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Is Tablet of Discovery the best card from Secrets of Strixhaven? Maybe? Strong "maybe."
The deck we looked at for a Tablet showcase was Four-color Jeskai, which won Japan's Champions Cup Final last month in the hands of Keiichiro Matsumoto.
But what about the deck Matsumoto beat? The second-place deck from the Champions Cup ran many of the same incentives, and also featured four copies of Tablet of Discovery.
Jeskai Control | SOS Standard | Toru Horie, 2nd Place Champions Cup Japan
- Creatures (1)
- 1 Twinmaw Stormbrood
- Instants (22)
- 1 Abrade
- 1 Essence Scatter
- 1 Flashback
- 1 Into the Flood Maw1
- 1 Sear
- 1 Swallowed by Leviathan
- 2 Three Steps Ahead
- 2 Broadside Barrage
- 2 Firebending Lesson
- 2 Thunder Magic
- 4 Consult the Star Charts
- 4 Jeskai Revelation
- Artifacts (4)
- 4 Tablet of Discovery
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What's going on with Jeskai Control?
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If we're already playing in the jungle gym of ultra-high casting costs (that is, all four copies of Jeskai Revelation), Horie's three-color version can almost be considered the conservative option. Last year, there was a point that playing any copies of Jeskai Revelation at all might have been something you considered not doing. Seven-drops? Surely you could do something bigger than everything in the opponent's deck for a more reasonable amount of mana.
Now with Tablet of Discovery in Standard, four copies of Jeskai Revelation seems like not just the consensus number, but the "right" one.
Despite running so many seven-drops, Horie wasn't completely off the reservation. In fact, a traditionalist might have accused him of overcorrection. You see, not only is there no Black splash for Inevitable Defeat, but the White cards we often see in Jeskai Control decks are completely absent from the early game's options.
No Lightning Helix to turn around beatdown matchups.
No No More Lies to prevent a faster deck from ever achieving purchase.
Instead, Horie did two different things simultaneously.
1. Leaning More into Tablet of Discovery
First, he leaned slightly deeper into the 
, 
, and possibilities of the Tablet of Discovery mana base. Essentially every Tablet deck can tap out on turn three, potentially whiff on a free Land drop, but have mana up for Sear or Pyroclasm.
Horie added not only Abrade as an answer to opposing Tablets, but Charring Bite and Firebending Lesson. Just more ways to play Tablet profitably on turn three: Plus, don't sleep on the fact that you can Firebending Lesson on turn one or two, already have it in the graveyard, and then Flashback with .
2. Increase the Grindiness
He made his deck a better grinding control machine. Four-color Jeskai is capable of wilder swings, scraping a higher ceiling (especially early) - and certainly with Inevitable Defeat - maximum flexibility.
So, what do you do when you take out Lightning Helix and No More Lies for consistency's sake? Trade in Inevitable Defeat for the still-pretty-good-but-far-less-flashy Abrade? You make sure all your mid-game interactions grind better. You fix your hand. Your spells might not all be the max, but you can try to ensure you have more relevant ones in hand as often as possible.
The one card I was really surprised by was Broadside Barrage. It's not "good" on rate, and can raise an eyebrow when compared with a cross-archetype standout like Erode, but Broadside Barrage mostly gets the job done one-for-one and helps to fix your hand at the same time.
Three Steps Ahead is a legitimate Counterspell (okay, Cancel) instead of a Mana Leak variant that loses context in the midgame, but also a Dismiss that can actually increase your hand size or produce even more value by copying a Monk token or Tablet of Discovery.
On that note, Horie's Jeskai is probably just the best Standard deck at accumulating cardboard, with four Tablets, four Stock Ups, and all four copies of Consult the Star Charts leading into the four copies of Jeskai Revelation (plus Flashback!)
While Four-color and Jeskai Tablet share essentially the same top end (four copies of Tablet of Discovery powering out four copies of Jeskai Revelation), they take philosophically different paths on the way up.
Four-color is in some ways actually the more traditional "Jeskai" deck, with many recognizable cards, but it splashes Inevitable Defeat for all the reasons we discussed last time. Four-color as a deck wants to have the highest ceiling. Its aspiration is to never be out-muscled.
