Long story short, this deck is about discarding cards and then returning them to your hand to discard again while also using your library, graveyard, hand, and permanents as resources.
(script)
It has been a while, but the year is almost over, and now I have time to post a deck about a new Christmas Colored God in the new year. I don’t know how to pronounce her name but I will call her Klophy, god of destiny. Three mana, red green indestructible legendary enchantment creature god that’s a 4/5 creature if you have devotion to red and green greater than seven. That was a mouthful. But since she’s gonna be a commander, what is the main draw, the interesting ability we all want to see? At the beginning of your precombat main phase, exile target card from a yard. Any yard by the way. If you exile a land, you add green or red to your mana pool. Not that this empties between phases, and given it’s your precombat main phase, this actually can be pretty awkward as it encourages you to cast spells before combat. So I don’t suggest bringing this deck to an aggressive gruul smash kind of build, which is appreciated. The second ability is if you exile a nonland card, you gain two life and each opponent is dealt two points of damage. Once again reaffirming that black’s drain abilities are OP because it takes two to three other colors to get a similar affect. Though this damage is dealt and not loss. This strangely is an advantage in this deck that we’ll look at today. Though not as much as the original version, the original version emphasized the idea of doubling damage passively.
So this deck’s goal is kind of weird. It is about getting cards into your graveyard. Now it is strange having a gruul graveyard deck, but I welcome this change. It isn’t about brokenly cheating a horde of giant kaiju into play immediately though, this deck is all about dat sweet grind. You discard cards and cycle them back into your hand. Primarily you want lands back into your hand more than anything else, since exiling nonland cards from your graveyard gets you good results, and you won’t mind discarding the lands again, meanwhile the nonland cards may end up in your graveyard through playing them or self mill opposed to discard.
So let’s talk about those lands. In many decks, lands don’t do anything flashy. You play the game, that’s it. Well here you need these expensive lands called Fetchlands. This is not a budget deck at all. There are a ton of colorless and utility lands so these lands are important. You have all the Onslaught and Zendikar fetchlands that can grab a mountain or a forest, so you are very likely to start each game with a stomping ground. It’s both a mountain and forest and usually you want it in play untapped. The fetchlands also provide lands in the graveyard which is very important. Undiscovered Paradise, Gruul Turf, and Ghost Town are ways to get lands back in your hand to discard. Strip Mine and Wasteland are for… They’re for being a dick let’s just be real for a second. We have no lands, or anything in this deck, that is explicit graveyard hate. Our commander is enough graveyard hate given how many other slots I had to take out. One of the big reasons that lands are a large sub theme in this deck, is that unlike other jund and gruul graveyard land lists, we are primarily using the nonland cards in our graveyard so we can fill the battlefield and our hand with lands.
For example, let’s say we have stormbind, Torbrand, and our commander on the battlefield. We discard one card to deal four points of damage. Our graveyard has five land cards and five nonland cards. We then play Splendid Reclamation. We then choose to exile a nonland card from it and deal another four points of damage and gain two life.
Next turn.
The god exile the nonland card we happened to discard with stormbind, each opponent is dealt four damage, we gain two life. Thanks torbrand. We then play Reap The Past. We have had six mana since we could have already activated Stormbind’s ability and played a splendid reclamation last turn. There were five lands that entered the battlefield thanks to Splendid Reclamation. This means you have eleven lands on the battlefield. You use seven to play Reap X five, which returns five cards, and excluding one from stormbind, they all are nonland cards. You return them to your hand at random. The other four mana is spent on Stormbind’s ability again. Since Torbrand is in play, it deals eight damage to target opponent. See this deck is grindy but it also manages to sustain itself by dealing damage very reliably. Random discard isn’t too much of a problem since we have so many ways of getting cards back. I must emphasize that our commander is not the win con, it is a way to stay in the game.
Our commander is definitely in the defensive category of our deck. We are a grindy deck so we need ways to stay in the game.
We might over extend and discard our whole hand just to deal a ton of damage to the whole table, and we might not even have Esnaring Bridge in play, so everyone will be annoyed with us. A lot of cards in our deck are triple or double red or green and are not super easy to remove enchantments, so our commander becomes the best blocker ever and invincibly chumps any nasty death toucher we can find. Additionally, our random discard burn kills creatures wanting to attack us. Stormbind is the poster child for this, but Seismic Assault makes use of lands in our hand while Ayula’s Influence is a nice way to make chump blockers. I elected for no Crucible of Worlds as Wrenn and Sixx gets lands into our hand which is much preferrable, and having a planeswalker with a nasty reputation is a good way for novice players to be like “oh god he might ultimate we’re gonna diiiiieeeee.” He can also ping small creatures.
Chaos Warp, Boompile, and Beast Within are our catch all permanent we dislike destruction. They have drawbacks but not having to fill a slot for every form of permanent destruction is preferred.
Card advantage is already a thing in this deck, so we don’t have much that grants card advantage without graveyard or land synergy. Additionally, no Kodama’s Reach or Cultivate. They grab twenty percent of the basic lands in our deck, which after a while, may blank later cards that get basic lands or any lands while also contributing to our beautiful graveyard.
Genesis, Gigapede, Eternal Witness, and Groundskeeper are all examples of cards that graduall grant card advantage over the course of the game in a more incramental fashion. Which is good given commander is slower.
Wheel of Fortune and Magus of the Wheel are just giant card advantage explosions, and your hand is a resource in this game, so is your yard. So these are absurd in this deck.
Void Attendant and Turntimber Sower allow you take advantage of the exile that occurred due to Scavenging Ooze, your commander, and all the lands going in and out of the yard to make a lot of chump blockers, and with Void Winnower’s case, ramp.
So that’s pretty much the deck. Discard, deal damage, return your graveyard to your hand, rinse and repeat. It’s more complicated then that and it might be tedious having to keep track of everything, to be perfectly fair. So this deck is in an awkward spot between too casual to be tough and too complicated and expensive for new players. Don’t worry, there are replacements for stuff like Wheel of Fortune that are quite cheap like Reforge the Soul. There are a toooooon of cards I left out in this deck so I’m sure there are plenty you guys would want to replace. I didn’t even mention how gamble in this deck might as well be a one mana demonic tutor. And Reap is in the mainboard because it’s commander. Of course there are going to be black and blue cards in your opponent’s graveyard. I have some of the cards up for sale on ebay in the description below if you’d like some big cards or some cards with pazazz, so that will be it for this time. Bye guys, deck list in the description, hope you have a great 2020.
Magic the Gathering, FNM is TM and copyright Wizards of the Coast, Inc, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. This site is unaffiliated. Articles and comments are user-submitted and do not represent official endorsements of this site.
