Heyooooooo! Did ya miss me? Welcome back to Fun & Jank Episode 33 with me, Plum!
This week, we’re taking a step back to shine a light on some cards I’d call sleepers. These are hidden gems that have all the makings of something powerful, but don’t have the right home or support yet. Some of these are cards I’ve brewed with and couldn’t quite make work (the brews I’d throw in one of my Honorable Mentions articles). Others are pieces I haven’t cracked yet, but I’m convinced there’s a good deck in there somewhere. They’re not bad, just waiting.
Usually in this series, we take underplayed cards and build full decks around them. But this time, I’m doing my best to steer clear of anything I’ve already featured in a past article. You won’t find stuff like Omen Hawker or Runaway Growth here, those already got their turn. Instead, I’ll walk you through why I think these cards are worth watching, where they might eventually slot in, and what it might take to finally push them into the spotlight.
My goal isn’t just to show off some weird picks, it’s to spark your imagination. Maybe one of these cards becomes the engine of your next great brew. Or maybe it just helps you think differently about a shell you’re already building.
These will be in no particular order, so let’s get brewing.
#1: Baylen, The Haymaker
Why it’s powerful:
Baylen is what I believe to be a powerhouse in a very weird wrapper. He turns any kind of tokens—creature, treasure, food, clue, whatever—into flexible resources. Need mana? Tap two tokens. Need cards? Tap three. Want to smash face? Tap four and he becomes a huge, trampling threat. That level of modality on a single card is rare. Call me crazy (just don’t call me Shirley) but I actually believe this card is quite similar to Urza, Lord High Artificer.
Both cards have the unique ability to turn nonland permanents into mana sources. Urza taps any untapped artifact you control to generate blue mana, which turns things like Treasure tokens, clue tokens, and even creature-based artifacts into resources. Baylen requires tokens—of any kind—to produce a mana of any color by tapping two untapped tokens. The difference in input reflects their color identities: Urza provides precision and efficiency, while Baylen embraces flexibility and diversity. Still, at the core, both are engines that translate board presence into mana, letting decks scale explosively if left unchecked.
Although Baylen’s card advantage is more incremental, allowing you to tap three tokens to draw a card. In both cases, both cards convert excess resources into new cards. One is flashy and gamble-prone; the other is grindy and reliable. But in terms of providing card flow beyond the hand, they share the same function: a steady stream of resources as long as your engine is fueled.
Urza’s Construct token becomes enormous based on how many artifacts you control, often growing into a one-shot kill in artifact-heavy strategies. Baylen, meanwhile, grows himself with +1/+1 counters when you tap four tokens and gains trample, turning him into a beatstick capable of ending the game in just a couple of swings. Both grow exponentially over the course of the game and can end it on their own in some cases.
Why it doesn’t have a home yet:
The big issue is that Baylen is extremely dependent on both tokens and having them stick around untapped. That’s a lot to ask. Most token decks want to sacrifice their tokens, not save them for tap effects. And the decks that do keep tokens around often don’t make them fast enough to get multiple activations out of Baylen before he gets removed. There are strong token generators in these colors, most recently Wish Good Luck is an interesting piece to the Baylen puzzle, but I’ve struggled to find the right combo of cards to make Baylen shine. We’ve been focusing on brewing with our rabbit friend for the last couple streams, mainly Food and Energy shells, and I’m hopeful we can find the right shell in the future.
What could make it better:
Honestly, if we got a cheap, repeatable token generator to pair with Ocelot Pride, that could make Baylen explode. I think we just need some sort of stronger, redundant engine like Ocelot. Or even a hypothetical card that was two mana and made three 0/1 plant tokens would allow Baylen to start churning value the turn he hits the board. The Energy and Food shells I tried on stream felt very strong, but I felt the Guide/Pride/Ajani package was doing a lot of heavy lifting.
