MTG Salvation

Ever since Narset, Parter of Veils was spoiled, people have been talking about her. Denying your opponents the ability to draw extra cards is already really good, but when you factor in her ability to make previously symmetrical drawing effects asymmetrical her power level sky-rockets. Combos have been talked about all over the internet, but so far the most complete deck list I have seen came from [REDACTED]

The deck is looking to abuse symmetrical card draw effects and the passive ability of Narset, Parter of Veils to break the symmetry of said effects in our favor. Cards like Day's Undoing become 1 sided 3 mana draw 7, while our opponent has to shuffle their hand into their library, which is obviously incredibly powerful.

Another powerful option for abusing Narset draw only 1 clause is looting effects: activate Lore Broker during the opponent's turn during their upkeep, (i.e. before their draw step), both of you loot, and then when the opponent's draw step comes they don't get to draw because they already drew 1 during the loot. This means that we can lock our opponent out of ever drawing cards, and doing it during their upkeep means that they cannot cast the card at instant speed, (because the draw and discard effect from the loot happens at the same time they never have a chance to react to having a card in their hand). Geier Reach Sanitarium is an additional looting effect on a land, and mikokoro, center of the sea is a one sided howling mine.

We are only allowed to play 4 copies of Narset, Parter of Veils, fortunately, Notion Thief is a creature with a very similar effect that we can also abuse with our symmetrical draw/looting effects, I will go more into depth the difference between the two in the "Guide to Playing the Deck" section.

Aside from our symmetrical draw/looting effects to combo with Narset or Notion Thief, we are also playing a ton of interaction to both slow our opponent down till we get the combo online, and also to keep our combo pieces safe. These interaction cards are fairly interesting, however, because of all of the extra cards we have in hand from Day's Undoing we get to play cards like Disrupting Shoal because the card disadvantage of exiling cards from our hand isn't as big when you have 1 sided draw 7s etc.

The deck relies on having Disrupting Shoal to slow our opponent down and keep our combo pieces alive, so having a good spread of converted mana costs in our spells, especially in game 1, is very important. Because of this, it is worthwhile playing spells that may not be as good on their own vs another option in order to keep our cmc spread out enough. If we go up against something like Death's Shadow, we want to have Vapor Snags, Spell Snares and Spell Pierces to pitch in order to counter all of their 1 cmc stuff; even if it seems like there's better options to replace those cards; the cmc is also a key factor.

Narset, Parter of Veils The core of the deck: she digs for extra cards and combos with our stuff by breaking the symmetry of "each player draws x cards" effects, also is just naturally good against some decks with lots of cantrips.

Notion Thief servers as backup copies of Narset, and can also beat in for 3 to close out the game. It doesn't draw us cards immediately like Narset does, but also breaks the symmetry even better with Day's Undoing, Lore Broker etc. by letting us draw the cards our opponent would have drawn! A few key differences between the two passive effects, however:
1) Notion Thief's ability stops every draw other than the opponent's normal draw during their draw step, this means that if you make the opponent loot on your turn, or draw on your turn, they don't draw any cards, whereas Narset, Parter of Veils sets a cap for 1 card each turn, so if you loot on your turn the opponent draws a card as normal.
2) In order to lock the opponent out of drawing cards with lore broker and Notion Thief's ability, you must activate the looting effect during their draw step, (i.e. right after they draw their draw step card) so they immediately loot, not drawing the card for the loot, and discarding the card they just drew, with you also drawing an extra card due to Notion Thief's ability. This has the drawback of the opponent being able to cast instants in response to the loot trigger, unlike Narset, Parter of Veils where you can make them loot during their upkeep, so they draw 1 and discard 1, and then they don't get the draw for the draw step, meaning if they had 0 cards in hand when you activated the looting ability there's no time for them to cast the card that they draw before they have to discard it, (obviously madness cards get around this).

Lore Broker Our combo piece used with either Narset or Notion Thief to lock our opponent out of drawing cards, while also making them discard any cards they have in hand if we can activate more than one. While being vulnerable to almost every creature removal spell ever is an obvious downside, we have a lot of cards that can protect it, and it can also beat in for damage or block, keeping either us or Narset alive, so it's not too bad a trade off. It doesn't have a very large impact on the game unless a) our opponent is already very low/empty handed and b) we have a resolved Narset/Thief. Cards like Jace's Archivist, and Teferi's Puzzle Box are harder to get going but have a larger impact on the game, both before we are comboing and after.

