Playing Against Heist in Alchemy

With the release of Alchemy: Thunder Junction, the Heist mechanic has been the source of much discussion: A new keyword ability that lets you target an opponent and look at three random nonland cards in their library and exile one face down. You may cast that card for as long as it remains exiled, and mana of any type can be spent to cast it.

And rightfully so, not only is it powerful it is very very popular, with Grave Expectations, Grenzo, Crooked Jailer, and Impetuous Lootmonger, all seeing a considerably amount of play in both Bo1 and Bo3 Alchemy.

So, what is the deal with Heist? Is it broken, or are the popular cards it is on just pushed? How do we play against it? I’m going to discuss all of these topics and provide a deck that I have been playing to good success in the new Heist meta below, so let’s dive in.

Broken Mechanic or Pushed Cards?

Heist reads worse than it plays in my opinion, but I think it landed in a Bo3 Alchemy meta that was perfect for it to exploit. Usually, stealing cards from your opponent is only okay, as the cards you steal are going to be worse in your deck than they are in your opponent’s deck, because your opponent added that card to their deck to support their specific strategy.

However, in the current Bo3 Alchemy meta, midrange and control decks are dominant, so decks are built to try to out-value and out-grind their opponents by playing strong and powerful individual cards that are good on their own even after their other cards have been used. So when you get to look at three of their cards with heist, you are almost always going to get an individually powerful card like Rusko, Clockmaker, Crucias, Titan of the Waves, Porcine Portent, etc.

In this meta, Heist is going to feel powerful and create frustrating games, where your opponent steals your most powerful cards and grinds you out with them. If the meta was more diverse, filled with a variety of aggro decks, combo decks, and control decks, Heist would feel less powerful, as a choice of one of their three cheap creatures isn’t going to do much for you when you are already under the gun from your aggro opponent, for example.

We can see this when looking at the difference in win rate when comparing Bo1 to Bo3 matches recorded with Untapped.gg, where Grave Expectations, Impetuous Lootmonger, and Grenzo, Crooked Jailer all have a slightly lower win rate in Bo1, where there are more aggressive decks, compared to Bo3 where there the decks are usually slower.

Bo1

• Grave Expectations – In Opening Hand WR 54.9%, Available During the Game WR 57.3%
• Grenzo, Crooked Jailer – In Opening Hand WR 56.8%, Available During the Game WR 59.7%
• Impetuous Lootmonger – In Opening Hand WR 60.4%, Available During the Game WR 60.6%

Bo3

• Grave Expectations – In Opening Hand WR 56.9%, Available During the Game WR 59.5%
• Grenzo, Crooked Jailer – In Opening Hand WR 58.9%, Available During the Game WR 62.6%
• Impetuous Lootmonger – In Opening Hand WR 62.3%, Available During the Game WR 62.4%

Looking at the win rates of these cards overall, they don’t stand out as power outliers, but they are still some of the most played cards in the format, so there are likely a lot of mirror matches that are slightly bringing that win rate down. This leads me to believe that the mechanic itself is not the problem, as the other heist cards don’t see nearly as much play, but that those three cards are making the mechanic feel more powerful than it actually is.

Just Pushed Cards?

Grave Expectations and Impetuous Lootmonger are powerful cards because they are just good on rate while giving you a heist. At two mana, Impetuous Lootmonger turns one of your extra lands or extra spells into a spell from the opponent, but just as important are the treasures that it can create over the course of the game.

When combined with treasures made by Crucias, Titan of the Waves, heist decks are able to cast their Grenzo, Crooked Jailer ahead of schedule, and while Grezno is just an expensive creature that generates value, he is one that must be answered, so getting him into play early can create a problem for a lot of decks. This also stacks incredibly well when you have two (or more) Impetuous Lootmonger in play, as you are getting two treasures for casting one spell and so on.

Lastly, Impetuous Lootmonger has first strike, which means that it just holds down the ground against aggressive decks, so while the heist ability might only get you a small creature or cheap burn spell, your opponent might not even be able to attack. And not just aggressive decks, Mardu midrange can’t attack with their Juggernaut Peddlers or Crucias, Titan of the Waves into the 2/2 first striker either, so you will almost always have time to cast your heisted spells.

Grave Expectations is essentially a one mana instant cantrip, like a super Preordain, but also has the flexibility of being both graveyard hate and lifegain if need be. I feel like at sorcery speed or without the flexibility this card would see much less play, but I expect that Grave Expectations will see play throughout its life in Alchemy. In my set review I suggested that not every black deck will want this, but I think that because of how cheap and flexible it is, every black midrange deck and control deck has to consider playing this card.

Evaluating these two cards, having played games with and against them, I do think they are very strong cards, but I don’t think they are to the point of needing to be nerfed or otherwise addressed…yet. We do have a big rotation coming up for Alchemy at the end of July and the format will be powering down quite a bit, which means that these powerful cards could take over the meta even further or find themselves weaker as the options they have to steal are also weaker.

Playing Against Heist

Playing against heist can feel frustrating at best, and infuriating at worst, as even when they don’t steal your most impactful cards, they are still generating value and using your own cards against you. There are several tools in the format that I’ve started to run in my sideboards/main decks that can help out and get your cards back on your side of the table.

Reprieve is the best answer by far. When they cast your spell that they have heisted, if you target it with Reprieve, it will return that spell to its owner’s hand, which in the case of a heisted spell is you. So not only do you get to counter their spell, you get your spell back and draw a card from the Reprieve, making it into a counterspell and draw two cards essentially.

