This is my initial take for a Food Buildaround.
Gilded Goose
and
Oko, Thief of Crowns
are what enable this archetype to exist and you'll be looking for these in every opening hand. The closest thing we'll ever get to
Birds of Paradise
, the golden bird is now the only turn 1 mana dork in the format and this deck is built to fully capitalize on the food synergy.
Gilded Goose
fixes our mana in our 3 color deck, creates food upon entering and can create food tokens when you have nothing else to do in the late game, and even makes a decent chump blocker with the 2 toughness and flying body. The goose does it all and aggressively mulliganing for it or
Once Upon a Time
in your opener is highly encouraged.
Once Upon a Time
adds a lot of consistency in finding
Gilded Goose
turn 1 and smoothing out land light hands and being able to cast it turn 0 feels incredibly powerful. Not to mention the fact that i can also grab
Murderous Rider
, meaning it can find lands, threats and removal. I expect it to be a 4 of in every green creature deck in standard and it definitely shines here.
The deck has incredible grinding potential with the combination of Cauldron Familiar + Witch's Oven
. The familiar can chump block indefinitely as you simply sac it to the Oven after declaring blockers and bring it right back with the food token it creates. The
Witch's Oven
s also stack nicely with each other. 4 Ovens means 4 activations every turn and draining your opponent for 4 every turn. I expect the combination of these 2 cards to be quite powerful, shutting down aggro strategies with the life drain and infinite blocking capabilities.
Witch's Oven
also makes all our opponents removal worse as we can turn any targeted creature into usable food tokens.
I'm not entirely sure if
Questing Beast
belongs here, but it feels wrong to be playing a green creature deck and not include it. Coming down on turn 3 with the goose, providing pressure and blocking efficiently for our planeswalkers makes it worth a couple of slots.
Yarok, the Desecrated
pairs nicely with a lot of the things this deck has going on. From doubling food tokens with the goose or troll king, to doubling our drains from
Cauldron Familiar
, doubling scrys from our scrylands and also doubling fight triggers from
Wicked Wolf
, Yarok compliments everything the deck is doing well and is a respectable finisher by itself.
The food synergy is completed with
Wicked Wolf
and the
Feasting Troll King
who both represent sizable threats if not dealt with and the Wolf often being a 2, or even 3 for 1 with a Yarok trigger and the troll king coming down as early as turn 4 with a
Gilded Goose
and
Castle Garenbrig
as a resilient threat that recurs itself.
Being in black gives us access to
Murderous Rider
which is now the best removal spell in standard and again ties into our theme of ourgrinding our opponent, with all adventure cards inherently being 2 for 1's. Our last bit of grinding potential is
Trail of Crumbs
. A nice support card, creating food tokens and working very nicely with
Gilded Goose
, you can activate the goose, saccing a food and use the mana from that food token to pay for the
Trail of Crumbs
trigger, essentially giving your geese the ability to draw you an extra card every turn for a single mana, which might be the most brutally efficient card draw engines in standard.
This curve is topped off with what I also believe to be another one of the most powerful cards in standard now.
Garruk, Cursed Huntsman
. He is undeniably powerful, creating 2 tokens a turn without losing loyalty, destroying creatures, drawing cards and has a game ending ult and bringing him out turn 4 or 5 with the help of our geese has got to be one of the more powerful things you can do in standard.
With the best turn 1 ramp spell, the best removal, extreme consistency, powerful must answer threats and synergy woven into ever card, I expect the sultai food deck to be a real contender in the new meta and I look forward to playing it.
