Historic 4 Color Nadu Skimmer Deck

In this article, I am going to break down my 4 color A-Nadu, Winged Wisdom/Kishla Skimmer deck. This deck uses Counterspell and mana leak for protection, green sun's zenith for selection to grab the namesake cards in addition to supporting characters, molt tender, deathrite shaman, scythecat cub, sylvan safekeeper, along a selection of silver bullets. The deck is mainly blue and green, but has red for wrenn and six and black mainly for the deathrite shaman ability. kishla skimmer provides card advantage, while A-Nadu, Winged Wisdom and scythecat cub enable you to clog the board and go over the top of most strategies.

Let's get into card selection, reasoning, and some tips and tricks.

Why play this deck

I think this deck is extremely fun! It allows you to attack on a few different axis, from card advantage + counterspells, big trample creatures that can kill through interaction, and even land destruction to lock out your opponent.

1. You ❤️ scythecat cub, kishla skimmer, or A-Nadu, Winged Wisdom
2. You ❤️ drawing cards
3. You ❤️ playing lands
4. You ❤️ a flexible strategy that can adapt to whatever your opponent throws at you (and counterspells)
5. You don't mind a rough manabase 😂

This deck is initially inspired by the Legacy "stryfo" pile, but with some drastic changes to include the strong cards we have in historic while excluding some key pieces like the free counterspells which we do not have in historic.

Core Deck

• 4 Kishla Skimmer - main card advantage creature.
• 2 A-Nadu, Winged Wisdom - secondary card advantage creature.
• 4 Green Sun's Zenith - creature selection.
• 4 Scythecat Cub - triggers nadu, and gets very very big. Even faster with 2. Main way we win the game.
• 2 sylvan safekeeper - protects our creatures, triggers nadu, puts lands in the graveyard for our mana dorks to eat. Consider playing more than 2.
• 4 deathrite shaman - best one drop of all time. Does it all: ramps, triggers kishla skimmer, exile from opponents graveyard, etc.
• 2 molt tender - mills, and exiles lands to trigger kishla skimmer and ramps.
• 4 Wrenn and Six - moves lands from graveyard to hand (triggering kishla skimmer), helps to meet land requirements, best 2 mana planeswalker.
• 4 Fabled Passage - historic fetch land requiring a high basic count. Better late game.
• 4 Prismatic Vista - historic fetch land requiring a high basic count. Better early game. å
• 2 island - counterspell mana
• 2 forest - so many green creatures, play 2
• 1 mountain - wrenn and six, mainly.
• 1 swamp - deathrite ability, mainly.
• 1 Otawara, Soaring City - awesome utility land and can be used with wrenn and six to lock opponent out of game.
• 1 Boseiju, Who Endures - another great utility land to kill problemsome permanents. Can be used in long games to remove lands.
• 1 Ghost Quarter - kills any land. Can be used on ourselves to get a necessary basic and allow for our mana dorks to function or trigger landfall.
• 2 Dust Bowl - kills lands. Good vs control matchups and in conjunction with wrenn and six to lock opponent out.
• 1 Overgrown Tomb - Green Black shockland.
• 1 Watery Grave - Blue Black shockland.
• 1 Steam Vents - Red Blue shockland (prob worst in deck)
• 2 Breeding Pool - Green Blue shockland (best).
• 4 counterspell - Best counter in late game, hard to cast early.
• 4 mana leak - Great counter for our deck. Rarely ever sideboard out.

We have a combination of very fast kills with scythecat cub, but also can grind the game out with our card advantage engines, Kishla Skimmer, A-Nadu, Winged Wisdom, and Wrenn and Six. Despite being 4 colors with 3 colorless utility lands, our mana base is quite good overall. A major downside is that it is hard to curve out and have counterspell on turn 2 since you really want to play a 1 drop that will be green and likely will be off of forest. I like to play this deck in best of 3s for this reason so you can tailor your initial land drops to the matchup in case you MUST hold up counters turn two. This is also a very big downside for fabled passage in the early game, while on turns 4+, it is the ideal fetch to recur with wrenn and six due to lack of life loss. sylvan safekeeper provides protection and enables our mana dorks in addition to helping with mana in niche cases.

