One of the main imbalances created by a group hug player in a pod is that it makes the player to your left have a large advantage. You do all these game altering plays during your turn and the player to your left gets the first opportunity to win the game. Heliod completely changes this. The card is also massively powerful so that helps! At this moment I consider this to be the ultimate winconless group hug deck. The lack of timing restrictions on casting helpful spells and the discounted casting costs ensure that you can have a big impact on every game you play!

In the early game the focus has to be getting Heliod down and flipped. Which is no small feat at some tables. Board wipes and table-wide edict effects are particularly rough to recover from. I run a lot of mana rocks to counteract these effects. The good news is if you play in a rough environment for creatures you can just wait and play him and flip him in a single turn. Once he is flipped you can start playing discounted spells every turn. Just ordinary card draw will discount a spell by one every turn, making key cards like howling mine a breeze to cast. Then once it is down we are at a two mana discount per turn at least.

If you want to really get the ball rolling one of these x draw spells is an incredible way to get into very large discount numbers very quickly. Obviously we aren’t trying to win the game so Kozilek is in the deck primarily for his shuffle effect as well as to serve as a giant blocker. The draw 4 also doesn’t hurt! It will take some explaining when he hits the board of course! I usually take this as a good opportunity to reenforce the, remember I don’t win, I’m not going to attack, I’ll scoop if it gets to 1v1 conversation.

But if you can get your discount to 3 or 4 you can easily play a draw spell that stacks your discount up to 9-10 with no problem. I find the largest challenge to planning out turns is making sure I keep enough pips open to play the cards I want to play. Usually counting mana is only a problem in the early game. Let’s look at the next few key cards.

Yup the flashiest enchantment in the game provided you have enough cards in hand is perfect for this deck! Throw in copy enchantment and then Fractured Identity and you can easily make everything in the game free for every player at the table.

At this point we should talk about the hug too hard problem this deck can have. It is very easy to turn the early game into the late game with this deck and I find that suits me and most players very well! But it is possible to clutter up the board with so many things that it becomes tedious. This will be different for each table you play at. If you for instance play with a Magic judge and he can sort complicated stack interactions out for you then go nuts!

Update: This deck can basically do whatever it sets out to do. And it can happen very early in the game too. Once Heliod is flipped it is very common to be able to give away omniscience to the table. So… About that. It sounds fun but most of the time it slows down turns and clogs the board with so many creatures that only combo players have any chance to win. Lately I have been giving the table Smothering Tithe and that has been a good middle ground. With all the x draw spells and Howling Mine effects players make a lot of treasures but that is still a limited resource unlike the free everything that you get with Omniscience. The turns have stayed shorter and the board states have been way less complex.

Next week I will try out One with the Multiverse and Storm of Saruman. They are both even more limited than Smothering Tithe and Storm of Saruman has synergy with what the deck is doing already!

This deck is very new! I’ll keep updating this deck tech after I play more games!

Thanks for reading this deck tech! For a full deck-list over at Moxfield, click here!

-marksquare