Strixhaven is almost upon us and with it comes new begins and opportunities for Standard. There's excitement in the air, the kind you feeling you get on the first day of a new school year. This excitement was amplified with the Mystical Archives, inserting tons of super powerful spells into the Historic format. So pack your bag and head to class as we go through two new brews for Historic featuring the new cards, or in the case of the Archives, old cards from Strixhaven. Mono Blue Mill

Starting off we have my beloved archetype of Mono-Blue Mill. It is my favorite deck in Standard and we even made a version in Pauper! With the Mystical Archives we got some insane additions in Brainstorm and Memory Lapse. The entire deck is built around maximizing on the power of these two cards as we try to mill the opponent out.

I spoke about this already during my review of the Mystical Archives, but I strongly feel that Memory Lapse is on a crazy power level for Historic. Two mana counter spells like Remand are still doing work in Modern, and our deck can make it close to a true Counterspell. Bouncing the spell to the top of the library is very good tempo as we take away the opponent's next draw step, but it gets even better if we can immediately mill the card away. Thankfully the deck has multiple ways of accomplishing this with Ruin Crab and a Fabled Passage for a landfall trigger, or anything that draws a card with Teferi's Tutelage in play will mill away the card that you just sniped with Memory Lapse. We can also crack our fetches after we Brainstorm to shuffle away the two unwanted cards, which is why we're running both Fabled Passage and Evolving Wilds. Brainstorm mills six cards for just a single mana if we have Teferi's Tutelage in play. This will allows us to chain more cantrips so we can mill the opponent out faster. Brainstorm even allows us to play more copies of Into the Story since we can shuffle them away if we get too many stranded in our hand.

During my milling journey, I've come to really value passive milling effects rather than straight up mill cards like Tome Scour. Without a way to steadily chip way at the opponent's library the deck becomes an awkward control deck and runs the risk of falling behind. Ruin Crab is an essential stand-alone mill engine that only relies on us making land drops to function and we've seen this crab put serious work in Modern Mill. Teferi's Tutelage and Into the Story are the core of the Standard builds and this pairing is basically our finisher. Each Teferi's Tutelage in play mills eight cards with Into the Story so we can turbo mill the opponent while also loading up our hand with cards. For support we have Frantic Inventory as our other cantrip of choice to go along with Brainstorm, and we loaded the mana base with Lonely Sandbar to keep the cards flowing. Curator of Mysteries is a spice pick for sure and is here to give us a scry whenever we cycle, and to soak up some damage if we need a blocker. A 4/4 flier can also get the opponent dead and it has cycling so we can just cantrip it away for the answer we need. Shark Typhoon also cycles to make a blocker and can be a control finisher if we need one. Overall this core transitions well enough from Standard to Historic, and with Brainstorm it has the potential to be a creditable threat.

Memory Lapse is insane in this deck which we talked about earlier, but we do have some other solid interaction. Didn't Say Please isn't the flashiest of the three mana Cancel options, but its effect is perfectly fine for this deck. Control decks have a strong presence in the meta with both Azorius and Bant Control being very popular, so we have a Negate to help stop their interaction. If things do slip through the cracks we have Stern Dismissal and Into the Roil to bounce them off of the battlefield for a turn. Stern Dismissal allows us to make the most of our mana on a turn where we want to resolve a Teferi's Tutelage but can't leave enough mana up for a counter. Into the Roil does its job well and the kicker means we can get triggers off of Tutelage and keeps cards coming to our hand. Velomachus Reanimator

During our preview streams we had a viewer bring up the idea of running Velomachus in a Mardu reanimator shell to hopefully chain cards like Unburial Rites and Bond of Revival. This came with some deck building challenges as we needed a certain number of reanimator cards and dragons to reanimate, which was difficult since all of the big expensive dragons are legendary. Velomachus could also be a great control finisher in some sort of Jeskai list running Time Warp to take extra turns. The deck we built is leaning more on the control side as we're trying to keep the opponent's board empty so we can smash face with our dragons. The dragon of Lorehold brings other deck building challenges as we want plenty of Instant and Sorcery spells for it to hit with the attack trigger, and those spells need to have a CMC of five or lower. We noticed early on that the deck desperately needs the correct number of looting cards to make our hands of massive creatures and reanimators function. After enough testing I was satisfied with how attacks with Velomachus played out, because if you aren't hitting spells consistently with the attack triggers then the entire purpose of the deck is missing.

Faithless Looting and Thrilling Discovery are huge additions for the deck as it gives us ways to stock up the graveyard with dragons to reanimate. Other options like Tormenting Voice and Cathartic Reunion are available to us Historic, but I'm here to try the new cards so we're going with Thrilling Discovery, and Faithless Looting will probably be the most broken card in Historic so of course we're running it. Unburial Rites and Bond of Revival are the reanimators of choice, with Bond we grant haste to Drakuseth, and Unburial Rites can be pitched to Faithless Looting so we can flash it back later. In the early stages of the game we can pitch a Velomachus and Rites to Looting and then pay the Flashback on the Rites to start attacking on turn four. Drakuseth, Maw of Flames is our other target and it deals tons of damage when it starts attacking and can change the state of the game by itself. Terror of the Peaks is a nice set up as we can play it on the turn before we start reanimating to deal serious damage to the opponent when our seven-drop dragons ETB. To round off our core we have Glorybringer as a hasty threat that can eat other creatures if we exert it. Sarkhan, Fireblood is here to help us bridge the gap between the mid to late game by helping us loot and ramping us into our massive dragons.

This is kind of a control deck so we are loaded up with interaction. Crux of Fate is our sweeper as the mode to destroy all non-dragon creatures means that we can hit this off of Velomachus with no worries. One-sided board wipes are always devastating and Crux of Fate means we can keep the opponent's board empty while are dragons soar us to victory. Anger of the Gods cleans up fast creature decks and the exile ability is somewhat useful against Jund Sacrifice. The rest of the deck is pretty straight forward with Bloodchief's Thirst and Fatal Push to kill early creatures. A pair of Thoughtseize to attack the hand and Chandra, Torch of Defiance to help us stand up to the other control decks. We added Abrade to the main deck to give us more to do with potential Chandra mana, and we have Hagra Mauling in the mana base. So what do you think of these two new Historic brews. Is building our own Counterspell with Memory Lapse seem legit, and does Brainstorm with Fabled Passage and Evolving Wilds seem worth it? Velomachus Lorehold is an awesome build around card, so what other shells would you stick it in? I do want to quickly talk about how frustrating it was to hear that Wizards cancelled the early access program, not only that but it happen late Monday night right before the event was supposed to happen today. This was a big blow to smaller creators that might have taken time off work to stream their decks, and to everyone else that wasted their time preparing for content that will sadly not happen. We weren't affected by this but please go support those smaller creators and give them some extra love during this time. As always thanks for reading and for joining the Fellowship. I hope you enjoy the early days of Strixhaven Standard and I'll see you next time.