Teferi's Puzzle Box Combos with both Narset and Thief to lock our opponent out of drawing cards. Teferi's Puzzle Box has a number of upsides and downsides when compared as a combo piece to Lore Broker. First and foremost, it's not blue :\. It is, however, a way to instantly get our opponent empty handed when combined with Narset/Thief, as opposed to Lore Broker where it only stops our opponents from drawing more cards, it doesn't deal with anything already in their hand. The Puzzle Box is also better at drawing you into your combo pieces, though it does it in a weird and random way that you have no control over, you do get to see a lot more cards with a resolved Puzzle Box than with a Broker. Not being a creature means that it can't chump block, but it also means that our opponent has to have artifact hate to remove it, meaning we have planeswalkers, creatures, lands, and artifacts as options for our combo pieces so it means our opponent has to have a larger variety of answers to stop us from locking them out.

Jace's Archivist A weird combination of Teferi's Puzzle Box, Day's Undoing and Lore Broker all on a 2/2 body. Like Broker, it dies to pretty much everything, (though 3 cmc means it doesn't get hit with non-revolted Fatal Push. The one mana activation usually doesn't matter much, and it has the ability to get your opponent locked out of having cards in their hand instantly with Thief/Narset, whereas Broker and Sanitarium both need a Day's to get the opponent empty handed. Archivist is also nice because it allows us to very quickly see a bunch of cards in our deck to find a Thief or Narset if we don't already have one. Also we can somewhat break they symmetry by dumping our hand via free pitch spells while our opponent is casting things at a slower rate. Note that unlike Day's and Puzzle Box, Archivist actually discards the card(s) to the graveyard, meaning it works better with flashback, (see: Echo of Eons).

Day's Undoing while it is very rarely a good idea to cast Day's Undoing in other decks, we love it! Not only are we able to break the symmetry of the card draw, making it so only we draw cards but our opponent still has to shuffle their hand and graveyard away already makes this amazing, we can abuse Day's Undoing even more by also playing "pitch blue" cards such asDisrupting Shoal that let us exile blue cards from our hand instead of paying their mana cost. Day's Undoing effectively gives us more ammo for our free interaction so we don't care that we may be spending 2-3 cards to do with one of our oppoenent's cards, (2-3-for-1-ing ourselves if you will). Also a combo piece working as incidental graveyard hate is more relevant now than ever, so that's nice. Also if mill ever becomes a viable deck (lol) it helps there too. Note: If you are planning on casting a Day's Undoing and you have Narset out you can tick down before you Days to try and find an answer to a resolved threat, but usually it's the right idea to save your Narset tick downs for the next turn.)

Geier Reach Sanitarium works in the same way as Lore Broker except that you have to pay for each activation. Being a land and not a spell also has some upsides and downsides. The upsides: it doesn't take up a slot in our nonland cards, it doesn't die to creature removal like Lore Broker and it doesn't require and mana to play it. The Downsides: it takes 2 mana to activate, and similar to how Storm Crow is the best card in magic because you can pitch it to Force of Will, Geier Reach Sanitarium is not a blue card and therefore cannot be pitched to any of our free spells, (or found with Narset's -2 for that matter), it also cannot block to save us/Narset from damage and cannot attack to close out the game. Also not tapping for blue mana or being a basic land, (more on that can be found in the "Wait a second, that's not a land" section of "Card Selection" down below) is a significant downside, so currently we're only running 1.

Mikokoro, Center of the Sea has all of the same downsides as Geier Reach Sanitarium, and also doesn't serve as a lock piece with Narset or Notion Thief, it does, however, servers as card advantage with both, where the looting effect of Geier Reach Sanitarium is only card advantage with [Notion Thief]. It's possible that this should just be a second Geier Reach Sanitarium, or some other land.

(Fair interaction are cards that interact with our opponents that don't have alternate casting costs, meaning we have to use mana to cast them; spells with alternate casting costs will be referred to as "pitch spells".)

Spell Pierce Spell pierce is one of those cards that is amazing against some decks and completely dead against others. 1 mana to counter a noncreature spell is useful against a lot of decks in the early game, especially because they won't be expecting it game 1, however it does nothing against creature decks, very little against ramp decks and becomes fairly useless in the late game, though you can pitch it to any of our pitch spells at least. Stopping path and bolt to keep our combo pieces is very relevant so some amount of them should be played in the 75.

