Mulligans
General Mulligans
Keeps are probably quite matchup specific but you always keep toy boat. Could see keeping shovel/stick up/swash in aggro matchups and mirror, but lean towards dig/raiding party for more control matchups. Deafen probably a keep vs paladin and gift might be good vs hunter/pala for the fan of knives option.
Pirate shell with cover artist as a late game finisher/value generator.
Combo is:
(4) sonya–> (1) sandbox token–> (1) cover artist–> (0) cover artist.
You now have 3 sonyas on board for 6 mana, goes down to 3 mana with a shadowstep for the sandbox mini and is still doable with the main sandbox body just costs 8 mana so almost always better to generate the token on an earlier turn alongside raiding party/bargain bin etc.
With 3 sonyas on board your turns can be really broken.
1 gift turns into a potential 16 deadly poisons for +32 damage at 5 mana. This can be used flexibly with 2 mana for 4 poisons initially then each additional mana gives 4 more deadly poisons.
Obviously this gets easier to pull off with coins from dig for treasure and shadow steps for the sandbox mini, with a godlike hand you could conceivably kill someone on turn 5 but more likely to be pulled off on 6/7.
Other worthwhile cards to use with sonya include deafen, which with 3 on boards lets you clear 4 taunts for 1 mana. (its also probably just good into decks like paladin).
Shovel also has some hilarious use cases with sonya. Assuming you play one earlier in the game, using the second shovel with 3 on board would generate an azerite scorp. If you played the scorp with a shadowstepped sandbox you’d then generate 3 more scorps. Of course a bunch of the spells would likely be 1 mana which you could also play 3 more times with the sonyas on board. The 1 drop excavates are also just good cards and can have some nuts combos with sonya.
On the whole, deck seems very flexible and powerful. The nice thing is its definitely counterable. Cards like neophyte and dirty rat can certainly disrupt and you could even run glacial shards if the damage combo gets too out of hand. Wouldn’t be suprised if cover artist is the card to get nerfed rather than sonya as it also has powerful use cases in druid but will have to see.