This is a totally out-of-bounds brand new standard deck, that I've been brewing up. I was quite successful with it online and I believe it can actually be like Tier 1.5 competitive if played right.
So the main idea of the deck is to cheat Razaketh, the Foulblooded onto the battlefield by Turn 4 using the Kaladesh card Indomitable Creativity. In my opinion this is a very underrated card and I always believed it had potential. What made this combo actually playable was the addition of Legion's Landing of Ixalan. In order to reliably hit your fat finisher off of a creativity spin, you can't play any other Creatures or artifact cards in your deck... That means we rely on the use of sorceries and enchantments that create creature tokens for us.
This is how the combo works: You go ahead and make some tokens in the first few turns with Legion's Landing, Servo Exhibition, Sram's Expertise and Start / Finish. Maybe you can even start scrying with Hidden Stockpile. Sometimes you will need to chump block (especially game 1 against aggro decks), but there is enough reciliency within these cards to survive for quite a while, because the battlefield gets pretty clogged by these cards. Against rather creature-light decks its very easy to flip the Landing on Turn 4 or even 3.
In a way you don't want to trade your tokens early, because you're gonna need at least one for the spin with Indomitable Creativity. This happens pretty consistently on Turn 4 and with a Legions Flip there's like a 0.1% chance you can already do it on Turn 3. This is totally nuts because basically all Standard decks are either concerned building a board or looking for tiny card advantage with the front side of
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. There's very little that most decks can do, when Razaketh, the Foulblooded drops on Turn 4...
There are two barriers to overcome in all this: First the Mana. Indomitable Creativity costs 3 Red Mana and this is very heavy on the mana base because you want to play this card somewhere between Turn 4 and 6 most of the time... Thats's why there's a playset of good old Evolving Wilds and a whole lot of dual lands. The Mardu Manabase is pretty strong IMO, and fits this strategy well enough.
The other issue is removal. By that I dont necessarily mean removal against Razzaketh, most of the time he's protected well enough. I mean removal on your targeted token with Indomitable Creativity. Because if the token gets removed first before the spell resolves, it is fizzled and there's no crazy 8/8 flying trampler entering the battlefield. This can be countered by targeting more than 1 token with the card. Sure it has a lot of downsides: You pay more mana, kill more of your stuff and you're gonna get both Razzakeths out of the deck and you're gonna legendary-sac one, if the do nothing. But that's most of the times better than seeing the spell the deck is centered around countered by a simple Fatal Push.
When you resolve Indomitable Creativity and Razaketh, the Foulblooded enters the battlefield, this where the fun begins... Now you don't just own a 8/8 flying trampler, but you possess the ability to tutor any damn card from your deck by paying 2 Life and sacrificing a leftover Token from earlier, provided you still have some left... And all of this at instant speed. This lead me of course to some interesting deck-choices as you can see. The goal is to provide a deep toolbox of all the highest impact cards against all the Meta decks that there are. There are in the Main 9 nonland cards that are straight singletons because of this. That's why we're playing a Main-deck copy of Lost Legacy, as well as three different sweepers. My personal favorite singleton although has got to be Fling... Your opponent might be at 16 Life and thinks they're surely gonna survive one more turn... Well not with Fling in the deck they're not! Just swing with Razzie and fling him into their face after combat.
What do we do if Razaketh, the Foulblooded is stuck in our hand and we can't cast him? Well it is kind of a problem, because there's no card in Standard that allows you to shuffle back a card from your hand into the library. But the alternative is just discarding the guy with Tormenting Voice, drawing 2 in the process and then later cheating the guy onto the battlefield with the help of his female friend liliana, death's majesty.
Often times Game 1 is all over the place with this deck... But because you have basically all the answers as soon as the combo resolves, you can often times lock the opponent out of the game. And there's always just the alternative plan of beating down with all the tokens against control decks. In sideboarded games the deck plays a lot smoother: There's a lot of efficient removal against something like Ramunap Red or Mono-Black Aggro, There's discard and card advantage effects against control as well as a special sweeper against the other more focused Token decks of the format.
If you like this type of deck, please feel free to try it out or comment on it. Also, I would be glad to hearyour thoughts on how this deck could be made even better.
