I've been working a new cube and started precisely with a broad set of ideas that all center around the possibility of building Dimir Saboteurs/Ninjas. But, since I love
Whirler Rogue, I decided that the deck could go the traditional ninja route (with plenty of the cards that people in the thread have already suggested) but also turn into a slightly slower artifact based deck if needed. It can easily switch into other decks: artifact control around
Marionette Master, reanimator (making use of the draw-discard effects) or even dipping into red for madness. These are the cards I put together and will form the core of the archetype:
Creatures:
Whirler Rogue: Perfect. It creates artifacts, has a use for artifacts, provides evasion for saboteurs and evasive creatures for equipments/ninjas. If only all cards were like this.
Lumengrid Sentinel: Hits some of the notes: has evasion and can clear the way for attackers.
Silas Renn, Seeker Adept: If you're highly comited, you might start to prioritise artifacts not strictly related to the theme. Or just recycle
Vault Skirge,
Spined Thopter and Spellbombs...
Artifacts: The thing that can make this work is the availability of cheap artifact and equipments that are already part of the traditional archetype. The equipments are also incredibly synergistic with Whirler Rogue.:
Bloodforged Battle-Axe: Creates more artifacts.
Prying Blade: See above.
Skeleton Key,
Mask of Riddles,
Mask of Memory,
Key to the City: Cheap artifacts that favour the theme. The neutrality of these cards in the archetype is what allows you to either draft the traditional deck or, if you find yourself getting most of the artifacts, take some of the artifact themed creatures as well.
Vault Skirge and Spined Thopter: Artifacts with evasion.
Bident of Thassa: Also an artifact.
Aether Spellbomb,
Flight Spellbomb: One example of the type of artifact that works perfectly with the broader theme and gets more powerful with the creatures above.
Others:
Depths of Desire: Another example of a versatile effect that most blue decks would want but works particularly well in Saboteurs. Also fixes mana.
Temporal Machinations is narrower but still useful. (Also
Contract Killing if you go with the slower version)
Ongoing Investigation: A slower card for the slower deck. Clue tokens work with cards such as Marionette Master, and treasure tokens make the green ability accessible enough that it could theoretically be used to stabilise the game.
So the point is to subtly encourage not the artifact theme but the original Saboteur theme. However, when any of the creatures appear in the pack, they might be not only much more interesting than the other possibilities, but also be able to rescue a deck that might be competing with the better, purer saboteur/ninja deck already drafted at the table. Anyways it still lets you pickup some of the key payoff cards for the original archetype, like the more expensive ninjas.
Switching into reanimator or even artifact control (supported by early tempo plays) is then possible and easy. The obvious payoff for switching would be something like Marionette Master, which is not only a good reanimation target but also a nice way to end the game when you have plenty of little artifacts like Clues, Treasures or Spellbombs lying around. Besides that the efficient and small looters can also support a madness theme, in either red or green or both.