#2: Moonmist
Why it’s powerful:
Moonmist isn’t just a combat trick for werewolves. I actually don’t want to talk about werewolves at all. What’s really notable is that it’s a mass transformation enabler for double-faced Human cards (excluding those with day/night bound). Moonmist allows us to cheat out the backside of DFCs without having to jump through hoops that make it challenging to transform them. This is one of those cards that can only get better as time goes on, and more cards are printed.
There’s more than just these, but let’s look as Jacob as an example. With Moonmist, we can transform him into Haukren’s Insight as early as turn 3, giving us a “pseudo” Omniscience early in the game. providing an incredible value engine.
Why it doesn’t have a home yet:
Historically, Moonmist has been shoehorned into clunky Werewolf tribal decks. But if you step back and use it simply as an enabler for the other DFCs, it has way more potential. The problem is, we just don’t have enough good Human DFCs in competitive formats to build around yet. Most of the really strong ones are slow, inconsistent, or just too niche to justify inclusion. However, that leads me into my next segment:
What could make it better:
What Moonmist needs is more good Human DFCs—creatures that flip into real game-winning threats. If the Final Fantasy set (or any future set) gives us aggressively-costed Humans with a busted backside, Moonmist becomes a legitimate build-around. If you ever get to flip two or three creatures into engines or closers at instant speed I think a shell abusing this card could have real legs. We’ll just have to wait and see what the future brings us.
#3: Alrund, God of the Cosmos
Why it’s powerful:
Alrund is one of those cards that reads clunky but plays like a bomb in the right shell. The front side grows huge based on hand size and Foretell cards, while also providing repeatable, selective card draw every end step. But what really makes Alrund shine is that his cheaper side is on the back. You don’t have to cast him as a 5-mana do-nothing. Instead you can drop the back side, Hakka, Whispering Raven, on turn two for a cheap evasive threat that can then be blinked into Alrund with something like Ephemerate.
Why it doesn’t have a home yet:
Most people just don’t think of Alrund as a blink target, because the God side is 5 mana and doesn’t affect the board immediately. And blink decks tend to want ETB effects, not delayed card draw or hand-size payoff. So he ends up falling into this awkward gap: too slow for tempo, too weird for control, and overlooked in value decks. But that’s exactly why I think he’s a sleeper. I’ve played some variations of UW blink with him in the past, and he plays quite well with another notable mention: Paths of Tuinvale
Although bouncing Hakka back to your hand isn’t as great compared to just flipping it with a blink spell, it does still cheapen both the front and back. I ended up playing Paths with cards like Snapcaster or Saiba Syphoner, and it was easy to get Alrund down to just 2 mana over the course of a game.
What could make it better:
I believe this is more of a case of just finding the right shell rather than looking for new support. Alrund felt great in the UW Blink lists I brewed. However, I think a shift towards more of a “scam” oriented build could be one possible direction to take the lists. Cards like Nulldrifter or Phlage, Titan' of Fire's Fury are already being blinked as a way to cheat them into play for cheaper or get additional value, and I think Alrund would be right at home in some sort of Jeskai shell with them.
#4: Mind Rake
Guys its literally Hymn to Tourach.
Not really…but kinda.
Why it’s powerful:
If you’ve ever cast Hymn to Tourach, you know how devastating it is to rip two cards out of someone’s hand for just two mana. If we can build our deck to either not care about losing cards or negate the card disadvantage somehow, Mind Rake can functionally be a Hymn to Tourach in the Historic Format.
Why it doesn’t have a home yet:
The symmetry throws people off. Most players see “each player discards two” and think it’s just a budget Mind Rot with downside. But if your sole goal is to empty your opponent’s hand, who cares if we get rid of some of our cards too? Plus, discard decks in Historic don’t have a consistent archetype identity, Mono-Black doesn’t have enough versatiltiy, Rakdos is usually aggressive, and control shells don’t want to discard their own hand. It’s powerful, but awkwardly positioned.