Spell Snare Another narrow interaction card, it hits different things that spell pierce may not hit, again it's less dead in our deck than it would be in others because we can pitch it to our free spells at the very least. Still not an amazing answer as it is far from a "catch-all", but hopefully it'll do.

Vapor Snag Useful to help stall if your opponent is play creatures, though it is worse against things like Goblin Guide that have haste and can attack again next turn, instead of having to wait for summoning sickness to wear off, and even worse against Goblin Electromancer in storm if they can combo off while the vapor snag is on the stack; obviously it is better not to let creatures resolve but that's not usually possible to catch them all. This would be better if it was a more permanent answer like fatal push, but it is important that we have a high density of blue cards for our pitch spells to function, so we work with what we have.

Void Snare A potential replacement for Vapor Snag. The life loss from Snag is irrelevant, but losing instant speed is a big downside. The upside, however, is having maindeck answers for resolved non-creature permanents which our deck is pretty bad at dealing with. Staying in the 1 cmc slot is also important when looking for alternatives to Vapor Snag.

Flusterstorm The most "gotcha" counterspell of all of our conditional countermagic, sometimes Flusterstorm is a massive blowout for 1 mana, othertimes it is unbelievably dead in hand. Good versus storm and control decks etc, could be a sideboard card if your meta is heavy with those, though I wouldn't recommend putting it in the main no matter how funny it is when it works.

Remand Very good in some matchups, and at least ok in that it cantrips in others, Remand can slow our opponent down by a lot if utilized correctly. Also has a cool synergy where you can remand your own card in response to a counterspell targetting your card so that it remains in your hand and the counterspell fizzles. It can't do anything about resolved cards, however, which brings us to our next card:

Unsubstantiate Sometimes it's a worse Remand, but being able to hit resolved creatures is a big deal because the rest of the deck isn't great at dealing with those, especially in game one.

Commit // Memory A catch-all answer to resolved permmanents, and has the bonus of also functioning as a Day's Undoing in a pinch, note: we can discard it to looting or to hand size in order to cast the Memory side if need be.

Vendilion Clique A win con, a chump blocker and a piece of interaction all in one, the only thing holding Vendilion Clique back is its 3 cmc mana cost and the fact that it's legendary, though that doesn't come up too often. It does combo nicely with Narset or Thief to function as a pure Thoughtseize so the opponent doesn't get to draw a card. Honestly it would be way better in this deck if it was a 1/3 to help block and stabilize against creature decks in the early game, but I guess trading with something isn't the worst thing in the world.

Tyrant's Scorn Our deck's version of Fatal Push. Though it costs one extra mana, we get to count it as a blue spell, (meaning it can be pitched), as well as a little bounce utility for things that Push would usually miss. Or sometimes bouncing creatures is more effective than actually killing them. cough bloodghast cough cough

Thing in the Ice :rate4.5:]A blocker to save both us and Narset some damage, TITI also functions as a board wipe and a win con! If put in the deck you probably want to run some amount of cheap cantrips, (swapping out some amount of our 1 mana interaction spells for Serum Visions/Opt usually does the trick). TITI is one of the best answers to fast creature decks in blue, fortunately there's not very many creatures with the horror type that are played in modern, so the bounce effect is almost always "bounce all other creatures", a big step up from other blue board wipe effects. Can also be comboed with Day's Undoing, if the Day's is the 4th instant/sorcery spell cast after playing TITI, the TITI bounce trigger will go on the stack before the Day's Undoing resolves. Meaning the creatures will get bounced and then suffled into the opponent's library as soon as the Day's resolves. Pretty nice trick that costs a lot less mana to do than trying to combo Day's Undoing with Engulf the Shore, Aetherize etc.

Dead of Winter [rate=4.0]] Not a blue card, but it is one of the better wrath options available to us. Replacing our islands with Snow-Covered Island is easy, and we already play a good amount of basics to make the Borderposts work. It's a turn faster than both Engulf the Shore and Damnation, while also hitting the same amount of creatures as Engulf and being easier to cast than Damnation, (one black versus 2 black in the casting cost is a big deal for us, especially in the early game where we really need a board wipe to stabilize). Killing things is also, (usually) better than bouncing them to hand.

