The reasoning behind Natural Order in HFEB

Guest Post by JoergHeinrichMTG

Watch the interview after Round 6 in Gdansk

Look also at the Interview after Round 6 in Gdansk. Right after I won against a Sligh player with Phantom Nishoba.

“… but the price for Nishoba’s freedom was a living plants life.”

Hey folks,

today I would like to point out the reasons why I play the Natural Order Phantom Nishoba package in HFEB for the entire year and have extraordinary win Rates with it against red Decks.

To be clear that it not a sideboard juke you do against any Deck with Swords to Plowshares or Counterspell. This package only applies to red Decks where Hermit Druid is a liability.

The usual way to start a Game is playing a Bird or a Wall of Roots. The Bird doesn’t stay for long in most cases. If you untap with the Wall and have 3 Lands or 2 Lands with an Elvish Spirit Guide you slam Natural Order and search for Phantom Nishoba. As long as you are above 12 life the Burn player basically can’t win at that point anymore. In other cases they need a very precipice hand with double Fireblast and two other Burn spells.

With Birds of Paradise, two Lands and Elvish Spirit Guide you are basically able to slam Nishoba on Turn 2.

What made me play the package?

The idea came in the end of 2025 where I struggled against Red Decks playing on MTGO. Sligh was one of the most prominent Matchups and if you try to win with Hermit Druid they kill it before and needing a Survival of the Fittest can lead to difficult situations when you mull down to 5 Cards, that you won’t have the critical mass or even don’t find the Survival at all. Trimming from 8 Win Conditions to 4 is a dramatically shift on consistency of the Deck. So I searched for additional win Condition options.

As I have been playing Legacy for the last decade and have experience with Elves and Cradle Control I know about the Natural Order into Atraxa plan in Legacy. Even if we don’t have an Atraxa which finds you more Cards in the Format the main aim is to have a Creature the opponent can’t win against. Phantom Nishoba fully fills that role against red Decks as we gain 7 life for each attack and block.

Why is this Tech so good over other options?

I am convinced that this Tech is superior to other attempts like Eladamri’s Vineyard, Chill or Shallow Grave, because it is a proactive Game plan and helps if you are ahead and behind in the game, because it kind of stops their creatures. Sure it is a delayed lifegain effect and they can kill you with it on the stack, but they can’t spread their kill over two turns anymore as you gain the life after blocking and attacking. If they don’t win right away after you land Nishoba it is basically over. Having a Vineyard but no Survival doesn’t help you winning the game and as it’s symetrical they also benefit of it and even before we are.

With Natural Order and Survival you keep the eight win conditions so you are likely enought to find one.

Another important point is that is plays against the Achilles’ heel of the Deck, which is the dependence of the graveyard. If you try to go for a Hermit Line with Shallow Grave or the Survival Squee value they can Tormod’s Crypt you and you are delayed for like two turns. Casting a Natural Order into Nishoba doesn’t care about the Graveyard at all and blanks their hate Cards like Tormod’s Crypt and Pyroblast. That’s a huge deal.

How do I board exactly?

The good point is that you swap the weak Cards Hermit and Krosan Exploration entirely for Natural Order and Nishoba. Five for five, that’s a fair deal.

Against Sligh you bring in:

+4 Natural Order

+1 Phantom Nishoba

+2 Swords to Plowshares

Getting a Ball Lightning or a Lavamancer is the best thing you can do to prevent 4 or 6 damage. In some spots exiling your own Creature can safe you from dying.

+1 Uktabi Orangutan

Good against the Tormods Crypt or Cursed Scroll and is another green Creature you are able to sacrifice or get out of Natural Order.

+2 Duress

Additional Discard helps to take key Burn spells like Fireblast or Price of Progress or answers like Pyroblast. The point that almost always hit the best Card without guessing is important.

+1 Ghitu Slinger

Kills Grim Lavamancer to avoid repeatable damage source.

You take out:

-4 Hermit Druid

-1 Krosan Reclamation

-1 Akroma, Angel of Wrath

It’s not needed without the Hermit lines anymore and a 3 Turn Clock which doesn’t get life isn’t enought.

