is the new generation’s Mana Leak, and its extra exile clause can work wonders against opponents who use their graveyards. Besides working as a sweeper, just like its keyword says, Ill-Timed Explosion can also be cast without discarding as a Divination, so it won’t be a dead card in matchups where you don’t need a sweeper.

To go five-color in the current Standard, the domain route is absolutely the best choice. Leyline Binding and Herd Migration shore up removal and color fixing plus life gain respectively, but Invasion of Zendikar isn’t what this control deck needs. So I swapped it for Case of the Shattered Pact, which works well with Niv-Mizzet, Supreme: early on you don’t have to worry about being stuck without green, and late in the game it lets Niv-Mizzet ascend into a double strike, vigilance demigod.

Is the setup above enough? As mentioned earlier, although Niv-Mizzet, Supreme doesn’t fear monocolored spot removal, and you can perhaps handle sweepers by countering them with No More Lies, it is quite fragile against bounce. So in the five-mana finisher slot I mixed things up and added two dragon buddies, Hidetsugu and Kairi and Zurgo and Ojutai. Hidetsugu and Kairi refills a card in hand through Brainstorm as soon as it enters, and if the opponent wants to deal with it using black removal, they have to gamble that the top of your library isn’t a big play like Herd Migration. As for Zurgo and Ojutai, see the previous article. I also added one Invasion of Ravnica
as extra removal and a resource engine.

Finally, a couple of support pieces for the above framework: Push // Pull and Urgent Necropsy. Push // Pull is mainly used on the Pull side to bring back dragons that have hit the graveyard. It pairs with Kairi and Ojutai: the former can connect once, then be sacrificed to earn another Brainstorm and a top-of-library trick, and the latter can return a dragon to hand to dodge the sacrifice ability. Just note that Push // Pull is a three-color card, so it can’t gain jump-start. Urgent Necropsy is a powerful instant-speed one-for-many removal spell, but it needs a high-cost collect evidence, which you can satisfy with Herd Migration or Ill-Timed Explosion.

Gameplay Demo

The two demo videos show Plan A, Niv-Mizzet, Supreme, and Plan B, Ojutai / Kairi, in actual play. In the first video, Niv-Mizzet, Supreme simply locks the opponent out with its shameless hexproof from monocolored and the card advantage from jump-start. In the second video, although I unexpectedly ran into Molten Collapse and didn’t get to gain jump-start, I still solved Case of the Shattered Pact, which turned Ojutai into a super-strong hasty beater and card-advantage machine. As for the final Kairi, if the opponent deals with it using ordinary removal, they have to pay at least five life (if they even have enough life), and if the timing of the removal is wrong they also face five 3/3 Beasts from Herd Migration, all while you’re still holding counterspells to handle any surprises. You could say victory was in the bag.

Conclusion

Murders at Karlov Manor set things up just right for Niv-Mizzet, Supreme, making a Niv-Mizzet control deck possible on top of a stable five-color domain base. Because of the large number of tapped lands, this control deck has a lower chance of smoothly casting a key spell on turn two than a normal three-color control deck, and it doesn’t get much out of matchups against Boros Convoke or Red Aggro. But compared with the traditional domain decks, the large number of interactive spells also means fewer openings. For players tired of going fast, this is a variant well worth trying.