I personally think Standard kind of sucks at the moment with so many uninteresting and non-interactive decks. This deck aims to be the opposite! There are few things more satisfying than stealing your opponent's Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath with Claim the Firstborn and whacking them with it for the win!
At its core this is a menace aggro deck with the obvious goal of playing a ton of small creatures and overrunning the opponent. Turn 2 Dreadhorde Butcher can win many a game. However, unlike most aggro decks this one has a few different backup plans for winning the mid to late game.
The first is reanimating our creatures with both Call of the Death-Dweller and Lurrus of the Dream-Den. Trading off turn 1 and 2 plays and then reanimating them with additional abilities on turn 3 is an incredibly powerful play that puts you up on board state and number of cards. Reanimating Dreadhorde Butcher with menace and deathtouch feels especially dirty! Lurrus of the Dream-Den also makes Dead Weight a repeatable removal spell.
The second plan is using Claim the Firstborn and Tentative Connection to steal our opponent's creatures and swing for the kill. This kind of effect is made even better with menace, since it is often easy to set up situations that force unfavorable blocks, or just kill them outright. It is also worth noting that these cards can be used on our own creatures to give them haste in a pinch.
Finally it is worth taking a second to look at Labyrinth Raptor, since it is the linchpin card of the deck. Its sacrifice and pump abilities make it very difficult to trade profitably with. Also, in multiples it effectively makes itself and and other menace creatures unblockable, since the triggered sacrifice ability stacks!
In a Standard format full of people effectively playing solitaire with cycling, Uro, shrines, and Starrix why not have some fun? ;)
