Timeless: 5 Decks with Avatar: The Last Airbender to try out!

The Magic: The Gathering collaboration with Avatar: The Last Airbender has been celebrated for the immersive narrative quality the set's cards offer to longtime fans and those unfamiliar with Aang's adventures, showcasing iconic moments and diverse character arcs across various stages of the story.

As usual, we've prepared decklists for various Magic formats using cards from the new collection, but this time, we present some options for Timeless.

The addition of Avatar's special slots has brought some staples from eternal formats, such as Dark Depths, Entomb (recently banned from Legacy), Standstill, and Force of Negation, guaranteeing the set the potential to significantly change the Metagame!

Golgari Depths

Dark Depths arrives in Timeless to guarantee another classic Legacy combo—banned in Modern—for the format. With Vampire Hexmage, we can remove the the land's counters to sacrifice it and put a 20/20 token with Indestructible and Flying into play.

We can also use Thespian’s Stage to sacrifice the original Depths for the Legends Rule, keep the copy made by the Stage, and then sacrifice it to create Marit Lage, since it will have no counters.

This list aims to focus as much as possible on getting Marit Lage into play early, with a full set of Crop Rotation and Once Upon a Time to add consistency, and we've also included Assemble the Team as a pseudo-tutor.

In the interaction package, Thoughtseize is complemented by Duress as our biggest opponents are discard spells and counterspells and/or combo spells faster than ours, but we can include pieces like Pithing Needle if we want to protect Depths against Strip Mine, or Sylvan Safekeeper if we prefer to protect the token from Swords to Plowshares and Solitude.

Golgari Mine

The Golgari Midrange deck is already known in the format for using Strip Mine as an effective resource negation alongside Wary Zone Guard, but Avatar introduced Badgermole Cub and Ba Sing Se as two other ways to reuse the LD plan each turn, with Cub also helping to accelerate mana to cast The One Ring or Sheoldred, the Apocalypse earlier with Deathrite Shaman or even with the transformed land — which can be a Strip Mine for disruption, or even a Verdant Catacombs for ramp.

Once the game is established, we can use Ba Sing Se every turn to "lock" the opponent or to create an army of 2/2 lands on the table.

Naya Depths

In this version, we attempted to replicate another similar playstyle to Golgari Mine, but using Badgermole Cub and Wrenn and Six as recursive tools for both Strip Mine and the Dark Depths combo with Thespian’s Stage.

Knight of the Reliquary and Elvish Reclaimer provide tutors for Dark Depths and Thespian’s Stage, while Deathrite Shaman functions as manafixing and ramp, with all pieces found using Green Sun’s Zenith and complemented by a small toolbox with Icetill Explorer and Sylvan Safekeeper for protection and resilience.

Dimir Reanimator

Dimir Reanimator is possibly the most hyped new deck in Avatar. After all, the archetype uses a huge combination of cards now banned in Legacy in Timeless, and almost the entire package is included: from threats like Psychic Frog, the Grief combo with Reanimate, and now with Entomb to ensure that Atraxa, Grand Unifier or Valgavoth, Terror Eater reach the graveyard.

The archetype also has Force of Negation and it can be one of the best strategies to use it as a disruptive element, since the role of this card in the format is essentially to protect from other combos, rather than protecting itself—something that Reanimator already does very well with Grief and Thoughtseize.

Azorius Bladestill

Despite the absence of Urza’s Saga, we can think of ways to take advantage of Standstill in Timeless in a more Control-oriented archetype, but we need more tools to circumvent the cast limitations and avoid triggering the enchantment, and Stoneforge Mystic offers both this type of effect and a powerful threat with Kaldra Compleat, in addition to Umezawa’s Jitte which can be easily equipped by Hydroponics Architect to hold off Aggro decks.

Shark Typhoon could be our main win condition, but we also included Castle Ardenvale as a way to create tokens every turn if we go too far into the late-game, a difficult task for a traditional Control deck in Timeless today, but one that may be worth some testing.

That's all for today!

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

Thank you for reading!