My Take on Temur Energy

If you've been participating in the MPDC League (and let's face it, if you're reading this blog, you probably are), by now you are well aware that Energy decks have been the early front-runner for the most dominant deck of our small metagame. This archetype was piloted to back-to-back 5-0 records for the first two weeks of the league, and continued to place well for the third week as well.

As promised, today I want to look at my own version of the Energy deck, inspired mostly by Polyjak's original list. Here's my decklist:

My intent in building this variant was to diversify my threats. I felt Polyjak's version relied too much on winning with a host of Thopter tokens from Whirler Virtuoso, and didn't often do well when that plan didn't come together. So I opted to add in Thriving Rhino as another important threat and Aether Theorist to provide early blocking and card filtering. But more importantly, I also added Empyreal Voyager. This creature not only gives the deck a Flying threat, but also provides a potentially limitless source of additional energy, making all of the other Energy threats that much more powerful and consistent.

To make room for these changes, I had to cut all of the Ahn-Crop Crashers and Rogue Refiners, despite how good the former card is. I also dropped to only 2 copies of Servant of the Conduit, which I felt like was unnecessary considering how much Land the deck consistently drew. Finally, I also wanted the ability to extend the deck better into the mid- and late-game, and opted for Glimmer of Genius.

I changed the Sideboard entirely other than  Sentinel Totem, adding in 2 Shielded Aether Thiefs for more defense and card draw, 3 copies of Manglehorn as my Artifact hate, 3 Blazing Volley to counter rival token decks, and Ice Over as an inefficient but necessary way to deal with creature too large for burn spells to kill.

I've had only middling success with this deck, going 2-3 for the last two weeks with it. But overall it's been decent. If you have any thoughts on how it might be improved, I'd love to hear it.

Next time I'll take a look at the deck that went 5-0 this week. And believe it or not, it wasn't an Energy deck!