Now Under Construction

I rebuilt this around [[Geomancer]] instead of [[Harbinger]], swapping air for earth to emphasize the ramp phase of the plan and add some beefy threats to the top end. This primer is thus extremely inaccurate and I will need to do a fairly large amount of playtesting to get a sense of the new list. My apologies for the wait until quality is restored to this document. The strategy section is still basically true in the broad sense, the strengths and weaknesses haven't significantly changed (though [[Geomancer]] allowing a huge degree of emphasis on drawing from the spellbook most turns probably helps a lot, and moving forward to flip sites can conceivably lead to actually locking an enemy avatar out of playing sites altogether).

There are a handful of good Harbinger decks floating around. Typically, voidwalk aggro is pretty successful. I'm convinced that some other approach can matter, and I'm eager to find it. Site destruction speaks to the Ponza lover in me, and I think Harbinger is reasonably well-positioned to take advantage of a slowed down game with discounted fatties for a midrange style plan. Blightstones or Land Deeds could be useful for hammering that approach home. The current iteration is very heavy on site destruction and threshold denial, to see if an all-in commitment to that strategy plays as well as I hope.

The maybeboard here is enormous to the point of being basically meaningless; the primer here is written to reflect the current state of the deck. Planned changes will follow at the end.

Strategy:

The goal of a Ponza deck, in Magic, is to execute a midrange plan patterned on the sequential goals of ramp, resource disruption, and threats. Our plan here is fundamentally the same. Plan A is to turbo out some very early site destruction to keep the opponent struggling for threshold and mana while we amass sufficient threshold and mana of our own to deploy a threat. Plan B is to get tricky with the handful of minions we're able to deploy, using [[Fade]] to slip in attacks without trading or [[Blink]] to get site damage in somewhere blockers aren't. Avoid Trading Two For One Whenever Possible. That's generally true to begin with, but here our minions are precious. There are not many of them. I will break down the cards in the deck according to these categories, as well as describing the more general utility package. Cards that fit multiple roles are listed twice.

Strengths:

Attack on an axis most decks aren't prepared to defend!
Holds up fairly comfortably against other midrange decks or control decks looking to play a longer game!

Weaknesses:

Gets absolutely run over by aggro. Lots of decks people run right now are very low to the ground and it is almost trivial to get underneath this one.
Pretty greedy threshold numbers- it's nice to hope for a turn 3 [[Morgana le Fay]] and it's not crazy to expect to be able to play her but too much has to go right to rely on it.
A three phase plan requires drawing the right kinds of cards in the right order, and sometimes you just draw ramp in the late game or won't find a threat in time.
Portals are random, even if there's usually one close enough to be useful.
There is no hope for keeping a one-element deck off of threshold, so mono fire or mono water will laugh at your attempts to disrupt them.
[[Order of the Sacred Oak]]

Ramp

Discounts and Threshold reducers:

[[Mix Aer]]
[[Mix Ignis]]
[[Philosopher's Stone]]
[[Four Waters of Paradise]]

Sites that offer extra value:

[[Imperial Road]] (notably EXPLOSIVE against [[Pathfinder]] or an [[Imposter]] wearing one)
[[Dark Tower]]
[[Lone Tower]]
[[Gothic Tower]]

Gives you extra mana and threshold if the unit holding it lives until your next turn:

[[Land Deed]]

Disruption

Removes at least one site next turn if left unanswered:

[[Castle's Ablaze!]]
[[Hamlet's Ablaze!]]
[[Year of the Blaze]]
[[Sir Balin]]
[[Lord of Destruction]]

Removes at least one site this turn:

[[Salt the Earth]]
[[Lord of the Void]]
[[Raze]]
[[Asmodeus]] (provided you can portal him onto an enemy site, though stealth makes the slower plan of walking from a friendly site viable)
[[Heirloom Lost]]
[[Sinkhole]]
[[Land Deed]]

Disrupts threshold without removing the site:

[[Granary Rats]]
[[Sinterfee]]
[[Blightstone]]

Increases mana costs:

[[Maddening Bells]]

Resets Everything:

[[Roots of Yggdrasil]] (with the sheer volume of ways to destroy a site in the deck, having a reset button available is very nice)

Threats

Auras that increase the danger of our smaller minions and larger threats:

[[Summoning Sphere]]
[[Sphere of Animosity]]

Minions that can door someone on their own:

[[Sturmgeist]]
[[Lord of Destruction]]
[[The Doom of Dilmun]]

Sites that can hurt your opponent:

[[Vindictive Nation]] (extremely punishing against other site destruction but still pretty good for free life loss if they earthquake or flood you.)
[[Cursed Land]] (it's tricky to deploy this without hurting yourself, but losing a little life to it is okay if you can box the opponent in and keep blowing up whatever they play nearby.)

