One of the most exciting cards in Kaladesh is Aetherflux Reservoir. This is a card that has a lot of potential to be a powerful engine in the right kind of deck. The ability to gain life every time you cast a spell is not something to be undervalued, particularly when it’s possible to get multiple copies as the game goes later. However, the card goes from engine to combo piece when you add the likes of Crush of Tentacles or Paradoxical Outcome. It takes shockingly few spells to just kill your opponent outright, and that’s exactly what Caleb Scherer tried to do this weekend.

Four-Color Reservoir - Kaladesh Standard | Caleb Scherer

• Creatures (7)
• 4 Glint-Nest Crane
• 3 Contraband Kingpin

• Spells (35)
• 4 Aetherflux Reservoir
• 4 Attune with Aether
• 4 Bone Saw
• 4 Cathar's Shield
• 4 Crush of Tentacles
• 4 Metalspinner's Puzzleknot
• 4 Prophetic Prism
• 4 Paradoxical Outcome
• 3 Traverse the Ulvenwald

• Lands (18)
• 3 Forest
• 3 Island
• 1 Swamp
• 4 Aether Hub
• 4 Blooming Marsh
• 3 Botanical Sanctum

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Contraband Kingpin
• 3 Dispel
• 3 Invasive Surgery
• 3 Lost Legacy
• 4 Radiant Flames
• 1 Mountain

Buy This Deck

There’s a couple of interesting things about this deck compared to previous iterations that we’ve seen. The biggest change is the inclusion of Green as a color. This gives you access to the likes of Traverse the Ulvenwald and Attune with the Aether as mana fixers, which does three powerful things for this deck. Firstly, it means that you gain access to powerful sideboard cards like Radiant Flames. Second, it means that you can play fewer lands, making your draws off of Prophetic Prism and Metalspinner's Puzzleknot more likely to net you spells instead of lands. Lastly, it gives you a higher density of cheap spells in your deck for Aetherflux Reservoir turns, which makes it much more likely you can make your way up to the requisite fifty life to just kill your opponent.

On the surface, this deck looks like it does a lot of nothing. And it definitely does. However, what’s not clear at a glance is how much time it’s able to generate in order to continue doing nothing. Both Contraband Kingpin and Glint-Nest Crane are fantastic blockers early on, and are reasonable targets for both Cathar's Shield and Bone Saw to further discourage your opponent’s attacks. On top of that, you can just chain cantrips with Aetherflux Reservoir in play to stave off lethal damage. If you can cast a Prophetic Prism, Traverse the Ulvenwald, and a Bone Saw, you’ve gained six life.

That seems like it should take the wind out of your sails for your combo turn, but that’s what Paradoxical Outcome is for. With just a handful of cheap artifacts, Paradoxical Outcome lets you just cast four zero-casting cost artifacts and some prophetic prisms to kill your opponent outright.

This is a fun deck that looks like it has a lot of potential if people are willing to give it the time to set up. If Lost Legacy is a popular card in the format, then this is going to be less exciting, as losing access to your Paradoxical Outcomes makes it much harder to try to win all at once. Instead, you’re going to have to assemble multiple Aetherflux Reservoirs, hold onto your one- and zero-mana spells and hope for the best.

Is this deck good enough for the current Standard? It seems unlikely that you can do quite this much nothing in a format with Smuggler's Copter fueling all manner of beatdown decks. But still, I prefer to believe the new Standard is a format where Aetherflux Reservoir has the potential to be a format-defining engine.