I have seen most Mentor lists run 4-6 hate pieces. IMHO 2 each of Preist, Cage, and RIP, since those all also hit Oath (RIP if its Sun Titan Oath for example), have been the best combination. It also depends on if your list runs the singleton strip, or wastelands as well as those are hate on bazaar.

I look at lists like this and just wonder if JacoDrazi isn't just better and possibly the same cost. But that is not why you are asking for help....

I think that mental Misstep, dryad militant, and Thorn of Amethyst should be considered. These cards are possible on turn one. point being is you NEED a turn one play. Dryad militant turns off Baby Jace, Snapcaster, cabal therapies, dread returns, and delve spells relatively well. Your biggest fear with this deck is Mentor and STPs (and maybe Oath.) MM helps against one of those. Mentor is just going to steam roll the deck. You have no way to come back from an early Mentor other than your STPs.

The other problem with a deck like this is that it is an anti-meta deck. What decks do you play against in your area or online? You can tune this deck to have an edge against Shops by playing maindeck Kataki and Null Rod. Against blue decks I would have 4 spirit of the labyrinths and 4 Thalia 1.0.

Just my 2 cents. Good luck!

Any concern about the presence of Animation Module turning on your opponent's Mental Missteps game one, when they would otherwise be dead?

Changed Cruise to Mana Drain, sideboard changed Dread to Spitters and cut third Leyline for another Mana Drain. Went 4-3 in P9 challenge. Losses to Dredge, Esper Mentor, and Montolio (Tks Shops). Beat Dredge, UW Standstill, Blue Moon, and UWR Mentor. Main deck feels pretty good at this point. I might want to change 1 of the colorless lands or the basic swamp to some other land (Bayou or Trop). Sideboard is very tough to figure out. You need certain cards like Cage to not auto lose to Oath but maybe Oath is so small a % it is worth skipping? They would just be more Leyline anyways though. Spitters are great against White Eldrazi and Grixis but suck against TKShops and Mentor. Idk what to do with the board from here.

I agree with @ssasala. After resolving Lotus, I would have played Cavern on Human followed by TKS. You're fairly likely to draw the single mana source you need to play one of your many 2-drops on turn two, and this is probably the only way to get your TKS on the board.

@Naixin said:

@rcwraspy I've tried it but I'm not sure how I felt about a tutor that puts a card on the top of your deck. I have considered, and will probably try Mystical Tutor as well as Temporal Mastery. It seems cute but when it works, it works.

Gotcha. You mentioned Vampiric so I assumed the top of deck clause didn't much matter.

@Ten-Ten i dont think playing cobra without gush is a good idea, the whole point of playing cobra is because of gush

Restricted since 1966.

@Islandswamp Who knows what I'm Oathing into... I usually run a creature package that include 1 Gris and 1 or 2 other things, often Emrakul, and more recently Salvagers because, seriously, that stuff is just really good.

@Brass-Man I suspect this is probably the main reason why Yawgmoth's Will isn't what it used to be. I find the path of Yawgmoth's Will's domination of the format, and subsequent falling off, to be fascinating.

Magus is for sure a non-bo with the mana bases of the best human decks from recent years (Storm's Humans that won in Spain spring to mind here.), but a couple questions spring to my mind at least.

Firstly, could you just jam a couple Magus into some version of Humans as a sort of uncounterable (off of Cavern), Armageddon-like effect to just end games where you have already played out a Thalia, into Mantis Rider, into Reflector Mage and then Magus is the cherry on top that never lets them replay the Smasher you just put back in their hand.... ? Maybe? I kinda doubt this would work myself... but maybe some slightly redder version of humans with Harsh Mentor is out there where Magus is a capstone sort of lock piece. The destroying your own manabase does seem like a problem though.

Secondly, is there a much much redder version of Humans out there? Something more like Kurt Crane's Moons deck from NAChamps (https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/503260#online)

Assuming that Harsh Mentor is good, I actually think that something along these lines with 4 Magus, 4Harsh, and 2-4 Blood Moon might be pretty tough, since the opponent will be dealing with a Magus or a Harsh nearly all the time, and will be faces with crazy problems like having to try to remove Magus, so that a Flooded Strand can become not a Mountain, and instead become a fetchland that costs 3 life to use. If a second Harsh comes down, it now costs 5, and at that point shouldn't they just be in such an impossible situation that there is no getting out? I'm also optimistic about this angle, since Magus seems great against both Eldrazi (which I think is the worst matchup for Humans) and Mentor, while Harsh seems great against Shops. Now just add some number of Eidolons and you have multiple, on-color, mainboard answers for a huge chunk of the metagame. (56% of top 8 decks in the last year, going by mtgtop8)

The miracle is probably a better candidate. The problem is that it shifts Jace activations into your opponent's turn. Not that we haven't all dreamed of "Your end step, cast Time Walk. Resolves?" I assume the card got thoroughly tested in Legacy, and it's not like you see it in RUG and BUG decks there despite 4x Brainstorm and 4x Ponder.

I saw Sylvan Library in one of Rich Shay's decks from a while ago and gave it a try. I haven't been impressed so far but I've only played about 4 events with it. Most of the time it is too slow. Sometimes I can't afford the life. When I get an extra 3 cards out of it it's incredible but that doesn't seem to happen all that often.

The primary purpose of the Shamans is Wasteland resistance, but their incidental value in fighting Crucible, Snapcaster, Will, and JVP is not zero. It's not normally a card I'm a big fan of in Vintage (I generally think of it as "too fair") but it's been very useful in covering the third or fourth color.

I'm just not sure the fifth color is worth adding more fragility to the manabase; especially in a relatively fair list. I'm usually the first to climb aboard the Greed Train but in this case I'm happy to trade it for fewer games of getting randomly crushed by Shops, Landstill, or BUG Fish.

Going back to the original post and card list Brassman:
Considering all the mentor, the rise of the eldrazi and some recent success of various fish type decks would you swap out duress for thoughtseize? Seems a much better meta-game call to me.

Along the lines of what @hankzhong said, isn't this deck just better without burning wish? It makes comboing faster and more consistent, and frees up enough space in the board to have a good shops matchup while not ignoring stuff like dredge.

I mean, adding oath to combat shops is still a great tactic. In a meta defined by shops and mentor-control, a deck like storm that already has a good control matchup, if it could be tweaked to have a better shops matchup, could be a real force.

Please consider breaking out the "Business" sections of your decklists. Years of reading decklists has trained me that at least separating creatures makes for greatly improved readability.

Seems reasonable, but i am really not liking kataki. I was testing against Doomsday and I was surprised by how much game the deck had. I think cutting kataki for hammer mage and then playing chalice seems real interesting.

@PeAcH
If he already has counter-top online misstep is only there to preserve the top but there are 4 tops already so the mms would be redundant dead draws at that point.