Sunspots

I know it isn't too clever to call this deck Sunspots but there you go. Between the Sunburst mechanic and my tendency to use glass beads on the cards as counters, it just made sense. Thematic connections, man! Or something like that. Let's decklist:

2 Treasure Hunter
4 Skyreach Manta
4 Etched Oracle

4 Energy Chamber
3 Engineered Explosives
4 Pentad Prism
3 Clearwater Goblet

3 Inexorable Tide

4 Rampant Growth
2 Clockspinning
4 Channel the Suns

8 Forest
1 Vivid Crag
1 Vivid Creek
2 Vivid Grove
1 Vivid Marsh
1 Vivid Meadow
1 Academy Ruins
2 Mountain
2 Swamp
2 Plains
2 Island

Now that is an interesting pile, when I look at it as text. There are only ten ways for me to win and of those, four are viable: Skyreach Manta. Everything else is there to generate mana or counters, or reset board states to ones more advantageous to me through a recurred Engineered Explosives. Recurring board sweeps are good of course, if you can get to them.

Which is why Clearwater Goblet is in there: gaining 4-5 life a turn is generally enough to mitigate what an aggressive deck can do and give me time to set up the flying beasts.

This deck evolved: originally an exploration of the Sunburst mechanic, Clockspinning was added in later as a way to counteract the scalable limit of  the Sunburst mechanic. Once Populate became a mechanic, I thought that Inexorable Tide would be a great way to reinforce Clockspinning's leapfrogging of Sunburst.

Nonetheless, looking at this deck now, I can't help but wonder if I have too much mana fixing. Channel the Suns is a good card; Is it necessary? Or perhaps I should be directing that question towards Rampant Growth, since I already have mana fixing at the two spot, as well as a way to repeat that mana fixing with Energy Chamber. According to the deck stats, there's a pretty big glut at two mana and a hole in the three mana spot, so it may be worth my while to find some juice at the three mana spot, the only question is; What does this need?

Time to play this and find out.

Bonus time: I dug this article by Dan Nelson on the probability of playing high casting cost cards in limited. Definitely worth a read.