How to Pilot Gubernatorial: A Raffine, Scheming Seer Beginner's Guide

If you're piloting my Raffine, Scheming Seer deck — Gubernatorial — for the first time, here's the whole job in one sentence: flood the board with cheap flying creatures, attack with all of them every turn, and let Raffine's connive trigger dig you into answers and win conditions. That's it. Everything else in this guide is about doing that one thing without dying.

I'll be honest up front, because the numbers are the numbers: this deck is 5-17 across 22 recorded games. It is not a tuned killer. But most of those losses have repeatable causes, and if you learn from my mistakes instead of making them fresh, you'll pilot it better on day one than I did.

Raffine costs and triggers whenever you attack: one attacking creature connives X, where X is the number of creatures you attacked with. Connive means draw that many cards, discard that many, and add a +1/+1 counter for each nonland card discarded.

The deck is built to make X enormous. I tag 31 creatures in this list as "Cheap flyer", my own label for the 3 mana or less evasive bodies that are the deck's skeleton. The curve backs it up: 37 of the deck's nonland cards cost or . You are not saving up for a haymaker. You are deploying two or three bodies a turn and turning them all sideways.

The flyers also pump each other. Empyrean Eagle is an anthem, and Pride of the Clouds and Skycat Sovereign grow with every flyer you cast. A board of 1/1s becomes a board of real threats faster than opponents expect.

Turn 1: Land, one-drop flyer. Esper Sentinel is the best turn-one play in the deck if you have it. It draws cards while you do everything else.

Turn 2: Another flyer, or a signet. Momo, Friendly Flier, Stormscape Familiar, and Watcher of the Spheres all discount your future spells, which matters more here than generic ramp — they let you double-spell a turn early.

Turn 3: Raffine, almost always. Ward—pay 1 life makes him annoying to remove, and every turn he's down is a turn you're not conniving.

Turn 4 onward: Attack with everything, every turn. This is the part new pilots get wrong. The connive number counts attackers, not connectors — so a chump-blocked 1/1 still grew your X. Spread attacks across opponents if blocks look bad, but swing wide.

One warning from my own logs: I lost a February game where both opponents had turn-one Sol Ring and I had no acceleration at all. Mulligan aggressively for a hand that does something on turns one and two. A hand of four-drops is a mulligan in this deck, full stop.

The record is 5-17, but the five wins share a pattern, and these are the cards in it.

Inkshield is the deck's best trap. In one recorded win, a Xenagos player swung 24 at me — Inkshield ate the damage and handed me 24 flying 2/1s, and the game ended the next turn. Hold up against aggressive boards and look harmless.

Knowledge Is Power is the fair-deck finisher: it scales with your connive count and turns a wide board of small flyers into lethal.

Teferi's Ageless Insight doubles every connive draw and is the engine behind my best games. Drake Haven and Archfiend of Ifnir convert the discard half of connive into value — in my favorite win with this deck, Drake Haven built the army, Teferi's Protection kept it alive, and Archfiend conniving 13 wiped every other board.

Holding board wipes too long. I lost a game clutching Farewell and Austere Command because it "wasn't the right moment." The right moment had passed. If an opponent's board is outscaling yours, wipe it. Your one-drop and two-drops rebuild faster than anyone else's.

Drawing yourself to death. Doubling your draws is a liability under Sheoldred, the Apocalypse-style effects. I once connived four and drew eight straight into the grave from the life loss. Against draw punishment, throttle the engine.

Overvaluing your own stax pieces. Hushbringer and Doorkeeper Thrull barely touch this deck, which is the point, but they're for shutting down ETB decks, not for curve-filling against a combat pod.

Track your own results the way I do. Every game above is recorded on Nerd Leagues, and logging games in a pod league is what turns "I feel like this deck underperforms" into an actual number. For the story of how this list came together, my earlier Raffine deck breakdown covers the changes that shaped it.

Fly wide, connive big, and don't keep the four-drop hand.