Jeskai, on the other hand, is oddly just an Izzet deck. It has two basic Islands and a Mountain. It's therefore far less likely to get stranded by an Erode or Demolition Field... but far more likely to be able to play Cori Mountain Monastery or Mistrise Village untapped early on. Sear and Abrade are substantially less exhilarating at killing an Emberheart Challenger than Lightning Helix... But they still functionally get it off the battlefield, and without stretching mana. The White in Jeskai Tablet is almost exclusively there for Jeskai Revelation. Even Twinmaw Stormbrood can provide function with just Red mana.
So why and when do you want to play this version instead of Four-color?
Why play Jeskai Control over Four-Color>
First and foremost, the mana base is less tricky in this deck, which is not to say it is "better" (I'm not sure that it is). It is less likely to trip you up, though. In Four-color you might get your wires crossed around a Sundown Pass or especially a Shattered Sanctum and find that your Verges don't make the colors you need. You're simply less likely to play the wrong Lands in the wrong order because there is less variety of them to screw up with.
If you're playing at a World Class level, this is probably less of an issue for you. However, it is a bonus built into the deck for the rest of us.
Playing a lot of removal cards (including extra copies of Abrade and Charring Bite in the sideboard) give you more opportunities to "get lucky" with your Tablet of Discovery, especially when playing under pressure.
And there is almost nothing better than having lots of mana open with Three Steps Ahead, Consult the Star Charts, and Flashback ready to jump ahead of the opponent during the middle turns.
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What gives me the greatest pause about this build is its inability to deal with large Creature threats. Broadside Barrage is kind of a Murder for the price of a Murder... as long as what you're murdering doesn't have a sixth toughness.
Jeskai is remarkably worse at dealing with a wide board of threats than Four-color. If you're interested in this deck (and personally, I find it a little more fun to play than Four-color) you might entertain Ill-Timed Explosion as a one- or two-of. Discarding a Jeskai Revelation to deal seven to everything might seem like it sucks in the abstract, but just imagine the board you'd have to be up against in order to want to make that choice. Isn't it better to have the option to discard your best card in order to keep playing instead of just losing to the battlefield as is?
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On that note, Slagstorm is a deceptively layered card in this deck. It doesn't sweep the way you want a Day of Judgment to, but the ability to deal three damage to the opponent actually comes up all the time. I've found the "extremely inefficient Volcanic Hammer" mode conditionally effective, especially if I already had two Monks in play to benefit from Prowess. Maybe I'm taking Lightning Helix for granted, but I've really appreciated the ability to end the game a turn faster, once I've already turned the corner with a Jeskai Revelation.
Some matchups are problematic on their faces. If your opponent has Cavern of Souls, you might be even worse off, staring at your Three Steps Ahead, than a deck that never tried to angle its game toward permission. But you still have the ability to chain Jeskai Revelations through a general concept of survival through Cavern of Souls. What is less correctable is "the mirror" (Jeskai against Four-color).
Quite simply, they race you because they can Inevitable Defeat your Tablet, whereas maybe you can Abrade theirs. And if you Abrade theirs, kind of who cares? It might be a one-for-zero, even if it's the right play. The mirror-ish matches are all about one player turning the corner on life total and becoming The Beatdown, whether or not they ever established full control first.
The guy with Inevitable Defeat is going to be better at that, especially if the opponent is planning on preventing it with three mana Counterspells.
So, which one would I recommend?
Four-Color or Jeskai Control?
If I had to choose a big mana Tablet of Discovery deck to play at a big tournament, I would choose Four-color over Jeskai. The biggest thing for me is that while Four-color does have a potentially worse mana base, it's not that much worse, especially in relation to how much percentage you get for just by being able to cast Inevitable Defeat. Again, that can help blow up opposing mana rocks and race, even though you're playing an ostensibly permanents-poor mirror.
Jeskai does feel a little more "fun" to play, and it's kind of centering to never have to worry about White mana before you have six-seven Lands in play. With four copies of Great Hall of the Biblioplex (which does nothing more to cast your Tablet in the merely three-color version), the mana works out well enough that I think you get more games with Black's flexibility (not to mention a duo of absolutely banger White two-drops) that it's worth the slight mana stretch.
LOVE
MIKE
