Aether Ambush

Concept

Aether Ambush is a tempo deck that uses creatures to reduce the cost of your spells, allowing you to scry, deal damage, or draw cards! Instant speed is the best speed!

Game Plan

The deck aims to attack with cheap creatures while leveraging abilities that trigger upon casting spells during the opponent's turn.

The key to playing the deck is tempo. Which means, making sure the opponent cannot mount a robust defense, while your cheap creatures finish them off.

The key abilities to enable this plan include cost reduction, direct damage, tap or untap permanents, card draw and scry. These are complemented by a solid suite of instant speed spells, which bring even more card draw/scry and direct damage.

Essentially, you want to keep your opponents from moving past the early stage of the game, while you roll over them.

Opponent's creatures may be stronger/bigger; however, they are not going to win them the game if they are tapped or killed by direct damage, while your creatures attack unguarded...

Deck Composition

The deck is normally composed of a balanced combination of creatures and spells, which can be classified as either strategy enablers or pay-offs.

• enablers

• pay-offs

Enablers

The enablers include creatures that facilitate casting spells during the opponent's turn like Naiad of Hidden Coves and, most importantly, instant speed spells like Glimpse of Freedom, Omen of the Sea/Forge, and Thirst for Meaning.

The enablers focus mainly on card draw/selection, which allow the deck to continue applying pressure and maintaining tempo advantage. Some, however, also provide direct damage and, more rarely, even counterspells.

The deck normally includes around 24 enabler cards.

Pay-offs

The pay-offs are normally creatures that double down as efficient attackers. Most known versions of Aether Ambush use the same creature package with very little variations.

Mischievous Chimera is a good example here, with a mana value of 2, evasion and two abilities that trigger upon casting spells during an opponent's turn. Pure value.

Stinging Lionfish is another important element of the deck with its ability to remove blockers by tapping them.

Dreamstalker Manticore is the most powerful attacker of the deck and it can deliver serious damage early on, with some help from direct damage spells, or from its own ping ability, to clear up the way.

Wavebreak Hippocamp replaces the first spell you cast during your opponent's turn.

The deck normally includes up to 12 pay-off cards.

Conclusion

Aether Ambush is very fun to play and can perform well against a variety of decks and strategies. 

It is particularly strong against slower decks as its tempo advantage can punish those decks quite importantly. On the other side of the speed spectrum, it can suffer against decks that can consistently remove its creatures, particularly the chimeras and the masticores.

Signature Cards