Other Utility

Card Velocity:

[[Pact with the Devil]] (almost never want to cast this without a spellcasting minion but sometimes you need three cards at any cost)
[[Blink]] (movement is great. Drawing a card for two mana is incredible.)
[[Fade]] (reusing Asmodeus is extremely good. So is drawing a card.)
[[Searing Truth]] (can either kill someone at door or get you two cards. Very versatile, but there are a handful of very high cost cards here. Be careful drawing with it.)
[[Morgana le Fay]] (spellcaster for Pact! draws three for three!)
[[Merlin]] (spellcaster for Pact! Sometimes lets you Blink or Fade off the top of your spellbook!)
[[Hauntless Head]] (probably the best carrier of Land Deed in the deck, spellcasts for Pact, spooky void noggin can come in through a portal for free.)

Other Removal:

[[Murder of Crows]] (recasting from the cemetery is solid. In here to break wards and tokens.)
[[Kor Crematory]]
[[Smokestacks of Gnaak]]
[[Wuthering Heights]] ("removal" is maybe pushing it for describing this site but it's very powerful- blow a Granary Rats onto a site, or keep pushing an enemy threat away from landing that last blow!)

Everything else is a pretty standard suite of threshold-fixing sites and defensive Air sites like Perilous Bridge and Mountain Pass.

Mulligans

The main plan has three phases. Ramp, then Disruption, then Threats. You absolutely need disruption in your opening hand. Ramp is nice to have, but not having it isn't necessarily a deal breaker as long as you can start blowing up sites by turn four at the latest. You don't need or generally want a threat in your opener. I could see keeping a [[Mix Aer]] [[Four Waters of Paradise]] [[Lord of the Void]] opening hand, for example (and I would actually be extremely excited to do so), but if all you've got is [[Maddening Bells]] [[Blink]] and [[Murder of Crows]] you probably want to ship everything but the [[Blink]] and roll the dice on getting a good site. In the early game, fire threshold is more important than air, but eventually you'll want two or three of both. [[Sturmgeist]] is a threat worth keeping and sculpting early threshold to cast, because it can come down for 2 mana through a portal and wreaks absolute havoc on lists trying to cast a bunch of Magics.

Planned Changes:

The thing this deck does worst is drawing into the right cards to actually execute the three-point plan in order. Some of that issue is likely down to a skill issue on my part as a pilot, but there are very few actual threats in the list and likely not enough ramp. Hell, sometimes it's a struggle to have any minion in hand which makes it impossible to even use the Harbinger's portals to begin with. The things I am most keen to add to try to improve these things are:

[[Ruby Core]]
[[Amethyst Core]]
[[A second copy of each Mix]]
[[Toolboxes]] (being able to use the collection is huge, and the raw amount of versatility is hard to overstate)
[[Wiccan Tools]] (2 mana to draw a card, turns something small into a spellcaster for Pact, and ignoring threshold makes some of the bigger stuff very easy to cast.)

The cards I have been least excited to draw in actual gameplay are:

[[Land Deed]] (needs a body holding it to matter, and is rough if that body gets killed and your opponent scoops it up)
[[Blightstone]] (as above, but not as bad)
[[Murder of Crows]] (I haven't actually been in a situation where holding this card amounted to the ability to do anything of any interest at all, even into savior)
[[Granary Rats]] (they're a solid early play, especially if you can portal them onto a home site turn one or two, but drawing more than one or two copies feels rough)
[[Summoning Sphere]] (just doesn't feel all that impactful when you've got a portal nearby; the main thing it's here for as a one-of is just in case you roll so badly that none of the portals are of any use)
[[Sphere of Animosity]] (brutally punishing against an avatar like [[Pathfinder]] or Voltron builds of something like [[Battlemage]] and stopping blockers/healing is nice, but the scenario in which you're up against one of those avatars or have a sticky minion on the opponent's face don't come up often enough to justify this. I'm hesitant to cut it just because if how good it is into [[Pathfinder]] but the list probably would be better served by [[Infiltrate]] or some decent beaters or even [[Colicky Dragonettes]] or something.)

Another possibility here is just that I give up on [[Harbinger]] for this plan altogether. Dropping Air in favor of Earth and building a [[Geomancer]], for example, could still leverage all the site destruction while also taking advantage of Earth's strong removal like [[Earthquake]] and flipping sites onto Rubble to maintain the speed at which you can dig through your spellbook and even gain some strong spellcasters to kill with [[Pact with the Devil]] like [[Mordric Druids]] and [[Wicked Witch]], though those casters being mostly Elite or Unique does put a damper on that benefit. [[Kettletop Leprechaun]] and [[Land Surveyor]] would be outstanding in a list like this, though.

Ponza!

@Anathema