Hi, and welcome back to the Single Spotlight – the series in which I cover some of the most powerful cards to show up in Standard, and break down what they have to offer the format.

The Holiday season has come and gone, and for most, that means it’s back to the daily grind of work, school, and routine. For those people, it’s doom and gloom, as early mornings and long days set in, and many longingly await the next bank holidays in Easter. That’s those people. For us Magic types, it’s January, which means one thing – it’s spoiler season! This month, we’re diving back into the tribal treasure-fuelled tribulations found in the Plane you can’t escape, and we’re doing it with the Rivals of Ixalan.

When I initially planned to write this article, I was focusing on a single card – but in the span of twenty-four hours, my list of cards to review grew from one to six. Much like the namesake tribe, today we’re going to be going deep and wide with the fish you can’t miss: Merfolk.

The Cards

Well, if you’re going to review new Merfolk, you’d better start strong. Silvergill Adept is a reprint that has proven itself time and time again in several eternal formats, including Modern and Legacy. While this ‘technically’ costs 4U to cast, let’s be real – any deck that tries to cast it does so for the minimal cost of 1U, making Elvish Visionaries everywhere blush.

For the low, low cost of two mana, you get a Goblin Piker. Not too impressive… that is, until you get to the bottom text, and see the best three words in Magic: draw a card. As a two power threat that immediately replaces itself, Silvergill Adept both starts clocking the opponent and providing you extra draws at more Merfolk to join the school of pain. While the Adept is a pretty pitiful topdeck if you’re out of gas and low on land, there won’t be many situations in which you’ve both no cards and little land. When your two drop’s worst case is as a five mana Rogue Refiner, you’re doing just fine.

The grind is real. Jadelight Ranger offers a whole lot of power for just three mana, and can most easily be looked at as a split-card:

1. 1GG, 2/1, ETB: draw two lands.
2. 1GG, 3/2, ETB: draw a land, then scry 1.
3. 1GG, 4/3, ETB: scry 1, then scry 1 again.

So, let’s break this down. Option one is a Borderland Ranger on steroids, Option 2 is a Rogue Refiner with additional card filtering, and option three is a Prowling Serpopard swapping out the text that matters 10% of the time to text that matters 100% of the time. Not only can it be any of these three cards, it’s worth noting that you actually have some control over where it lands – if you just want the beef and reveal a spell, leave the spell on top on the first Explore, then keep or mill it as necessary. If you’re after land? Mill the spell the first time and roll the dice again.

Jadelight Ranger doesn’t have any particular synergy with Merfolk aside from simply being one and and sharing the minor theme of counters, but cards like this don’t need synergy – they’re great regardless. I’m excited to give this one a try in generic Green Midrange!

Now, let’s take a dip in power level for a moment, and look at the potential synergy option. Watery Ambush is, in a vacuum, not an impressive card. Four mana for two power across two bodies is not blowing anybody out of the water. The activated ability, also, isn’t raining on many parades – four mana to make one fish extra slippery for a turn is inefficient to say the least.

So, with all of these downsides, what does Watery Ambush do well? It makes two guys with the typeline Merfolk, which, when paired with the right cards, might be enough. What cards do I mean?

Introducing Edric, Spymaster of Trest’s second cousin (on his mothers’ side. You’ve seen the little Mermaid, right)? For only one additional mana and cutting a colour, Seafloor Oracle offers a Merfolk specific ‘curiosity’ ability – that is, whenever your fishy friends nibble on the opponents’ life, you get a fresh card. Effects like these really, really incentivise having several bodies at once, and Watery Ambush and Ixalan’s Deeproot Waters both offer a veritable pet store of little nippers. Curving three creatures into this with a little disruption can easily result in a free Ancestral Recall!

