(Treasure Hunt

| Art by Daren Bader)

Companion Who

Hello everyone, and welcome to another installment of Hidden Strings, the article series where we can add a Grim Tutor

If you're new to this column, the above sentence probably makes no sense to you, but I promise it'll all be clear in just a few moments. In fact, even familiar readers might be a little confused this time around, as normally I'd use the opening of my article to leave behind a small clue of what's about to come. Today, however, we're going to mess around with a freshly released card, so I figured that a closer and more explicit look at it would be advisable:

As someone who hasn't been following the TV series, I can only rate the new Doctor Who cards based on their role as game pieces, and in this regard Ryan Sinclair

When you look at cards from the perspective of secret commanders, legendary creatures whose abilities contain the phrasing "exile cards from the top of your library until X happens, then do Y" tend to have great potential. Indeed, depending on the nature of X and Y, such abilities may very well become ways to find specific pieces in our deck. Of course, this won't always be easy, but "easy" is not what we're striving for here, so let's unpack this new commander and see how best we can (ab)use it for our secret deeds!

Thrill of the Hunt

On the surface, Ryan

Somewhat poetically, though, this is a case where the problem actually hints to its own solution. Indeed, a card exists that not only can be worth running as the only nonland in our deck, but actually benefits from us having nothing else but a big pile of lands:

What Memes Are Made Of

Alright, let me be clear: I'm certainly not the first to come up with the idea of a ninety-something-lands deck built around Treasure Hunt

I'd say the best way to proceed with a deck like this is to start from the most basic and streamlined list possible, and then work our way up by adding whatever we deem necessary to improve its speed and/or resiliency.

The first point of order is to ensure that Treasure Hunt

Filling out the remaining 97 slots with Mountains

1. Make our first three land drops.
2. Cast Ryan Sinclair
   .
3. Attack on our fourth turn.
4. Cast Treasure Hunt
   through Ryan
   's trigger.
5. Put our whole library into our hand.

Evidently, this shows that we need both a way to win the game on a following turn and a way to avoid losing on the very next turn due to drawing from an empty library.

A Meme Within a Meme

At first glance, resorting to a nonland win condition might seem like an efficient way to solve both issues simultaneously. Traditional finishers, like Zombie Infestation

Of course, adding a nonland card to the equation means that Ryan

The true issue with cards like these is that, what they offer in explosiveness, they lack in resiliency. Having to dump our hand in an attempt to win the game means that having our plans thwarted will set us back to square one and most likely cost us the game. Not to mention that there'd be cases in which the specific order of the cards in our deck would make our plan fizzle due to revealing too few lands before hitting the finisher, leaving us with very little to do and almost no hope to bounce back.

Upon further inspection, it actually looks like any nonland win condition would put us through the same risks: between the face-up nature of our gameplan and the fact that we can't afford to run redundancy, relying on easily disruptable game-enders feels like a recipe for disaster. We might then be better off fully embracing the deck's gimmick and relying on just our lands even to go for a win.

Dark Depths

Yeah, that's right, today we're going all-in on the meme! And now that we have a clear objective, let's see how we can pull it off.

The Name Is Bond; Manabond

An example of a quick fix to the issue of the empty library could be to loop Treasure Vault

1. Discarding to hand size after firing off Treasure Hunt
   (so that we can both play the Ruins
   and place the Vault
   in our graveyard in the same turn);
2. On each of the following turns we use our land drop just to stay alive, thus becoming unable to even deploy our remaining Gates.

Luckily for us, both of these problems have the same solution, and that is dropping a bunch of lands onto the battlefield in one fell swoop. To my knowledge, no land has been printed that has such an ability, so this is where having a second nonland card in the deck actually comes in handy. The following three are the best options I could think of.

Summer Bloom

Journey to the Oracle

Manabond

Whatever the choice, dipping our toes into green means that our Doctor needs to be in Simic colors. Given that some of the scenarios we are going to face might involve topdeck manipulation, I feel like The Third Doctor

Building the Manabase

The skeleton of our build is now looking something like this:

This is a good starting point that should cover the fundamental bases. I would also be hard-pressed not to include the following:

Kessig Wolf Run

As for the remaining 70-ish slots, I'd say to just go ham with your favorite lands! You could even use the traditional deckbuilding template as a guide: there's ramp, there's card draw, there's interaction, there's recursion... we're only really lacking board wipes, so we'll have to settle for protection

Lastly, in my list I also decided to run one last nonland card in Gamble

Final Parting

And there you have it! A challenging but fun 95-lands build that, depending on its actual configuration, can take the shape of either a glass-cannon-y meme deck or a solid and inexorable killing machine.

Do you love it? Do you hate it? Are there any particular cards or interactions that I missed? Let me know in the comments.

Until next time!