Historic: Yorion Affinity

Overview

I'm a pretty big fan of Affinity decks in Historic. I think they offer pretty good matchups across the format with efficient starts and grinding end games. They matchup well against both aggressive decks using cheap efficient removal, and controlling decks through value oriented creatures and deep synergies.

I have been playing an Affinity deck for a very long time and I recently decided to put in some real effort to get it back up to snuff and competitive in the current meta. This is my first serious attempt and the deck I am currently using to grind the ladder.

Yorion gets a bad reputation as the "Easy" companion because his restriction is simply "Play more cards." But despite having such a simple restriction in practice, it's not one I feel is as easy to accept as it might seem on face value. Variance is a major part of Magic the Gathering and there is no more often quoted advice to new players then "Play 60 cards" because despite being allowed to play more then the minimum, your almost always giving up access to your best cards, your losing consistency, which is the worst enemy of beating variance. The types of decks that have seen success using Yorion as a companion tend to be those that can overcome this inherent disadvantage, usually by being exceptional at card selection, digging for answers, and in most cases pure card draw.

This deck did not actually start off as a Yorion deck. It spent a very long time as a tight 60 card deck. The idea was to use draw spells like Reverse Engineer and Thought Monitor along with card advantage pieces like Ingenious Smith, Mystic Forge, and Karn, Scion of Urza to out value our opponents. This was backed up by large Ingenious Smiths, Karnstructs and Nettlecyst tokens. Finally the deck took an early game stall tactic to deal with early game value pieces and build up enough artifacts to make aggressive decks fold to it's large threats.

After quite a large amount of play though I was finding a pretty consistent issue, if the opponent could deal with our larger threats and stabilize it became possible to dodge draw spells long enough they could take the game back over. This was usually the result of killing a germ token, or a well timed board wipe. With powerful creatures in the format many opponents were packing enough removal to deal with the threats they needed and close out the game.

To help combat this I added a few Teleportation Circles to the deck. These allowed us to reset Nettlecyst, get more value from Ingenious Smiths and gain massive card advantage each turn from Thought Monitor. It was a big improvement and helped take the deck that extra step further.

Whenever I play a deck for a really long time I like to scrap the deck and use everything I learned to rebuild it. It's not always better, but the change in strategy can sometimes lead to learning something about the strategy that can be applied to the original more tuned deck. As I was doing so I went through and added cards I thought would be exceptional. Emry for rebuying artifacts, Patchwork Automaton for it's stickiness, Sai for his insane value churning out artifacts. All these cards were exceptional. But I just did not have enough flex slots to play them.

I had already committed to playing Teleportation Circle and knew it added some real power to the deck, but I didn't really want too many multiples because of the way timing works with it. I wanted to blink one, maybe two things, so it caused too many dead draws and there were better cars in it's 3rd and 4th copy slots. But one of the downsides I ran into was running it meant I was not running a body, there were times I just didn't have anything to blink and it was still dead.

All this coming together made me really begin considering if Yorion could be the answer. I could play more generically good cards, while having access (Although expensive access) to a blink effect for the parts of the game I needed some additional value, I got a body on demand in the late game, and in general I felt the deck had enough card selection, card draw, and advantage that I would get away with bumping up a few three count cards to four count and add in the powerful legendarys and some lifelink/trample for good measure.

Maybe in the long run the Yorion build is not the best version, but so far it's been a huge improvement overall for the list and I expect some pretty big improvements as we head into Phyrexian themed sets.

Early Removal

The deck is running 4 artifacts for early game removal. Portable Hole is great for picking off pieces from lifegain and other aggressive strategies while Glass Casket excels at taking care of cards in the Angels and other low to the ground decks. Portable hole is especially useful because it can hit a variety of mana rocks, ramp, and aggressive creatures.

I do wish we had just a little more artifact based removal. I have thought about running some non-artifact based options but the deck is pretty reliant on as much as possible being an artifact or getting you an artifact.

Later Game Removal

We do have a few options for removal later in the game. Moonsnare Prototype helps us get a single threat off the board late in the game while River's Rebuke can be back breaking for decks as a one sided board clear that opens the path for massive alpha strikes.

Card Draw & Advantage

This deck is packed full of card draw, much of it coming down cheap and giving us some much needed advantage. Thought Monitor and Reverse Engineer are our primary card draw spells. Ingenious Smith is a great two drop that can grab one of our 11 artifact lands or a bunch of powerful cards. Mystic Forge and Emry can help take over the game and recover from board wipes and other removal while Esper Sentinel often replaces itself or slows out opponent down while they wait a turn to pay. Sai is not often card draw, but can be useful in a pinch when you really need to dig.

Threats

Our deck cares about putting threats onto the board. Some of our best threats scale very quickly and can take over the game in short order. Karn and Nettlecyst put big threats onto the board while Ingenious Smith and Patchwork Automaton scale up quicky. Any of these equipped with a Shadowspear is going to ruin our opponents day.

Lands

I don't often talk about the mana base since they are often "Best Lands, some spice" but this deck is running 11 Artifact lands. This makes it possible to grab one off Ingenious Smith, who also benefits from it entering the battlefield. They also reduce the cost of Emry and Thought Monitor and make our threats get very big very quick.