Disrupting Shoal Force of Will's lazy cousin: it requires a little more work to get it running, but it does the job usually. We have a good spread of cmc cards in the deck to utilize its effect, and we can even cast it for x=4, 7 or 10 if we have to, (Commit / Memory counts as a 10cmc card, and though Commandeer may feel like it has a cmc of 0 most of the time, it does technically cost 7. Also with the amount of card draw we have we can sometimes hard cast it for cheaper cards in the late game.
Commandeer My personal favorite of our free pitch spells, it is extremely good at shutting down our opponent's gameplan out of nowhere, and sometimes just winning us the game on the spot, (no, actually that's my Karn Liberated), though it can also take less flashy things like Lightning Helix against Burn to gain life, function as a sort of counterspell etc. Not good against creature decks for obvious reasons, but there's extras in the sideboard for when they are particularly good. Also worth noting that Commandeer is less narrow than Disrupting Shoal, so even if you really want to take something for yourself, keep in mind that you may want to use your more narrow answers when they work and keep the catch-all ones for things that the more narrow cards can't hit.
Snapback doesn't do anything to hexproof creatures and isn't great against hastey ones or ones with abilities that can be abused at instant speed like Baral, Chief of Compliance or evenGriselbrand, but at least it's a potentially free answer to most resolved creatures, which the deck can really struggle with. Also can bounce your own creatures to save them from removal or even get another Thoughtseize out of Vendilion Clique.

Force of Negation "The madlads did it! They printed Force of Will in modern!" Well, not quite. Though new Force is incredibly powerful, it is more limited, (which is probably a good thing, I don't think a functional reprint of Force of Will would be good for the modern format). Another free counter spell is good for the deck, however it is far worse than Disrupting Shoal in practice: Shoal, (and commandeer to a lesser extent]] serves 2 key functions in our deck. Yes, it disrupts our opponents without us having to commit mana, but it also lets us tap out/low for our sorcery speed combo pieces while still holding up protection for them. Force of Negation does not do this. As it is only free if it is not our turn, so if the opponent has something like a Dreadbore, Force is effectively useless if the opponent casts Dreadbore right after Narset/Thief etc. resolves. Similarly, it doesn't help us resolve a Narset/Broker/Puzzle Box/Archivist/Day's in a counter war, because we have to cast those during our turn. We can flash in Thief and have Force be online for counterspells, but that's only one of our 6 combo pieces.

Mistvein Borderpost These may seem like a strange decision to play, but hear me out, they are actually way better than they seem. First and foremost, lands are normally colorless, so having something that functions as a land but can be exiled to our pitch spells is a big deal, especially with 3 being a decently relevant cmc, and a lot of our other 3 cmc cards are combo pieces that we may want to keep in hand. Also being able to find them with Narset, Parter of Veils is a pretty big deal; there's a lot of times when we would -2 and get nothing if we didn't play 4 of these. Also having some small amount of ramp and some color fixing is never a bad thing.

They key win condition of the deck is to lock the opponent out of ever drawing cards with a combination of Narset, Parter of Veils/Notion Thief and a looting effect like Lore Broker by making the opponent draw a card and immediately discard it.
A few key differences between the two passive effects on Narset, Parter of Veils/Notion Thief, however:
1) Notion Thief's ability stops every draw other than the opponent's normal draw during their draw step, this means that if you make the opponent loot on your turn, or draw on your turn, they don't draw any cards, whereas Narset, Parter of Veils sets a cap for 1 card each turn, so if you loot on your turn the opponent draws a card as normal.
2) In order to lock the opponent out of drawing cards with lore broker and Notion Thief's ability, you must activate the looting effect in response to them drawing a card on their draw step, so they immediately loot, not drawing the card for the loot, and discarding the card they just drew, with you also drawing an extra card due to Notion Thief's ability. This has the drawback of the opponent being able to cast instants in response to the loot trigger, unlike Narset, Parter of Veils where you can make them loot during their upkeep, so they draw 1 and discard 1, and then they don't get the draw for the draw step, meaning if they had 0 cards in hand when you activated the looting ability there's no time for them to cast the card that they draw before they have to discard it, (obviously madness cards get around this).

It's an interesting interaction. The rules text for Narset, Parter of Veils from Gatherer states:

Replacement effects (such as that of Underrealm Lich or the first ability of Jace, Wielder of Mysteries) can’t be used to replace draws that Narset disallows. However, if an opponent’s first draw is replaced (by Underrealm Lich’s ability, for example), that draw didn’t happen and Narset won’t stop the next draw (which may also be replaced by Underrealm Lich’s ability).

