Writing a Sharp Edge: Standard Silverquill Squall

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

Introduction

Silverquill’s specialty is the art of the pen, turning prose and verse into spells, with praise for yourself and insults for your opponents both turned into advantages. Its new signature ability, Repartee, opens up the restriction of heroic that only triggers off your own creatures: it triggers no matter whose creature on the battlefield your spell targets. In exchange, the spells that can trigger it are limited to instants and sorceries, and permanent spells like Shardmage’s Rescue don’t qualify, which keeps things balanced. Repartee looks like a heroic-style strategy, so is it viable to build it the way you would a heroic deck?

Deck Analysis

On a heroic route, setting Auras aside, the first cards that come to mind are Dig Site Inventory, which can put a +1/+1 counter with flashback, and a pump spell, which pumps without costing you a card. That is a perfectly reasonable line of thought, but this style of build is also very unstable. Spells that can only target your own creatures neither make use of Repartee’s advantage nor do anything when you don’t draw a creature or it gets removed, leaving you staring at the board waiting for the game to end. So you can’t run too many of these spells, and in the current Standard environment, where speed is up and quick kills are more common, pure pump spells are best avoided. With that in mind, my decklist is as follows:

Decklist

• Theme cards: Stirring Hopesinger, Informed Inkwright, and Lecturing Scornmage

Silverquill’s Repartee trio. Many of you have surely experienced in Limited how disgusting Stirring Hopesinger is, with flying and lifelink while pumping your whole team. In this deck it is also a game-winning card, but its three mana cost is a significant obstacle. The lower-curve Informed Inkwright is needed to send out an Inkling with Repartee to build the board first, and the growing Lecturing Scornmage provides early damage and baits out your opponent’s removal.

• Spell dictionary: Reroute Systems, Requiting Hex, Get Lost, Enter the Avatar State, and Silverquill Charm

Since Repartee doesn’t have heroic’s restriction of only targeting your own creatures, it can be paired with ordinary creature removal, but you must also protect your Repartee creatures to build up their effect, so the configuration has to take care of both sides. Reroute Systems from Edge of Eternities is an extremely good fit: it can deal damage to a tapped creature, it can also give a target creature or artifact indestructible, and it costs only one mana. The removal range that Reroute Systems lacks is filled in by Requiting Hex and Get Lost. The missing hexproof and evasion support is handled by Enter the Avatar State, which for one mana grants flying, first strike, lifelink, and hexproof. Last is the versatile Silverquill Charm, a three-in-one of removal, pump, and direct damage, though its removal range is short and its cost is a bit heavy in this deck, so I only run two.

• Supporting creatures: Cheeky House-Mouse and Mardu Devotee

Because the Repartee strategy relies on spells supporting creatures to deal damage, you can’t have too few creatures, since if they get removed or you don’t draw them you’ll stall out, but if you run too many creatures, the risk of not drawing your tricks goes up. In addition, to be able to draw into and cast both creatures and spells early, the mana values of your nonland cards and your land count both need to be squeezed to the limit. So cards that satisfy both the spell requirements and the creature role are the first choice, such as the new set’s prepare creatures. That said, after trying the prepare creatures myself, what I ended up with is the Eldraine adventure creature Cheeky House-Mouse, which gives a pump plus evasion against mid-sized and big creatures for one mana, and the creature itself is a light one-mana 2/1, useful both as a one-drop and as a Repartee trigger. The other is Mardu Devotee, which adjusts your tempo: it enters as a 1/2 for one mana and scries 2, lowering the risk of missing land drops or spells, and when you’re color-screwed it can also help fix. It’s an excellent lubricant for the deck.

• Guest lecturers: Dark Confidant and Squall, SeeD Mercenary

Finally, there is an important question: how do you refill the hand that the low-cost combos burn through so quickly? We leave that to our champion friend Bob, Dark Confidant. With lots of cheap cards and lots of protection spells, Dark Confidant can refill your hand every turn at a very small cost, under the guard of your spells. The last card, included out of personal preference, is the finisher Squall, SeeD Mercenary. Although he has no evasion of his own, he can help evasive creatures, like Stirring Hopesinger, attack alone when both sides have creatures lined up, and with the help of Enter the Avatar State he can also Rough Divide straight into your opponent while digging a creature back from the graveyard to rebuild the board.

Gameplay Demo

The worst situation for a Repartee deck in motion is running out of material, so the survival of Dark Confidant is crucial. Try to cast it when you can protect it, and even casting a Repartee creature first to bait removal is worth it. Although Squall was a pick for fun, the Repartee creatures ahead of him soak up most of the removal and he has tricks to make up for his lack of evasion, so he performed better than expected.

Conclusion

As I mentioned in the previous article, I have been consciously or unconsciously putting non-ordinary FINAL FANTASY legends into the decks in this series, so this time with Silverquill I deliberately considered the black-white legends. After looking at Rufus Shinra and Judge Magister Gabranth, I felt they really weren’t up to the task, so I had to let the more expensive rare Squall take the spot. I thought he would be hard to make work in this deck, but in testing he turned out to be a surprisingly good fit, which was a nice little surprise. I suppose this is the joy of brewing your own deck!