Pioneer: 5 Decks with Foundations to try out!

Foundations arrives next week on Magic Arena and Magic Online and will consequently affect competitive formats with new ideas and archetypes enabled by its cards.

In Pioneer, the expansion brought some highly coveted cards: a new variant of Lava Spike, Kaito, Cunning Infiltrator as a Planeswalker with great potential in Tempo decks, a new two-card combo, and even the reprint of Elvish Archdruid for Elves fans.

In this article, we delve into five decklists made with Foundations cards for Pioneer to try out in the first few weeks after the expansion's release!

Boros Burn

Red decks have gained a new Burn spell with Boltwave, an updated version of Lava Spike. With it, you can build a list with up to 12 three damage spells for one mana alongside Wizard’s Lightning and Skewer the Critics.

To use these cards at the lowest possible cost, we need to make some compromises. Skewer the Critics improves as a card with Boltwave, so we need some Wizards to reduce Wizard’s Lightning. Luckily, some of them are the best creatures in the format for this type of strategy.

These creatures take advantage of cheap spells, so we stack them with some of the cheapest Burn spells in the format, like Play with Fire and Boros Charm, whose value is doubled by the presence of Clever Lumimancer and Slickshot Show-Off due to the Double Strike mode.

Monstrous Rage is almost the 12-16 version of Lava Spike and helps our bombs attack unhindered when we need a quick win.

Overall, Boros Burn will still have the challenge of proving itself more efficient than Prowess decks, especially in the Rakdos version, which features cheap interaction and a combo-kill between Callous Sell-Sword and Heartfire Hero.

Dimir Ninjas

Kaito, Bane of Nightmares established a new archetype in Pioneer, Dimir Ninjas, and it has been developing and growing in the Metagame ever since. Foundations gives this strategy one of the most powerful cards of the expansion: Kaito, Cunning Infiltrator.

The new Kaito does a bit of everything you'd expect from a Planeswalker: he filters your hand, grows quickly, has a relevant static ability, puts bodies on the board, and his ultimate virtually wins games on stabilized boards. He's one of the most powerful cards in the set, and as such, he deserves a deck built around him.

Four copies seem like a lot for a Planeswalker in a Tempo list. But in the right list, he makes games revolve around him, whether he's putting Ninjas into play that grow with Kaito, Bane of Nightmares's emblems, discarding extra copies of his legendaries with his first ability while giving a free pass for a creature to attack and putting constant pressure on his opponent to respond to him.

Coupled with so many low-cost threats, it's hard to imagine an opponent feeling safe leaving the new Planeswalker on the board for long. And speaking of them, Thousand-Faced Shadow is a card that I intend to test now in the next few weeks to evaluate if its interactions with Moon-Circuit Hacker or with other creatures besides the emblems of Kaito, Bane of Nightmares are worth a slot instead of Spyglass Siren.

Rakdos Conqueror

Bloodthirsty Conqueror has an infinite combo with Enduring Tenacity and Starscape Cleric in Standard and, like Unstoppable Slasher and Bloodletter of Aclazotz, can be migrated to Pioneer.

The combo works when both permanents are in play and the opponent takes damage: Bloodthirsty Conqueror will make the player gain that amount of life, triggering Enduring Tenacity which will make the opponent lose the same amount of life, triggering Bloodthirsty Conqueror and repeating the loop.

I don't know if Rakdos is the best home for this combo, and the fact that Enduring Tenacity is only a 4/3 for four mana on its own doesn't help. Maybe this deck wants another Devotion shell with Gray Merchant of Asphodel since both pieces actively interact with it, but not even Bloodletter of Aclazotz was able to make this strategy grow in Pioneer.

Selesnya Liege

This deck started with a joke I made in one of the groups I'm in about "being able to put together a list that would be a Waste Not player's nightmare." It involves including Loxodon Smiter and Wilt-Leaf Liege to punish their discards while Voice of Resurgence punishes their removals and Knight of Autumn to destroy enchantments while Kutzil, Malamet Exemplar draws more cards. Everything on the list is highly synergistic to make sure Discard-focused Midrange players have a hard time.

Going this route means giving up Collected Company or at least making it harder to include when the main driver of the deck is Wilt-Leaf Liege and its ability to give +2/+2 to creatures, so we maximize the number of multicolored creatures for this purpose, but still use some of the usual white aggro staples from Pioneer.

Wedding Announcement is our way of trying to make up for not playing Collected Company and improve the interactions with Kutzil, Malamet Exemplar and maintain some card advantage flow.

Selesnya Company is certainly a better deck due to its interactions and ability to use several different Hatebears for different matchups, but Wilt-Leaf Liege can start some versions looking to extract value from its abilities, whether from Selesnya, Bant or even Abzan with Siege Rhino.

Elfball

Elvish Archdruid has finally arrived in Pioneer and brought with it Genesis Wave. These two cards, combined with Shaman of the Pack, can enable very explosive and/or even instant-win turns, so I decided to bring an Elfball variant aimed at Pioneer.

Our plan involves playing mana dorks in the early turns, accelerating Elvish Archdruid or Circle of Dreams Druid to generate a lot of mana, and casting Genesis Wave to ideally have ten or more elves in play with two Shaman of the Pack.

To increase the consistency with which we execute this plan, we added Circle of Dreams Druid as copies 5-8 of Elvish Archdruid and Glasspool Mimic to copy your creatures. It's worth noting that if it comes from a Genesis Wave along with a Shaman of the Pack, it cannot become a copy of the Shaman because they enter simultaneously and Glasspool Mimic's ability makes the player choose the copy before it hits the board, but it does enable turns with more Elvish Archdruids and with extra copies of Shaman of the Pack if you already have one on the board.

To facilitate our plan and dig deeper into the deck, we have Collected Company. It is possible to use Chord of Calling in this slot, but it depends on which proposal we want to look for in the list. In mine, I chose Elvish Warmaster as a plan B in case we can't find Genesis Wave, where we use its abilities repeatedly to transform our Elves into an army that wins the game in a single attack.

That's all for today!

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment!

Thanks for reading!