grixis.wen
placed: 20 (of 23)
WINS:16 LOSSES:24
tcg price: $49
24 lands + 0 ramp
2.64 av cmc
What happened: After finishing 10th overall and 1st among three-color decks last time out, I tuned up Grixis into a tighter spread of 4x 4x 4x, put in a set of Desecration Demons and expected Grixis to turn in a formidable midrange-control performance. Something went very wrong though and it slid all the way down to 20th out of 23. It's not abundantly clear where the biggest part of the blame lies. Desecration Demon was actually a bit disappointing, the number of sweepers was cut from 6 to 5, and its possible the deck didn't regress as much in objective terms as it did in relative terms to the rest of the table as everything else received rebuilds as well, but either way, big changes are needed.
Whats next: the new rebuild moves away from midrange control and heads towards a more classic grixis pure control style. I initially tried a tuning with no creatures, just walkers and Batterskull, but having absolutely nothing on the board to skirmish and slow things down a turn or two while removal comes online can get risky and the game can slip away shockingly fast. I went back with a set of Frostburn Weird to take care of some of that work. The next major rethink is card advantage. 3x Treasure Cruise and 3x Read the Bones should mean that grixis is now positioned to out-draw most everything else around it. The win-cons are pretty flexible with a pair of Liliana Vess Batterskull Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker and Keranos, God of Storms. Whereas my other hard control deck esper.wen focuses on the end result of milling the other deck out, grixis here now is more than happy to just start pointing burn spells at the dome and burning the opposite deck after major card advantage has been established and the board has been locked. Two builds ago, grixis.wen had a price tag of $24, last build came in $49, and the current build is priced up to $151, so its clear its getting increasing injections of power, the question will be how the balance and pacing of the strategy holds up.
