Kamigawa Neon Dynasty: Mech Deck

 Kamigawa Neon Dynasty is upon us!

The original Kamigawa block was actually what was just coming out when I first played Magic online, having to run a PC emulator to get it to work on my Macbook during my freshman year of college.

Kamigawa was not very popular, and whatever good will it might have had got totally blasted away when Ravnica was introduced the next year. So, I was surprised when I heard they were revisiting the plane. I was also even more surprised to find out that the concept was for a futuristic cyberpunk version of the plane. MTG has played a little with technological levels, but I don't think we've ever seen them introduce a setting with such sci-fi-inspired technological elelements.

For my first deck, then, I leaned in hard.

I'll confess, other than like three episodes of Power Rangers I watched in elementary school, I never watched much of the "Mech" or "Giant Robot" stuff out of Japan as a kid. But it's a real genre over there, from Voltron to Gundam to Neon Genesis Evangelion - works that I could not tell you much about other than that they involve people piloting giant robot-like vehicles and that the latter one is super weird.

KND (if that's the abbreviation) gives us a bit of a Mech theme, with many Vehicles and a new creature type: "Pilot."

While I've played around with some speculative decklists found on the internet for Ninjas, a control/resurrection deck, and an equipment-based Boros deck (that is frankly more Zendikar than Kamigawa,) I've actually had better luck today with my own homebrewed Azorius Mech deck. Here are the elements that make it work:

Prodigy's Prototype is a real workhorse of the deck. It's a 3/4 vehicle with Crew 2 for 1WU, and each time one or more of your vehicles attacks, you create a 1/1 Pilot token that has "this creature crews Vehicles as if it had 2 greater power." Getting one or two of these on the board will make it far easier to get your mechs rolling, and the 3/4 body is fairly resilient.

Surgehacker Mech is useful removal attached to a powerful body. It's a 5/5 vehicle for 4 with Crew 4 and has menace. When it comes into play, it deals damage equal to twice the number of vehicles you control to a target creature or planeswalker. We generally have a lot, so it can often get a kill.

Mobilizer Mech is one that I think might look better than it is, but I'm still running it. It's a Vehicle for 1U that is 3/4 and has flying, and Crew 3. When it becomes crewed, you get to turn another vehicle into an artifact creature until end of turn - essentially letting you crew two vehicles for the price of one.

Patchwork Automaton is a 1/1 Artifact Creature for 2 that has Ward 2 and gets a +1/+1 counter each time an artifact comes into play under your control. This naturally synergizes well with the fact that you keep dropping vehicles into play, and will get big enough to crew them as well as being harder to kill than your other pilots.

Kitsune Ace is a 2/2 Fox Pilot for 1W. Whenever a Vehicle you control attacks, it either gives the vehicle first strike or you untap it (great if you just used it to crew the thing). This turns your vehicles into trickier threats, no matter how many you're attacking with.

Ingenious Smith is a 1/1 Human Artificer for 1W from Adventures in the Forgotten Realms that first lets you put an artifact from the top four cards of your deck into your hand when it comes into play and then gets a +1/+1 counter once a turn if you put an artifact into play. Like the Patchwork Automaton, this essentially grows into the pilot role.

Born to Drive is a sort of interesting outlier - it's an Aura for 2W that gives a creature or a vehicle +1/+1 for each creature and/or vehicle you control - potentially making a mech much bigger (and thus allowing it to hide from creature removal when not being crewed) but you can also channel it for the same cost to create two Pilot tokens (similar to what you get from Prodigy's Prototype). I think the Aura mode really helps you create a scary menace (especially nice with Kitsune Ace to give it First Strike,) but the channel option also makes this great insurance if a board-sweeper takes out all your potential crew.

Mech Hangar is the non-basic land that help you get Mechs out, which can be tapped for colorless mana, or any color of mana if it pays for a Pilot or Vehicle spell, but can also be tapped with 3 mana to turn a Vehicle into an Artifact Creature (essentially crewing it).

In practice, the deck more or less works as an aggro deck. There's a bit of removal in Surgehacker Mech and Portable Hole (the latter helping out with the Patchwork Automaton and Ingenious Smith) but mostly you just want to get your Mechs nice and big and swing in with them.

As is often the case, I imagine that as the new metagame settles in, this kind of devout focus on one of the new set's big themes is likely to wind up falling to the more consistent "just pick all the best mythic rares from the set and add it to an older archetype" kind of decks, but for now at least, it's fun to operate in this space.