Veena's Good

After a few weeks of disappointing promos, I was pleasantly surprised by the release of Veena’s Masterpiece.The card impressed me at first sight. The Big Wheel has played a critical role in the success of many of my Stonescar builds, and in the right shell, Masterpiece could ostensibly provide a similar source of card draw…

Without having to take damage…

While providing an option to relevantly impact the board…

Oh yeah, and if that wasn’t enough, Masterpiece will do it for half the cost.

Granted, you do need to be hitting your opponent with units, but that should already be the norm. I mean, if hitting the opponent with units ISN’T normal for you, then that raises a whole bunch of other questions. For me though, I would not consider this a particularly onerous condition to fulfill.

Ok, so this card looks great. What’s the next step?

At this point I started theorycrafting decks that would best support Veena’s Masterpiece. I thought about The Creation Project decks, various flavors of Time ramp decks, as well as a few others. While I was ruminating on deck ideas I also happened to be playing my Green Is Good (Updated) deck and I realized that it very much fit the criteria I was looking for.

What’s the easiest way to make sure you can hit the opponent with a 4+ attack unit?

Well, having 3+ attack evasive units seemed like a great starting point.

Mono J has Valkyrie Enforcer, Unseen Commando, and Helena, Skyguide, three evasive units which all attack for 4 after a single Masterpiece activation, while Steyer’s Eyes and Mistral Messenger might require two activations, but are also evasive. Additionally, cards like Kira, the Prodigy and Tarra, Ever Loyal often end up large enough to trigger Masterpiece and too large for the AI to effectively block. Besides the fact that Masterpiece is a Time card, I would say that it slots very naturally into my Mono J list.

Now I will preface this next bit by saying that my goal here wasn’t to try to build the best deck, but the best Veena’s Masterpiece deck. There is a very real possibility that splashing Masterpiece will NOT win you more games, as it is a trade off. While Shen-ra, Unbreakable IS widely considered the worst card in my Mono J list, and I WOULD consider Masterpiece to be an upgrade, warping the powerbase might still end up lowering the deck’s overall win rate.

Speaking of the powerbase, I am not really sure that the Combrei Tome is a necessary inclusion. Since Masterpiece is the only maindeck card which requires Time influence, the deck is still functional even if you don’t draw it. Maybe Tome would be better as a Seat of Progress or just a Justice Sigil. I haven’t really had power issues with it after 11 runs though.

So yeah, this deck obviously isn’t anything crazy or even particularly innovative. What it is though, is very good at taking advantage of Veena’s Masterpiece. If you’re wanting to play with Masterpiece and aren’t sure where to start, then I would recommend trying this list.