I want to go in a little further on why Evolved Sleeper excites me and why I think it will be useful in Explorer and possibly also Pioneer. This may be because I’m on a long road trip vacation right now, but I’ve been thinking about this card a lot and am really excited to play it. I’m writing this on my phone in a hotel room, so, sorry for the bare bones post.
I think it’s important to identify what’s going on in the format and what a card brings to help in expected matchups. Explorer is all about the Rakdos Midrange mirror right now (or pseudo-mirror if you’re playing Jund like me). Typically, your lowest impact cards, and therefore your cheapest cards, are the weakest cards in a midrange mirror, since the games are not usually going to be about tempo and more about card advantage. This hasn’t really been my experience in this matchup, though. The Rakdos decks have a lot of cheap removal and hard hitting medium sized threats to put a lot of pressure on you, and you wind up losing card advantage battles that are tougher for you than they would be because you’re under pressure. So, Sleeper does some things in that matchup that are useful while keeping your deck low to the ground, helping you not get run over early while keeping your top end live as well.
There are a few ways that you lose the Rakdos matchup. First, is just tempo. Bloodtithe Harvester into Trespasser or Fable, then more heavy threats every turn as you try and catch up. Part of what makes the deck so good is that they can just straight beat you up, while still have a good board control and discard element. Sleeper is good here because it’s a cheap spell to cast. That’s really it, it’s just something that gets out of your hand quickly, and if you can trade it off against an opposing creature or removal spell, then that’s great.
The second way to lose is by Chandra. Chandra is both a tempo swing and a card advantage engine. When she comes down and -3’s one of your creatures, the opponent is ahead on cards because Chandra is still around, but if they start netting cards off of her +1 the next turn, then they get a card advantage engine for basically no mana. If you use a removal spell on Chandra, you’re not only down cards, but down on mana usually because of the mana you spent to kill her plus the mana of the creature she nuked. What Sleeper does against Chandra is just exist as an extra body that entered play cheaply to attack a Chandra after she -3s your creature. Sleeper is extra good at attacking Planeswalkers because it can increase its power and hit for more loyalty, leaving you with a bigger sleeper when all is said and done.
Another great way to lose against Rakdos is to force yourself into using spot removal on their Cemetery Trespassers and Fable tokens. Being able to trade with Trespassers and block Fable tokens without spending extra cards to do it is important for getting out of those early turns and having cards left over to battle on with.
Sleeper isn’t going to annihilate Rakdos or anything, it’s not really supposed to. But what it does do is lower the overall mana curve of the deck while not giving up on top end power. That’s going to help your matchups across the board and the effectiveness of the deck without sacrificing too much in the Rakdos matchup.
The deck we’re playing is changing too, and being a sleeker and cheaper deck is going to be critical with Liliana in the list. I’m going to assume that Rakdos decks will pick up Liliana as well, so everything that makes Sleeper effective against Chandra also helps against Liliana. The best way to beat Lili is to have enough pressure so that they can’t untap with her, just like Chandra. But Sleeper also goes well with our own Liliana, getting out of the hand early so you can have it empty and +1 for value, and using extra mana that you’ll have because both players are light on action.
Sleeper also looks like it will be great in conjunction with Riveteers Charm. It’s cheap and proactive, which makes it an excellent card to exile off your library with Charm. Charm is going to be great in the Liliana decks just like it’s been good in the Tireless Tracker decks, so I’m interested in maximizing its strength.
I’m mostly excited about playing Sleeper against UW decks and other matchups where we’re the aggro deck. Sleeper requires an answer by itself, and it’s not that that is super hard to do, but it’s going to open the door for stuff like Liliana or your other bigger stuff to hit. Plus, if you can use Thoughtseize to take away their cheap answers like March and Portable Hole, then they are forced to spend a bunch of mana to deal with your one drop, or you can activate it and draw cards until they have the mana to wrath it.
To touch quickly on Knight of the Ebon Legion vs Sleeper, I think that Knight might be a little underplayed at the moment. It’s a great card, a good draw early and a good draw late. But, it’s a little bit one-dimensional, and that causes it to only get played in a few decks. Plus, black aggro feels like quite an underdog against Rakdos, which is just not where you want to be. I think that Sleeper is going to fit better in midrange decks than Knight, since it ties your mana up less and leaves you with cards after they find an answer instead of just damage, and I don’t think that Knight was that far away from making the cut to begin with.
I’m less confident in Sleeper than I am in Liliana out of this set, part of that is because Liliana is a known entity, part of that is because Sleeper is a style of card that isn’t done very often. Cards like Sleeper have been hit or miss in the past, but there’s potential there. There have been some solid role players and all-time great threats among cards with this design. But mostly I’m excited for Sleeper because I think it’s going to be really fun to play with. It gives the player a ton of options and it looks to be the type of card that gets better with practice. I plan on playing them for a while and finding out just how good they are.
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