Turbofog’s biggest upside, for me, is that when it goes off it’s incredibly fun to be playing. The sense of the approach of inevitable win as Jace Berlen gets his 11th counter with a pair of Archive Traps and a clutch of Fogs in hand is enthralling. I love it when the combo goes off. It’s even OK when the combo gets beaten by a faster deck or a savvy player. What’s really not fine with the Bant build of Turbofog is the fragility of the manabase. If you’re kept off any one of your three colours then the deck relies too heavily on your opponent having the wrong cards in hand.

That is precisely why Joel Calafell was entirely right to build a blue-white milling, damage prevention deck. Calafell’s list is well documented and is all over YouTube, Wizards.com, Channel Fireball and pretty much everywhere else that was interested in a rogue deck going 6-0 at the World Championship. I’ve left it rather a long time to start making comments about the blue-white build but I spent a while trying to make the Bant build work and now making the blue-white build work to my tastes.

The core of the deck is the same as Turbofog: Howling Mine and Font of Mythos as a drawing engine coupled with the fog engine of Angelsong and Safe Passage with Day of Judgment acting as a fog effect. The win condition is Time Warping to ramp the manabase, charge Jace Beleren to critical mass and cast Archive Traps.

This is my current build.

I stand by my assertion that more than 2 Fonts can clog your opening hand horribly. I’ve cut the life-gain in favour of a singleton Twincast and an additional Archive Trap.A Twincasted Time Warp or Archive Trap is as good as game over, however any more than one and you’re running into a dead card to frequently.

Flashfreeze is maindeck still as a metagame call – Cancel could fit just as easily in the main with the Freezes in the side but Jund and Valakut Ramp are tricky matchups and are both reaosnably popular in Plymouth.

The additional Archive Trap speeds things along a bit and helps prevent the frustration of an unanswered fetchland-into-basic in the early turns. It’s been suggested to me that milling a Vampire deck too early can lead to all kinds of problems with Liliana Vess and Bloodghast, but if milling removes Haunting Echoes, Duress, Mind Sludge and Bloodchief Ascension, it’s all good.

I have more countermagic than Calafell, running both Negate and Flashfreeze. This deck can be horribly rickety in some matchups and being able to say “No” more often is no bad thing.

What’s missing? Silence is. Whilst I love this card, and it can be incredibly useful as an almost-Time Warp, it often just delays the opponent rather than stopping them. The most useful thing the card does is stops the opponent interfering with your turn when something big is about to go off, either by shutting them up for the turn or by drawing out any countermagic they have in hand.

I’m also not running Rest for the Weary at the moment, although I’m not convinced of the wisdom of this. On the one hand having more proactive cards is fantastic, however sometimes that extra little boost to your life stops games ending unfavourably. I’m thinking here of how much of a pain in the arse Bloodchief Ascension has been for me. That said, Baneslayer Angel swings life totals quite dramatically and provides a good buffer late game.

So there it is: my take on Jacerator. It’s fun, it’s reasonably consistent and sometimes it wins. I like it.