Images courtesy of Wizards of the Coast
Hello, racers! How are you enjoying Aetherdrift? I myself have been brewing up several of the commanders from the set and trying to find which ones I like the most. If you caught my last article, then you know I was keeping my eye on the star of this entry. Unfortunately for my little Jenny heart, a bug emerged in the Brawl matchmaking, and it was turned off. After a week of testing in what I can only describe as Chaos-queue, I settled on a list that can hold its own against the top without blowing out the middle. Sorry low-weight decks, you were an unfortunate casua-
Wait — why are you roping me? I’m just trying to get my child-automatons home in one piece. Rude. Well, while we wait, here’s the list; it’s a tempo deck.
They made a robot that cares about family in the racing set. Vin Diesel should sue.
Mendicant Core, Guidelight Brawl Deck List
What Is Tempo?
No, Clefable, not that type of tempo.
If you’ve been around Magic for while, then I’m sure you’ve heard this word thrown around in a lot of ways. And while the word has a lot of uses, the one I’m referring to is the archetype based around creating mana advantage with cheap threats, repeatable card draw, and removal. To put it as simply as possible, if on turn three you pay all your mana to cast a creature spell, then I Unsummon it, then I’ve traded one card from my hand for one turn of your plays. I’ve also left myself with two mana to spend on either card draw effects to replace that loss or to add to my board state.
Against aggressive decks, this has the effect of pushing the game later in turns than aggro can sustain; they’ll run out of resources before they can win. Against midrange and control decks, this game plan can deny its opponents access to resources and keep them from ever getting up and running.
This is a style of gameplay that requires finesse and patience to pilot effectively. It’s not played like control where the opponent is denied everything. Tempo must balance adding its own resources to the board with denying its opponents critical threats. It reacts to its opponent’s speed. If they go fast, it will play an equally fast denial game and try to outlast. If they’re playing a slower control deck, then tempo will try to get its threat out quickly and protect it, usually with cheaper Counterspell cards. Against other midrange decks, the tempo pilot will have to make a judgment call as to what type of game plan will win.
The last and maybe most important concept to understand with a tempo deck is what’s known as “card advantage.” This is more than just the difference in cards between two players’ hands; card advantage is how many total cards you have access to at any given point, regardless of card quality. A card that draws two cards, like Divination, is going to inherently create card advantage by costing one card and giving back two. Any low-cost cards that can rack up lots of card draws are going to be extremely powerful in a tempo deck.
I’ll tell you what’s curious — how much I hate facing this card.
Card Choices and How to Play the Mendicant Core Deck
The first thing that stands out about this deck is the sheer number of one- and two-mana spells in it. Over half of the cards in this deck are spells that cost less than three mana. Tempo thrives on cheap spells. It’s necessary to be able to both add to the board and have mana left over for interaction spells. It’s also incredibly helpful to this type of deck to be able to cast its spells at instant speed. So when playing an artifact deck, cards that have flash or give flash to other cards help a lot, as do artifacts with activated abilities at instant speed.
Having the ability to get some sort of advantage from your unspent mana, whether by creating tokens or drawing cards, is a huge boon to the tempo game plan. Retrofitter Foundry in particular is great because it also creates artifacts to help pump up our commander’s power.
Sai, Master Thopterist and Forensic Gadgeteer are both very powerful ways to create card advantage while also increasing Mendicant Core, Guidelight‘s power. Combining Sai with the Retrofitter Foundry can quickly overpower any opponent.
These are the two best tempo spells on Arena. Hitting more expensive spells will be more devastating for any opponent. Not only does the target’s owner lose all the mana spent to cast the spell, but also the tempo player gets to replace the card they spent on it with a draw. One of the most powerful tempo plays in Brawl is to hit someone’s commander with it when they’ve tapped out with a full hand because they’ll have to discard a card at the end of turn.
One last part of Mendicant Core, Guidelight to master is managing his speed. There are several cards in the list that try to give speed as early as possible, and others that try to be able to damage the opponent indirectly to increase speed on a stalled board state. The faster we get to max speed, the sooner we can start making copies of our artifacts. I believe that’s called acceleration in physics, so I’m calling these cards gas pedals because they accelerate.
Pictured: zero-cost acceleration.
Take Us Home, Robot-Parent
I hope you enjoy finding your way to max speed with Mendicant Core, Guidelight, and you manage to help him get his automatous children back to their home plane. If you’re looking for more great MTG content, be sure to check out the feature I wrote on some fun lil’ predictions I made for the Final Fantasy set, and please go follow me on all my socials. You can catch all sorts of Brawl and EDH content multiple times a week.
And one last bit of business, I put together a Bluesky starter-pack with all your favorite cardgamer.com writers. Make sure you give them all a follow so you don’t miss any exciting TCG news!