-4 Cabal Therapy

Discard spells are basically okay, but the point is that getting a damage and miss the named Card is bad for tempo. It’s best when you are already in the driver’s seat and want to clear a Pyroblast before you cast Shapeshifter as we don’t rely on that plan that high and can still Unearth it, Therapy is not needed with the Natural Order plan.

-1 Unearth

As we are not going to reanimate Shapeshifter as soon as possible anymore we don’t need the full set.

If the opponent plays Burn (with more Burnspells, usually without Ball Lightning), I adept to not bring in the Swords and the Ghitu Slinger but keep 3 Cabal Therapy instead. The logic behind this is that it’s not worth to bring the reactive Card as their Creatures are not that powerful anymore and being able to clear a Flame Rift, Pyrostatic Pillar or multiple spells from their hand makes more sense.

If you know that your opponent knows that you bring Nishoba and has access to a decent amount of Sulfuric Vortex you can bring in Monk Realist instead of Ghitu Slinger as well.

Against Goblins it’s basically the same but you don’t bring in Duress, but keep 2 Therapies.

I hope this article gives you enough information to evaluate the worth of the Phantom Nishoba package.

Best regards Jörg

Hey, my name is Jörg from Germany and I started playing Magic in 1995. My older brother brought some Revised Edition Cards from school and we played a couple games. Not knowing the rules perfectly didn’t matter. As an 11 year old kid I fell in love with the game from the first moment. One Saturday I cycled to our LGS and bought an Ice Age Starter pack with my pocket money and opened the best Card in the Set, which was Jester’s Cap.

After trading a couple of Cards my classmates and I started building our own Decks and played in school within breaks and met in our free time to play and have a good time. Then in 1999, with the release of Mercadian Masques, I lost interest in the game for a while and with completion of job training in 2007 I was getting back to Magic. During this time I went to the LGS and drafted almost every Friday night, then started to play Standard constructed and organised local tournaments for about one and a half years. With the start of Modern and the disadvantages of Standard rotation our local community shifted to Modern in 2012. Besides that I built a Merfolk and Maverick Legacy Deck and played in locally private tournaments. In 2014 I also started creating an MTGO Account and practiced in Leagues to get routine and knowledge of the Metagame. With the Ban of Birthing Pod and the Eldrazi Winter I completely lost interest in Modern and shifted to Legacy completely.

There I specialised on a couple Decks like Death and Taxes, Grixis Delver, Reanimator and Elves and regularly successfully played Challenges on MTGO. In 2021 my greatest result was winning the Online Eternal Weekend Bayou Event with hellonewton’s Reclaimer Elves.

After that there wasn’t that much for me which can top this and with the release of dubious Cards (Multiplayer mechanics like Initiative) I slowly lost interest in Legacy as well.

End of 2022 I randomly saw that there is a Twitch Stream which shows European Premodern Championship in Darmstadt and noticed an upcoming Premodern scene, which allows you to play older Cards which have been outperformed or even have been banned from other Formats. Within a year I started getting into the Format playing mainly Elves as I already had the most part of the pool. In 2023 I played my first Euros in Darmstadt and knew that this is the perfect Eternal Format for me, where you can put a Deck away for a year and still be able to play the Deck with one or two Sideboard Card changes also the community is very friendly and polite.

Playing Elves was a bit too non-interactive to me and I built a Green Blue Madness Deck of Cyberpunker and put the Shapeshifter/Triskelion/Devourer Combo into it to give the Deck an unfair component to be able to shift in plans similar to the Splinter Twin era in Modern and have an “oops, I win” button. Meanwhile I also tried HFEB already but I fizzled quite often due to the complexity of lines. Over time I tried the Deck and heard all the podcast episodes with Mike Harris and started getting an understanding of the Deck.

With the Fix of Volrath’s Shapeshifter on MTGO I started playing the Deck in practice rooms and created templates for explaining the Combo so I didn’t need to do every click. Over time I also played the Deck in the Moxforge League (a monthly German webcam League with around 50 players) and improved results over time. The Sligh Matchup was still the hardest Matchup to play, so at the end of 2025 I had the idea to put Natural Order and Phantom Nishoba into the SB to have a transformational SB instead of playing reactive Cards like Chill, Absolute Law and so on.