My current creature silver bullets:

• 1 Keen-Eyed Curator - graveyard hate. Also triggers kishla skimmer and serves as a threat. Always play 1.
• 1 Icetill Explorer - awesome 4 drop that helps us hit our colors, go over the top of opponent with our land destruction, and is a tutorable creature that recurs lands. Triggers scythecat cub and kishla skimmer. Always play at least 1.
• 1 Lumra, Bellow of the Woods - Currently testing this card. In theory it is great, but it costs too much for fast matchups and is hard to resolve against slower control players. I am not sold. Perhaps should be a second icetill...or maybe my pet card, elvish reclaimer.

Sideboarding

This is even more in flux than the core deck, so I leave it as is:

• 1 Meltdown - great vs artifact go wide decks.
• 2 consign to memory - Awesome vs eldrazi.
• 3 Soul-Guide Lantern - good vs graveyard strategies
• 2 Pick Your Poison - flexible and powerful against flyers, artifacts and enchantments.
• 1 Reclamation Sage - tutorable vs artifacts and enchantments
• 1 Grist, the Hunger Tide - tutorable grindy card good as removal vs otherwise hard to kill creatures.
• 1 Maelstrom Pulse - flexible premium removal that hits go wide strategies.
• 1 Culling Ritual - good vs aggro
• 2 Vexing Bauble - good vs affinity.

The key is to shave clunky cards like Lumra, Bellow of the Woods, counterspell, maybe even our engine pieces like kishla skimmer or wrenn and six in favor of more interaction that is tailored to the matchup.

Tips and tricks

Overall the deck is very flexible in how it can be built, so you absolutely should cater it to your own playstyle. I suggest to keep the core to Green and Blue as the counterspells are very strong and green provides the backbone of the deck.

You can get landfall triggers off nadu, helping to save your scythecat cub from destruction (cards like dismember are quite popular, right now and can be played around). The cub also benefits from holding back your fetchlands, especially on the first turn since the second trigger is the same as the first on turn 1 (only adding 1 counter), but if you save it until turn 2, then you can get 2 counters from the second trigger and this only gets better from here. Double cubs gets really crazy really quickly, letting you win the game out of no where even with a measly 4/4 cub and one fetch, with first 2 triggers, add 2 counters bringing us to 4, then next two triggers each double taking this to 16 counters. Along with the trample, that is a kill as soon as turn 4 (without any acceleration).

Fetching is a big challenge in this deck and forces you to think ahead. Do you think you need to cast that counterspell in your hand next turn? might need to grab an island off your fabled passage (though I am almost always getting forest early and ignoring the counterspell). Whereas when playing prismatic vista, you want to wait until the last moment to fetch in most cases since the land comes in untapped and will help trigger landfall (this is true late game for fabled passage, too). Cards like wrenn and six and icetill explorer should be prioritized most games so you can meet mana requirements. Other games you will need to prioritize your islands in order to cast counterspell.

Just like fetching is a challenge, so is sacrificing lands. Sometimes you will need to sacrifice a forest or island to sylvan safekeeper in order to keep a key creature alive. You MUST make this tradeoff on a case by case basis as you could be locking yourself out of casting certain cards until you can get something that recurs lands. This is less of a problem if you are starting the dust bowl train since you likely have more than enough fodder at that point.

Since the deck has a tendancy to flood out, I choose to play the land destruction package of cards. This is especially powerful with wrenn and six and/or Icetill explorer resolved. Prioritize cutting your opponent off a troublesome color for you. Blue if you are trying to resolve cards from hand or black if you are killing creatures. Maybe you need to target your opponents utility lands like man-lands which absolutely will kill us when we have a field of just dorks and skimmers. I think this is not the absolute best thing to be doing but it is a really fun way (for me) to win. Perhaps these cards would be better spent to just make the manabase better, but where's the fun in that?

Conclusion

So, what do you think? What might you do differently with this very flexible deck?