This means that if you activate a looting ability during the opponent's upkeep, (meaning they haven't drawn a card yet this turn), Narset allows the draw to happen, and then Thief's ability cancels the draw and gives you a card. When the opponent's draw phase comes, Narset's ability doesn't prevent the draw, because the opponent hasn't actually drawn a card yet and Thief doesn't care about the draw step draw, so the opponent ends up getting that card.

If you activate the looting ability after the opponent has drawn their card in the draw step, Narset's ability kicks in and stops them from drawing another card, so they discard the one they just drew, (assuming 0 cards in hand at the begging of the turn), and because they never drew a card that wasn't the initial draw step one, Notion Thief's ability never triggers.

Let's say you cast a Day's Undoing with both out during your turn, and the opponent hasn't drawn any cards this turn. The first card the opponent attempts to draw is allowed by Narset, but then gets cancelled by Thief, so you get an extra. The 2nd card isn't canceled by Narset, because the opponent never drew the first card, so Thief kicks in, cancels that draw also, and then gives you another. This means that by the end of casting the Day's Undoing, your opponent will have 0 cards and you will have 14, (7 from your draws from Days, and 7 from the Thief's ability.) Also let it be noted: if something is preventing the opponent's draw in their draw step from happening, (ex. Colfenor's Plans) then each time they would go to draw a card Thief's ability would cancel it, so Narset never triggers, and you end up with the extra cards.

To recap: If you want to draw an extra card and you have both Notion Thief and Narset, Parter of Veils out, trigger the loot before the first draw of the turn; if you want to lock the opponent out of keeping cards in their hand activate the loot after the initial draw of the draw step.

In order to get the combo online, you need to do 2 things: 1) resolve your pieces and protect them and 2) get your opponent empty handed.

Resolving the combo pieces and protecting them is actually easier in this deck than in other combo decks, because of all of our free interaction spells: we don't have to wait until we can hold up mana for interaction during/after casting our combo pieces if we have a Disrupting Shoal in hand to hopefully protect it until we can untap next turn. Because our draw spells like Day's Undoing become a lot worse if we don't have a combo piece out, it is very important to get either Narset, Parter of Veils/Notion Thief on the board and keep it there as earlier as possible and as long as possible, (though obviously make sure it is safe to cast them; it sucks when you have a Remand in hand that could've countered that Ugin The Spirit Dragon but instead you tapped out hoping that Disrupting Shoal on 2 would be enough).

Getting our opponent empty handed can be done one of two ways: either they cast everything in their hand and you survive it and manage to stabilize despite this, or you cast Day's Undoing with Narset or Thief out to make them shuffle their hand away without drawing new cards, it is also possible to activate multiple looting effects, (Lore Broker etc.) during 1 turn to make the opponent start discarding extra cards.

Once the opponent is locked out of drawing cards we can close out the game by beating in with our utility creatures.

Anything that likes to cast a lot of noncreature spells is a pretty good matchup, especially decks that have a lot of card draw effects, like Control, or Storm simply because our combo pieces are already naturally good against them, and our free pitch spells let us interact with their combo in unexpected times. We also have a pretty good matchup vs things like the new Neoform decks or the Goryo's Vengeance decks that are looking to abuse the new London mulligan rule, again because our free pitch spells let us interact with them when they go for that early turn 1 or 2 kill, far earlier than most decks in the format, and also fairly consistently especially in games 2 & 3 when we can bring in additional Commandeers.

Decks like Burn, Elves and Humans are much harder to beat but not impossible; cheap and efficient creatures dodge a lot of interaction and Cavern of Souls and Aether Vial can make them even harder to interact with. Burn especially is also pretty good at killing our combo pieces, (if you can help it never tick down Narset, Parter of Veils because it puts her in bolt etc. range).

There are also some interesting matchups, where our deck functions really well vs part of their deck, but does very little vs other parts. Scapeshift/Valakut, The Molten Pinnacle/Primeval Titan decks. Scapeshift is pretty easily shut down with the likes of Commandeer, but Valakut, The Molten Pinnacle dodges all of our interaction, while Primeval Titan dodges some of it but not all. Dredge is another one of the matchups: our combo pieces are pretty sweet against their Faithless Lootings and Burning Inquirys, but their ability to dump creatures on the battlefield very quickly can lead to problems, and also sometimes our looting effects will just give them a discard outlet to discard whatever they wanted in their graveyard in the first place.