What could make it better:
Mind Rake doesn’t need a new engine, it needs players to rethink discard as a strategy. Waste Not is a trap. I’ll talk about it more in a future article, but I see so many players jamming Waste Not on turn 2 and then sitting there as the opponent empties their hand before they can get any real value off it. Then they die before Davriel or Bandit's Talent can do anything. Instead we need to be going all in on what I’ve been calling the “pseudo-hymns.”
This trifecta lets you hit a critical mass of “two-mana, discard two cards” for an 8-Rack style list in Historic. Now, I know Talent and Plunder don’t guarantee that the oppoent will discard two cards, but it’s pretty common to see it happen nonetheless. I’ve been working on a list that’s been quite promising that I’m hoping to talk about soon. That’s all I’ll say for now.
#5: Mana Flare
Mana Flare is one of those classic “high-risk, high-reward” cards that everyone forgets is in Historic.
Why it’s powerful:
This card is a spin on Heartbeat of Spring. If you’re trying to do something big, fast, there’s nothing quite like Mana Flare. For three mana, it doubles everyone’s land output, And with consistent land drops, you jump from 4 mana to 8 on turn four, or earlier with acceleration. Although the effect is symmetrical, a deck designed to take full advantage of the extra mana should be able to go bigger faster than the opponent can handle.
Why it doesn’t have a home yet:
Mana Flare is a symmetrical effect in a format that’s increasingly hostile to symmetrical effects. If you pass the turn after casting it and don’t win immediately, you’re handing your opponent the same bonus you’re trying to abuse. Most Historic lists aren’t interested in letting the other player drop something like this for free. And red ramp, as an archetype, hasn’t quite crystallized in these formats the way it has in other eternal formats.
What could make it better:
The way I see it, you can go two routes, Ramp or Combo. Both need a little support.
If you go the ramp route, you better make sure whatever you’re dropping on turn three or four will stabilize or closeout the game. It’s possible we have our answer for this already, with Ugin, Eye of the Storms. Any mana accelerant on turn one, into a Flare on turn two, means that you can drop Ugin (or any 6-7-8-9 drop) on turn 4 with a land drop every turn. That’s on par with Tron (WOW). A big red shell playing low to the ground sweepers like Pyroclasm would probably be a good place to start, and its actually what I’ve been testing as I write this article. This style list needs a definitive endgame.
Alternatively, it could fit into a combo shell with a Twiddle style game plan. Pore over the Pages is probably the best mass-untap spell we have when it comes to lands in Historic. But if we were to get something like Early Harvest, or even Heartbeat of Spring like I mentioned above as additional redundancy, a combo deck could be viable for sure. I’ve played a shell with Goblin Anarchomancer, Escape to the Wilds, and Explore that showed some promise, but was just a bit too inconsistent to work well. If we want to combo off, we need to make sure we have a deterministic win just like any other storm deck.
There’s a world where Mana Flare is the beating heart of a ramp or combo list—it just needs the right threat or the right loop to make it click.
Closing Thoughts
There’s something exciting about cards that haven’t been “discovered” yet. I hope this little detour through the jank dimension sparked some ideas. Not every good card starts good. Some need time. Some need help. Many are just chilling on the sidelines waiting for the right set to come along and give them some new life. It’s one of the many reasons why I love brewing in eternal formats. Finding a new synergy or interaction that hasn’t been seen before is such a rush for a brewer like me.
I keep a list of cards like these. Ones I want to revisit every so often to see if something new has emerged, but obviously I can’t fit them all in one article. If you end up brewing around any of these, tag me—I want to see what you’re cooking. And if you’ve got your own Future All-Stars that I missed, let me know. Maybe they’ll show up in Honorable Mentions or get their own full feature in a future episode of Fun & Jank.
As always feel free to comment and leave any questions you have below! Make sure to come back next week for even more Fun & Jank!
If you want to see these decks in action, come hang out with me on stream where we test, refine, and have a ton of fun together!
Happy Brewing!
