What new decks have you had fun with while mastering cards?

Irving

I had drifted away from the game for a bit when BFZ came out, but the "color mastery" concept brought me back because there was finally a point to playing with all those fun but not quite good enough cards. Sometimes it was just a painful slog to win with cards that were basically worse versions of the strategy I'd been playing. But there were a few fun discoveries:

- Playing with Dreadwaters led me to a whole new Jace strategy that feels appropriately controlling for blue. Instead of using his first ability to slow opponents down until I could bounce/destroy their stuff, I now use his ultimate almost exclusively - along with Dreadwaters, you can get a fearsome board full of draining gems, and never match them yourself if you can help it. Hopefully you dropped a Harbinger or Reflector to bounce their first creature before getting the lock into play, or if not you use Awakened Scatter to the Winds to drain their cards and get a 6/6 to beat them down. Turn to Frog, Anchor, and Scour take care of anything that gets through, and you grind it out 6 or 10 points at a time. This deck is great, and got way better when I got lucky and pulled an Exert Influence.

- The goblin deck with Zada/Piledriver/pump spells isn't great, but (especially with Embermaw Hellion) the pre-combat step is great fun as everything keeps buffing each other. Sure Strike is great either on Zada (of course) or on a berserking Piledriver. I only wish Zada would work with supports like Call of the Full Moon.

- Don't really have the best cards for the ingest/process deck, but the engine can be pretty effective. Really enjoyed using Liliana so that you can use the ingest from Transgress and Grip of Desolation to fuel big Despoilers and Blight Herders. Dust Stalker feels great when you usually get to keep it, and one little ingest dude like a Sludge Crawler may be worth the slot. Wasteland Strangler is probably the card you really want here (don't have it). Was never able to make use of the Void gems to fuel my Eldrazi - I suspect that's a different mana denial deck that goes all in on the ingesters and doesn't Process.

- The white support deck with Starfield and Sigil is also great fun when it works, but definitely inconsistent when you don't get the right ones or it takes too long to put together. You do need certain key cards - Oath of Gideon, Knightly Valor, basically the supports that affect the board immediately. You can't be all-in on finding a Sigil, paying for it, and hoping your opponent is doing nothing. Can't decide whether the disablers (Bonds, Hixus) are in the best version of the deck or not - against some opponents they're game over, but against red or Sword of the Animist they take up valuable draw steps that you could be using to find cards that help you win. As usual with Gideon I, his first ability plus Mist helps you deal with threats once you have a board presence.

Is there anything cool you discovered?

Mcjordan

There were some surprisingly good creatures I wouldn't have otherwise tried. For example, Veteran Warleader and Void Winnower (to a lesser extent). I thought Veteran Warleader was overpriced for its stats and effects... until I tried him with Ally Gideon. Now I think he is OP. Void Winnower was also pricey, but giving the opponent's creatures defender is pretty awesome in some control decks.

I also enjoyed figuring out how to win with some not so good cards. There were some not very competitive but fun combos with cards like Turn Against using Sarkhan's second skill (after matching 5) that I wouldn't have tried without card mastery.

One of the main benefits of the mastery system to me was that it forced me to try many decks with different planeswalkers instead of just playing my best one all the time. That not only varied up my games, but it also helped me figure out the strengths and weaknesses of each PW and helped with deck building strategy in general.

There were some weird game mechanics that came up, too. Like if you use OG Gideon's third ability on a creature that has regen already, it gets replaced with +5 rather than being additive. Also, Mirror Pool yields some surprising results sometimes.

I really like how card mastery was added. It didn't feel very grindy to me while I was mastering cards.

Irving

You're sure right about Warleader. That Gideon II Ally deck looks absolutely lethal with Warleader, Lantern Scout, Oath of Gideon, and his second ability. It can come back from behind with lifelink, or just run you over with giant Warleaders. Fortunately the AI is dumb, so you can beat it, but I bet if you have the cards that one is second only to the Kiora Crush of Tentacles deck.

I hope I didn't come off negative about the Mastery concept. There was some grinding, but overall it brought me weeks of fun with way more variety than the game had had before!

KoopaTroopa

I usually build around 4 or 3 core cards for every PW and then fill the rest with 6 or 7 cards I haven't master but not really caring if they have synergy or not. After that I go and play against Jace or Liliana in the heroic chapter since those are the ones that fill the mastery bar more quickly according to this chart images/other/MTGPQ/Color%20Mastery%20Chart.jpg