Why Tutors Matter More in Atraxa
Superfriends decks live and die by card velocity. With 36+ planeswalkers competing for slots, you can't afford to draw the wrong payoffs at the wrong time. A tutor in Atraxa finds the card your board state demands right now, not just any card.
After tracking 200 games across two years and two iterations of the deck, we found that our average tutor target changed completely depending on whether we were ahead, behind, or at parity. That data changed how we slotted tutors entirely.
The Seven Worth Running
Every card on this list met one criterion: it closed out games or dramatically stabilized a losing board when tutored on curve.
Doubling Season is the obvious alpha. Fetch it before Atraxa drops and you get double the counters on each planeswalker, often enough to ultimate the turn they land. Across our tracked games, it ended things 40% faster than any other single card.
Deepglow Skate sits right behind it. Flash means your opponents have to treat it like a combat trick they can't see coming, and ultimating a planeswalker the turn it enters is very often the last thing that happens in a game.
Atraxa, Praetors' Voice herself, when you're running a second copy or tutoring her back after removal. Yes, sometimes the right tutor target is just your commander again.
The four most-tutored cards across all 200 games were Doubling Season, The Immortal Sun, Deepglow Skate, and, surprisingly, Contagion Engine. Not Cyclonic Rift. Not a wrath. Engine.
The Four to Skip
Contagion Clasp is a trap. It proliferates, but it costs mana to activate and the rate is too slow for a 100-card singleton format where you need proliferate at instant speed or for free.
Inexorable Tide looks great and rarely does anything. By the time you're casting spells naturally, Atraxa's upkeep already covers your proliferate. Tutoring redundancy you don't need is a wasted slot.
The Chain Veil reads "win harder when you're already winning." Tutoring it when you're behind is a dead draw every time. Build your deck so you don't need it, then cut it.
Teferi's Protection is excellent and shouldn't be tutored. It lives in your opener-or-never pile: a reactive spell you want in hand before combat, not something you search for at sorcery speed.
How to Read Your Board State
The single biggest improvement to our tutor sequencing came from identifying three game states and having a target ready for each:
- Ahead: Fetch a finisher like Doubling Season or Deepglow Skate. Lock up the win before opponents stabilize.
- At parity: Fetch a threat that demands an answer, Atraxa or The Immortal Sun. Make your opponents react.
- Behind: Fetch a reset or a stabilizer like Cyclonic Rift or Elspeth, Sun's Champion. Don't fetch a wincon when you're losing. Fetch time.
Sounds obvious. Almost no one does it. Watch your next game and count how often a player tutors for a win condition while sitting at 4 life with an empty board. Once you're comfortable with tutor sequencing, the next level is understanding combo lines and when to go off.
Printable Proxy List
All seven tutor targets are available for print directly in the Builder. Paste this list:
1 Doubling Season
1 Deepglow Skate
1 Contagion Engine
1 The Immortal Sun
1 Atraxa, Praetors' Voice
1 Cyclonic Rift
1 Elspeth, Sun's Champion
Click Build proxies and you'll have them print-ready in under two minutes. For a broader look at building a planeswalker-centric deck from the ground up, see the Superfriends Primer.