Staying in White, Soul Partition will exile a nonland permanent and then allow its owner to cast it. So if you target a heisted permanent, then it will go to your exile zone, letting you cast it at your leisure later on. The same is true for Aven Interrupter, who exiles the spell and lets its owner cast it on a future turn, and also makes any of their heisted spells cost two more to cast since they are being cast from exile.

If you don’t want to play White cards, Blue has a variety of bounce spells that can return your heisted creature to your hand. Vesuvan Mist is great if you are in Black as well, as when you pay the kicker cost you get an additional copy of your heisted card into your hand.

Lastly, in Red we have Zoyowa’s Justice, which funnily enough makes the owner of a creature or artifact shuffle it into their deck and then discover equal to its mana value, not the controller. So if you cast it targeting a heisted creature of artifact, it will shuffle it into your library and then give you a replacement with your discovered card, leading to potential blowouts in combat.

As heist has kind of taken over the format, a lot less people are playing the traditional brew killer in Esper Rusko, so now is also a good time to try an aggressive or combo deck, where your opponent will be much less pleased with their heist options.

Jeskai Flash, Heist Killer

This is a tempo/control deck that is sure to frustrate your opponents regardless if they are heisting you or not. The main goal of this deck is to get High Noon and Stoic Sphinx into play and then ride the sphinx to victory. With High Noon in play, each player can only cast one spell each turn, making our counterspells and delay effects like Reprieve and Aven Interrupter even more potent, as our opponent’s one spell for the turn is either gone or back in their hand.

The drawback of a card like Stoic Sphinx is if you have to counter a spell or remove an opponent’s creature with the sphinx in play, it loses hexproof giving your opponent a window to remove it. But with High Noon in play that isn’t the case, since they have already cast a spell, they can’t then remove your sphinx with another spell, making our counterspells very safe to cast. This leads to a game state where we attack with our sphinx, pass the turn, counter/delay anything relevant on our opponent’s turn, and repeat.

At 5 power, it only takes four hits from a Stoic Sphinx to end the game, and the activation from High Noon does 5 damage so sometimes we only need to hit them three times to end the game. The rest of the deck is built to support this plan. We have a few other flash threats in Faerie Mastermind and Malcolm, Alluring Scoundrel to come down early, get in a few points, and provide a bit of value later in the game by either drawing cards or filtering cards respectively, and Kutzil’s Flanker gives us some main deck graveyard hate, although our most used mode will be scry 2, gain 2, to help find our main cards and give us a buffer.

Reprieve, No More Lies, and Three Steps Ahead are our counterspells of choice. Reprieve and No More Lies give us good early interaction while Three Steps Ahead is a hard counter early with plenty of upside later in the game as well.

For removal we have Lightning Helix and Get Lost, which are great for taking out early creatures that sneak in under our counter spells, and Lightning Helix also gives us a nice buffer on our life total, and can go face to finish off games from time to time. Rounding out the deck are Lorien Revealed and Eagles of the North to let us cheat on our land count while also providing necessary fixing for our three color deck.

So why is it good against heist decks?

First, we play both Reprieve and Aven Interrupter, giving us eight main deck ways to get back our own heisted spells. Aven Interrupter is also great against heist in general, since their heisted spells are cast from exile, the interrupter makes them two more to cast. 

Second, our High Noon plan is particularly effective against their plan, because if they cast a card that heists, they then can’t cast the card they heisted since they already cast a spell this turn. All of our counterspells and removal spells are also great against their top end cards like Grenzo, Crooked Jailer, as our No More Lies are still alive late in the game against an expensive card like that. 

Lastly, our cards are only okay for them to heist. We don’t have any huge haymakers or value cards outside of Stoic Sphinx, but if they try to put one of those into play, we have a lot of ways to counter it, put it back into our own hand/exile, or remove it.

Tips for playing the deck:

While Stoic Sphinx has flash, it is sometimes best to just cast it on your turn if the opponent is tapped out. Yes, that does open up a chance for them to cast a spell without our counterspells up, but unless you are worried about a must counter card like Grenzo, Crooked Jailer, we can usually afford to give them one turn to cast a spell before we start beating them down.

High Noon is usually a play that we make on turn four or five, when we have mana up to counter or remove something on their turn. On the play you can jam it on turn two sometimes, but putting down the shields for them to freely cast a two or three drop can sometimes put us behind, so think before you cast it on turn two.

Three Steps Ahead can copy one of our creatures, so if we have an Aven Interrupter in play we can copy it to delay an opponent’s spell instead of countering it if we need the extra body, and the taxing effect stacks, meaning our opponent’s delayed spells or heisted spells will cost an extra four mana.

Wrapping Up

Heist is without a doubt the new hotness in Alchemy and probably in other formats as well, but I think it is currently a bit overrepresented just because it was the first thing to dramatically alter the format in a long time, making a lot of players want to try it out. I think there are a lot of good individual cards and strategies that can make it much less frustrating to play against, so if you find yourself frustrated, try out some of the cards discussed above and see how your matches against them change.

All that being said, I think that Grave Expectations and Impetuous Lootmonger are here to stay, so buckle down and mentally prepare yourself, because you are going to get heisted for the next long while.

I hope this article and deck guide have been useful and let me know what you think. Did I miss any other great counters to the heist mechanic? What have you been playing to navigate your way through the new heist meta? As always, best of luck in all of your games!