Today's deck of the moment is: Jeskai Sagavan! Both Max and I have been playing this deck for quite some time now and we've deviated quite a bit away from the more "stock" variants of this deck.

Decklist

First off, the decklist we're working with:

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/4207498#paper

This list looks like a stock Jeskai Sagavan deck for the most part, but you'll notice no copies of Expressive Iteration here, and we include copies of both Urza's Saga and Wasteland, which most of the other lists have eschewed.

Why I'm playing This

Most of you know me as a "fair blue" control player specializing in Miracles over time. However, I've also coming off of an extremely long break from Magic due to life stuff, and when I dove back in with Bant Miracles, I did extremely poorly in a few events and decided that it was time to simply relearn the format with something quite a bit more proactive. I chose Jeskai Sagavan since it seemed like a tempo deck, another of my loves, and I could learn how to work with some of the new cards on base power level alone. One thing led to another and I absolutely fell in love with the combinatin of Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer, Dragon's Rage Channeler and Daze. These cards are so incredibly powerful together and I've been winning quite a bit with it, significantly more so than with Miracles, and I'll be practicing this deck for the forseeable future.

Other Cool Stuff

To compare this version to the Expressive Iteration versions, let's take a look at the following stock list:

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/4261714#paper

I want to be clear on one thing. Expressive Iteration is a better raw card than Predict. It's always a +1 without needing an additional card to set it up compared to Predict. However, the reason we are playing Predict instead is due to the manabase primarily. First of all, Urza's Saga is a busted card if you've played any amount of Legacy over the past few weeks, and we believe that this card allows decks in this fashion an avenue of attack that's good against some specific matchups. These matchups Bant/4C Control and anything that wants to attack you with graveyard hate, such as Leyline of the Void and Rest in Peace. This diversified angle helps alleviate spot removal as a pain point in several 'psuedo-mirrors' as well.

That being said, the reason these decks have cut the Urza's Saga package is that it helps alleviate some of the manabase concerns as the deck is already extremely color and mana intensive as it is, you're always utilizing your mana every turn if things are going well enough.

It somewhat depends on what metagame you're expecting, but we've chosen to go down the route of Predict and the colorless lands. Predict does a similar impression to Expressive Iteration, but requires an enabler:

• Cantrips such as Ponder, Brainstorm, and Mishra's Bauble
• An on-board Dragon's Rage Channeler
• An opponent's scry effect such as Delver of Secrets or Personal Tutor
• The biggest Galaxy-brain imaginable for predicting opponent's cards after a cantrip resolution

When utilizing Predict, there are a handful of tricks you need to keep in mind:

• If you have a fetchland in play, and your opponent has a Wasteland in play, you will need to fetch, hold priority, and then cast Predict so your opponent cannot interrupt your ability to get a land or the draw two for Predict.
• Often times if you're pressed on either mana or a clock, and you need to find a card that does something sooner. In these instances, it's fine to cycle Predict only for a single card, but if you're not pressed for time/clock reasons, it's wise to hold the card for an enabler if at all possible
• With Dragon's Rage Channeler, you'll need to always keep the card on top with the Surveil trigger in order to resolve your Predict correctly.
• There are a lot of other tricks that come up with Predict that could likely use a dedicated article on it someday, but feel free to comment below if you find tricks while playing the deck!

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If you have any input on the deck or any fun tricks with Predict please feel free to comment below or reach out to me on Twitter! @Minniehajj