Sultai Beanstalk Prowess- Powerful and Extremely Fun
And some thoughts on being "wrong" as a brewer
I came up with this kind of crazy idea for a Sultai Prowess list and got a trophy with it my first league. I’ve brewed a lot of different decks at this point, but this one might be the most fun. It turns out you just haven’t lived as a Pioneer player until you spend one mana to draw 5 and gain 10 life.
But first a bit on how I got to it as I think the deck is far off from perfect, so the concepts powering it are what are more important here.
Impact of Wilds of Eldraine
From the early returns of WOE it seems like there are two cards that have had the most obvious impact: Sleight of Hand and Up the Beanstalk (with Monstrous Rage in third). Sleight of Hand powering updated versions of Phoenix and Drakes. Up the Beanstalk powering updated versions of any of the Leyline Binding decks, most notably Bring to Light because of the extra synergy there.
One thing that stands out to me with these two cards is that I wrote up a list of 32 top cards in WOE and somehow had neither of these on the list. There are 266 cards in WOE, so I listed a whopping 12% of the cards in the set and missed not just any two, but the best two cards!
Reflections on being “Wrong” as a Brewer
But here is the important thing, it really doesn’t matter that I was wrong about missing these cards. I was able to recognize my error as soon as I started seeing winning lists coming out and start brewing with these cards a week into the set being out.
This is something important to always remember as a Spike Brewer, Being Right and Being Wrong are only opposites in a situation with binary or symmetric outcomes. But with brewing the cost to being wrong is tiny, but there is huge value in being right (the 80% winrate you can get with a good brew and the satisfaction and that comes with putting a new deck on the map, winning a big tournament with your own brew, getting a card banned, etc).
So with brewing your goal is to maximize being very right, not minimize being wrong. Worrying about minimizing being wrong can even prove costly by reducing the range of ideas you consider.
This of course prompts some introspection of why put these lists together at all before a set comes out. Here are the reasons I came up with:
It’s fun- The most important, a new set is a giant puzzle with tons of uncertainty. Trying to solve that puzzle with a bunch of other people who are all equally blind towards the reality is really fun. As soon as the set comes out and we get real world testing, some of this fun of total uncertainty disappears.
Find gems before I become anchored by deck dumps and other people’s opinions- I think it’s safe to say I see the format in a different and somewhat unique way. The period between full spoiler and set release is an opportunity for me to evaluate the cards as something of a blank slate from outside opinions on the cards and I may be able to identify a card that has the potential to be strong that others will miss.
As soon as I start consuming content and seeing league and challenge results they start changing my view and I can never get my brain back to this state. It is a good thing to consume this content because my opinions will be substantially more accurate informed by this new data, but my opinions will also will become a bit more tunnel-visioned.
Seeing where you were you wrong helps you challenge your understanding of the format and update your priors accordingly- Here, Sleight of Hand, I mentally compartmentalized as worse Opt (which is likely a wrong opinion on its own), but what I critically missed is how powerful the Rule of 12 is. On Faithless Brewing they talk about the Rule of 8 all the time, why would I not think the Rule of 12 could be even more powerful, especially for one mana cards.
Up the Beanstalk is a clear story of the power of a two mana card advantage engine. I even talk all the time about Reckoner Bankbuster and somehow missed this. The other thing here is the value of anything that is a cast trigger. The existence of Mono-Green encourages more counterspells in the format, so a card advantage engine that gets under counterspells and then counterspells can’t interact with is huge.
Sultai Beanstalk Prowess
So all of that somehow led to me becoming obsessed with one idea: “If I cast Treasure Cruise with two Up the Beanstalk in play that’s a one mana draw 5!”
Looking for cards that interact favorably with Up the Beanstalk, Stormwing Entity jumped out, especially as we now have Rule of 12 for one mana blue cantrips.
I initially tried a Simic deck. It failed and I got the timeless Simic reminder of “you have to be able to remove creatures in Pioneer”.
So now I had to add a third color, despite my general “no three color decks” principal, since it makes your mana so bad. I could see any of the colors working, but of course I started with Fatal Push given my goal for third color was creature interaction.
I ended up with this, took it through a league, and got the trophy:
The deck has some issues: the mana is terrible, it can struggle to actually get the kill, and the life loss of the shocklands combined with some of the cantrip wheel spinning can make you vulnerable to aggro.
But my goodness does it do powerful things at an extremely efficient rate. An early Beanstalk is a fairly reliable two mana draw 5. You have large cheap threats, that draw you cards with Beanstalk and are protected by Stubborn Denial. On the play, a curve of Beanstalk on two into cantrip Stormwing on three is just something else.
Sheoldred is the card I’m most questionable on. Really stretches the mana and expensive without triggering Beanstalk, but five mana for Sheoldred followed by Cruise with any Beanstalks in play just completely turns games.
Tolarian Terror is good, but can get stuck in hand and does have awkward interaction with Cruise. Running it as one of felt good to be able to thread in, but I am really not sure what the right number is.
The one of Saheeli gives the deck a different angle of attack. It can be mediocre, but also is the MVP of some matchups.
I want to emphasize that I am not confident that any part of this deck is built right. There is likely significant room to improve the mana base. The card selection in the main is very up for grabs outside of the core of: one mana cards, Beanstalk, Stormwing and Cruise. The sideboard certainly needs tuning. Even with that the power is definitely there and worth exploring.
The other thing I want to emphasize is that playing this deck is absolutely crazy and extremely fun. You get into all these absurd game states and are doing things that feel so much more powerful than you are used to doing in Pioneer. It’s the kind of deck where you end up laughing while playing because you cannot believe what’s going on.
Next steps for my testing are:
Elusive Otter version
Slightly slower version with better mana (haven’t figure out quite yet how to do this)
Temur version with Elusive Otter, Swiftspear, and Hearth Elemental
Test more non-Blue Beanstalk builds. I’ve tried two Golgari Beanstalk Midrange decks (below) and got 4-1’s with both of them.