[Top 100 Masters] Icaria Blue

There's no way this deck should work, but it does. It's infinitely greedy and has heavy influence requirements (4 Red, 6 Green, 2 Blue), while many of the cards are quite expensive.

It works due to its powerful ramp potential with Icaria, Valkyrie Captain, Bulletshaper, and of course Reclaim.

It also works due to 8 Warp cards in the deck which can save your neck in a plethora of situations. End of the Story is a great counter to the prominence of aegis lists that have been in the meta, can warp it from the top of your deck in sticky situations, and works particularly well with the Garden of Omens site (which allows you to pull it to the top of your deck and use it).

Originally, this was simply a Rakano Valkyries list, but I found that the addition of Primal, and specifically the blue and Hooru merchants, as well as the 2 powerful Skycrag sites made all the difference. It was worth increasing the difficulty of meeting the influence requirements just for the benefit of the Markets, the sites, and the merchants.

Having both Jotun Hurler and Xo in the list gives you quite a bit of fodder to use with your Merchants, generally allowing you to pull whatever you need from your Market without negatively impacting your hand, and the Fate fodder works well with Strategize too.

It's hard to understate how good Garden of Omens and Howling Peak are in this list. At the moment the meta is not carrying a lot of site hate, and with 8 chances to draw them (with merchants), these things can completely change the game. Garden of Omens was recently nerfed because it's possibly the most insane and ubiquitous site in the game. Allowing you to destroy an enemy creature, kill an attachment, or put a spell on top of your deck allows you to react to pretty much any situation. That's not even mentioning how crazy the effect of lowering your spells' costs can be. Howling Peak on the other hand, while not as universally applicable, is strong when you have an established board presence and makes your units incredibly difficult to kill. It goes without saying that making a clone of a unit like Icaria, the Liberator is generally game-ending.

Obviously, the deck struggles quite a bit against aggro. Bulletshaper is the only 2 drop that has any stats you can block with, and even then it's not something you want to chump because you often want to use his ability. If you can survive until End of the Story, you can often come back into the game because of cards like Rizahn, Greatbow Master and Display of Honor, which grant powerful life drain abilities.

Generally speaking, you want to use Ixtun Cargo always for influence fixing and mana. Which means you should try to avoid getting 2 influence of every type as long as you possibly can so that the card doesn't accidentally transmute. Having said that, it can still be a powerful lategame option in a pinch, depending on your luck.

The Market is relatively easy to use. Generally you'll be pulling Garden of Omens first, unless you are lacking a blue influence or are mana starved, in which case Hooru Banner is usually better. If you're closer to 6 mana and your opponent isn't playing huge threats, or you need 1 more red influence, sometimes Howling Peak is better. Royal Decree is good against combo decks or if you think your opponent has something particularly threatening in their hand. Display of Honor is an all-around answer that's good in many situations. You can use it to finish the game with a surprise burst of 4 damage. You can use it to lifesteal yourself to a safe health. You can transform your opponent's huge threat into a 2/1 goat, etc.

As usual in my lists, I don't run a lot of maindeck spot removal because most of the time it either trades evenly which isn't an advantage, or it sits in your hand and does absolutely nothing. And even though FJP has a lot of potential weapons, they're not well-positioned in the current meta.

Anyway, I hope you have as much fun with this deck as I have!