Yellorambo’s Tempo Mage – Doom in the Tomb

The return of Flamewaker and Babbling Book is a mouth-watering prospect for fans of the old aggressive Mage archetypes, and the added juice provided by Mana Cyclone-based combos will likely make this deck a terrifying one to face on ladder. Many of its resource generation and longevity-related tools are taken directly from the Conjurer Mage builds which terrorized the meta until its nerf, but with a much more burn-based gameplan behind it.

The basic outline of a Tempo Mage build is quite straightforward, but there are many different ways you can take your build. Ideally, you’d like to utilize both the spell-generating package and the secret-related synergies introduced in Saviors of Uldum, but it turns out it’s pretty tough to do both at the same time with just 30 card slots to work with, especially considering that you no longer have the turn one powerhouse of Mana Wyrm available to hit the ground running.

The featured build opts for a light Secret package with one Arcane Flakmage, two Kirin Tor Mages and two Cloud Princes but just the one Mirror Entity and two copies of Counterspell added, relying on the brutal card generation options (Babbling Book, Magic Trick and Mana Cyclone) to find the rest over the course of the game in order to be able to add enough one-mana spells to fuel Flamewaker and Mana Cyclone in other scenarios, plus to smooth out redraws with Stargazer Luna. Double Elemental Evocation is featured as a surprise damage enabler with Cloud Prince on the early turns.