I thought this deck was going to be a meme when I built it, but I went 11-7 today at around 500 in Masters. Savior gives you a decent chance against aggro.
The general gameplan is to shuffle Nictotraxian and your other fate cards in and out of the market with merchants to get a lot of fate triggers. Fetch Jotun Hurler and Savior against aggro decks, fetch crown and the dragons against slower decks. If you’re facing a lot of aggro, you can replace the crown with
Lumen Shepherd
Against fast decks, you cycles Savior of the Meek & Lumen Shepherd, against slow decks you cycle Nicto and Xo. the draw from nicto gonna need some pray and sacrifice for RnGeesus.
Tho, you could fit in some removal and making the deck having less merchant. Unstable Form kinda cool since you can get values from it.
Though, kinda feel slow out of the fact there is basically all crest in it. and need mana fixing if we want to use some other stuff like Hailstorm or Harsh Rule. Since this filled with crest, im trying using Petition instead of seek power. It slow the deck further more but it gives me access to fixing two colors in one go plus a scout. And since the deck basically passive until three mana, Petition arent that much different than seek power. It pays off to hit quick double color requirement for the sweeper.
Might be there is some optimal build where we wont have to totally jamming in all of the merchants/crest and use other stuff instead. I'm trial error by focusing on Auralian color (but still use all color) and the using the Display of Ambition to make the deck become totally toolbox. with Crystaline Chalice, Quicksilver Mirror, Xenan Obelisk, Eye of Winter, Staff of Stories, Memento Mori, Azindel gift and many more others of relics to try.
I don’t know if you saw my earlier comment on Petition, but this build I think needs seek instead of petition. I initially tried the petition build and lost far more games due to being unable to cast a merchant on 3 than I did to color screw - seek+crests can get you all 5 colors most of the time.
After some more play. I agree on hitting 3 mana ASAP. I swapped the petition for seek, with some more crest that not green/white for the sigil.
While I haven't tested the deck, Cargos can be fetched by multiple merchants, while seek power is either colorless (therefor wasted merch slot or gives a sigil, which is heavily limiting as well). It also can provide more cards in the lategame, when you hit the influence reqs. The only downside is, that the powerbase is weakened a bit more, so there is that.
Also, black merchants are kinda.... problematic. You can only fetch Nicto with it, and most things you market won't be black either. All in all, I would even go as far and suggest cutting the black merchant for ... Twinning Ritual! It can be played T2 to duplicate one of your smugglers (which are most of the times a better target after all) or even copying a fetched Nicto/Xo/... to get an additional fate trigger, possibily a new Crown keyword and to get another copy you can chain marketing.
Well, I will test it, since that deck looks truly fun :)
While Kerendon Merchant can only fetch Nictotraxian, the body is one of the better ones for this deck - it helps stall the ground out really well. You just have to be careful to sequence your plays so that you can fetch Nictotraxian with Kerendon Merchant and put it back with something else.
Twinning Ritual is a fine inclusion, but you really can’t play it T2, since the deck runs a lot of depleted power and you really want to save your sigil for T3 to play a merchant on curve.
EDIT: Another commenter brought to my attention that Kerendon Merchant currently can only grab Nictotraxian, which can lead to some awkward lines. Talir’s Unwinding fixes that problem as well.
Also, when you play a dedicated knucklebones deck, the deck is all removal and card draw, so when you play knucklebones, you already have a hand of gas to protect your shenanigans. In this deck if you play a knucklebones, and it get's removed, the plan of the deck just falls apart.
I haven’t felt the need for Harsh Rule or random Echo cards, but if you wanted to cut a few cards (Aurelian Merchant and Ebon Dune Smuggler would be my first cuts) for Harsh Rule or Unstable Form, you probably could. Cutting more than 1 or 2 power would be a mistake.
5 hits is still enough for the first 2-3 Seek Powers to have a hit, and the odds of drawing all 4 and multiple sigils and not enough crests that the limited number of sigils is worse than just regular flooding are very low. Petition is too slow for the Crest, Crest + Seek, Sigil + Merchant curve that Seek Power enables, so I don’t think it accomplishes much.
Edit: I guess Xo is for that, but you only have 12 of your merchants that can get him vs 20 units that can get chalice. Could also just be a Mirror image, I don't know if that's possible though in this deck XD
What I wanna try is Quicksilver Mirror, since we can copy the merchants and keep cycling the stuff in and out. After some tries, it feels like win more card. The deck need a way to survive early onslaught, the mirror doesnt help about it.