Now, the Oracle is still a four mana 2/3 with no combat abilities, and is about as stone a topdeck as you get without being a land when you’re behind. That said, if you’re familiar with Ixalan limited, you’re probably aware of just how well Merfolk puts you on the back foot and keeps you there. Speaking of cards that keep Merfolk ahead…

We have a Standard Merfolk Lord. No messing around, no fancy text, no conditional or activated abilities – Merfolk Mistbinder asks nothing more of you than being cast to harness it’s power. All of those cute Hexproof 1/1s? The 2/1s, 2/2s and 3/2s? They start to mean business once the Mistbinder crashes in. This is not even to speak of what happens when you start stacking them up. Remember Lord of the Accursed, and what it did for Mono-Black Zombies? Well, this offers the same powerful effect at only two mana. A curve of one drop, two drop, three drop, double Mistbinder is going to end many a Standard game pretty convincingly.

You know the old saying, two is better than one? Well, Wizards agree, and decided to print:

If Mistbinder is a straight-forward, no frills Lord, Kumena is the Emperor. Kumena offers a whole lot for very little investment; with just one other Merfolk, it threatens to end the game in a hurry with it’s unblockability. Somewhere, Aetherling is smiling.

Once you’re up to three Merfolk (including itself, and ignoring summoning sickness), Kumena puts on it’s Cryptbreaker hat and starts trading tapped guys for cards. I’m sure you all remember Cryptbreaker, and how it more or less single-handedly made Zombies a deck? Extra cards means extra guys, which fuels the continued use of this ability. Unchecked, it then starts threatening the last one.

Once you’re up to a whopping five Merfolk, Kumena starts spitting counters all over the place. That activated ability essentially reads ‘tap five untapped Merfolk: add 5 power and 5 toughness minimum to your board’. Put that way, you can see that Kumena does not mess around!

The Deck

We’re only on day three of spoiler season, and already the fish that could are threatening to drown the competition! Let’s take a look at what I think a Merfolk shell could look like, not even counting any potential further additions to the archetype (except Yavimaya Coast, because come on Wizards – enemy colour pairs need some dual-land love)!

There are two ways you can build this deck – with Deeproot Waters, and without. The Waters version excels at going wide and utilises the various Lords better, the non-Waters version has a generally higher card quality with Jadelight Ranger and efficient interaction. I honestly don’t know which is the more powerful, but to begin, let’s look at the version with better card quality.

This Merfolk build looks to play out pretty similarly to the Zombie builds of last Standard. It has one of two plans – it either curves out one, two, three, then jams a bunch of Lords and runs the opponent over, or it stalls the board out and gets ahead with Kumena and Seafloor Oracle, adding ever more fish to the table while digging for more anthem effects.

We’ve covered the creatures above, so let’s look at the noncreatures. Unsummon is no Vapor Snag, but I feel like it’s been waiting for an aggro-tempo deck like this to shine. For a single mana, it can undo entire turns – imagine your Temur opponent looking to get ahead with a Glorybringer, only to be Time Walked at instant speed! Essence Scatter offers similar answers to cards like Whirler Virtuoso and Bristling Hydra that would otherwise give Merfolk issues; not to mention a pesky Hazoret the Fervent or The Scarab God.

Blossoming Defense acts as a split card here; on the one hand, it’s a combat trick that helps your Merfolk push past big Longtusk Cubs in the early game. On the other, it’s a single mana Counterspell that lets your Merfolk Mistbinder keep on binding mists.

The sideboard offers the usual suite of countermagic and Naturalise effects for Control and Combo matchups, as well as countering key wrath effects. Nissa herself can join the grind in slower matchups, and Kefnet’s Last Word rinses the Gods. The spiciest addition? Deeproot Waters. In matchups that you know will give you time to get full use out of it, such as Midrange or Control pairings, Waters can offer a whole lot of value for a small investment.

Summary

Phew! Just a few short days into spoiler season, and I’m already exhausted wading through this sea of gold! Merfolk looks to be a powerful tribe in Rivals Standard, and with just one more little push, I’d suggest to all my readers: learn to swim. I hope this article has sparked the brewer in you all, and you’re awaiting new spoilers as eagerly as I am!

As always, thanks for reading, and good luck.