MTG Salvation

Niv-Mizzet, Reborn was printed in War of the Spark and has sparked an entirely new archetype in Modern, brought to us by Cavedan (Username) from the Faithless Brewing podcast. He popularized the deck and as it has evolved and put up more results, the community has boomed in size. The deck is built around playing a 6/6 flyer for 5 mana that frequently draws 3-4 cards. And that's the huge draw to the deck. It's 5-colors and the mana has to be terrible right? Not so fast, recent printings have made our mana quite consistent and resistant to hate.


These 2 cards from Modern Horizons have smoothed out the mana for the deck in a way that I didn't believe was possible. With some snow-basics and plenty of fetches we rarely have problems casting our spells on curve.

At it's heart, Bring to Niv is a control deck that uses Niv and planeswalkers to win the game. We have to get there though, and these spells are crucial to getting us to that point.

These are the 2 most crucial spells in stabilizing the game and bridging us to casting our win-conditions. Lightning Helix is crucial against Burn and other aggressive decks to remove threats and gain some life. Assassin's Trophy's downside of giving a land to our opponent doesn't hurt us as much as other decks because of how much value our deck creates, and how far ahead Niv gets us. The entire goal of the deck is surviving until Niv.

Bring to Light serves as both a utility removal spell, and fetches our win-condition. As silly as it seems, many of us have cast Bring to Light to find a Lightning Helix.

The Spells

The Planeswalkers

The Creatures

Sideboard Options

Decklists

There are a few different variations of building the deck. One split is on the Snow vs. Non-Snow manabase. Your decision on which to build changes the deck significantly. The snow version has recently become the more popular version of the deck thanks mostly due to Arcum's Astrolabe. Astrolabe acts as a mana-fixer, as well as often being the only T1 play in the deck which cantrips. Astrolabe also functions very well with Teferi, Time Raveler to draw cards when you need to. The downside to the Snow-version is that it can lead to some awkward opener's that only have basics for lands. The Non-Snow variant often offers better mana-fixing out of your landbase, to the downside of being weaker to Blood Moon and causing more damage due to playing more shocks.
The other major variation is playing Birds of Paradise versus not. During Hogaak Summer it was almost unanimously thought of better to play Birds. This was largely due to needing to interact with the Hogaak and other graveyard decks on T2 with our 3 mana spells like Kaya's Guile and Ashiok, Dream Render. Now that the format has slowed down there's a large split of players who prefer Birds or other mana accelerants and players who choose no accelerants. The upside of playing Birds is having our powerful suite of 3 mana spells available on turn 2. Teferi in particular is a very powerful turn 2 play, especially if you're lined up against UWx or GBx deck. The downside being that drawing a Birds of Paradise on turn 8 feels really bad. The obvious advantage to not playing Birds is that you get to put 4 more 'good' spells into the deck that aren't terrible to draw past the opening turns.



Here's a link to a wonderful primer being wrote by Urdothor, please keep in mind that this is still a work in progress. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iEMJrvu7n2ICNcoFlpVr6HsBZPv8kITLbDpZkuUE6PI/edit

A link to Faithless Brewing's podcast after they attended GP Minneapolis with Bring to Niv, and one of them even Day 2'd!
https://faithlessbrewing.podbean.com/e/hogaak-summer-nivs-got-it-lit-cashing-gp-minneapolis-with-rainbow-niv-mizzet/

Sideboard Guide and build variation descriptions coming soon!!!

And last, but certainly not least, here is a link to our Discord. https://discord.gg/2nC5X5U