"After his death, monks spent ten years transcribing the tattoos from Reki's body and gathering stories from those who spoke with him. Thus the volume you hold was written."
--The History of Kamigawa
I'm not going to pretend this is anything particularly revolutionary. This is a fairly standard "Mono-Green Legendary Stuff" deck starring Reki, History of Kamigawa at the head. It's about the same as any other Reki list, but we may as well go into detail on what that means.
This list is still in progress, so suggestions are appreciated!
Let's briefly talk about Reki himself.
Reki, History of Kamigawa is a 1/2 for 3 in monogreen, who draws you a card every time you cast a legendary spell. 1/2 for 3 is not a body to write home about, so functionally he's just an enchantment that draws cards and occasionally chump blocks- but that'll do for now. The two big gates in magic are mana and cards. Being monogreen, we can get mana easily, and Reki handles getting us cards, but imposes a deckbuilding restriction- we need a decent proportion of legendary spells. Important to remember- Reki doesn't care if they're creatures, artifacts, or enchantments- as long as they're legendary, he draws a card.
Plan A is thus going to be to try to play Reki turn two or three, then start powering out mana and legendary creatures, building boardstate without losing cards in hand, then turn said boardstate sideways until everyone else has stopped moving.
First priority is getting Reki into play. There's 33 lands in this deck (and also
Adventurers' Guildhouse, but we're not going to treat that as a land for our purposes), which is a little land-light, but we just need to find three to get Reki out and start rolling. In order to help with mana, in the early turns we've also got a lot of ways to find extra mana:
Burgeoning
is never going to be a bad early play;
Dryad Arbor + Green Sun's Zenith
is a perennial favourite for early ramp, and
Sol Ring is, of course, format defining.
Oath of Nissa gets special mention here for just being great at all stages. Early it can find you land, later it can dig for creatures- and it's conveniently legendary, so it draws a card off of Reki too.
Ideally at this stage in the game we want to be avoiding casting any legendary spells- the card draw is incredibly valuable- but in the case of Oath of Nissa and Sword of the Animist, if you kept an astoundingly bad hand, it may be worthwhile to play them just to guarantee Reki can come out and play.
Once we've got Reki in place, it's time to start powering out a board state. A solid third of the deck (34 cards in total) consists of legendary spells, which replace themselves on cast. Most of the rest is removal or more ramp, both of which keep us in the game, and there's a couple of options to draw cards- most noticably
Rishkar's Expertise- in case we start running low. The midgame plan is basically to keep dropping permanents on the board and removing anything that looks dangerous. Attacking is not a high priority at this point- you're most likely looking to end the game in a single swing rather than chip away over time, and keeping shields up in order to not die is paramount.
Regarding tutoring- there's a few ways to tutor in this deck, though granted not too many. Things like Time of Need and Fierce Empath give options to search for creatures, among others. WHen using these, it's probably preferable to search for silver bullets rather than searching up big threats- there's a lot of big threats in the deck and you have a lot of card draw. You'll find those eventually. With silver bullet answers, the question is whether you find them in time, making tutoring for them a better idea. Things like Melira, Sylvok Outcast, Dosan the Falling Leaf and
Glissa Sunseeker
are all capable of stopping opponents in their tracks, so prioritising them- or ways to protect them, like
Archetype of Endurance
- are good uses of a tutor if you have opponents on those strategies.
When it comes to ending the game, we need to assume we've stuck a few decent sized threats to the board. We're a green deck. If we can't make that happen, we don't really have any good ways out other than keeping trying. Fortunately, we're not running out of steam any time soon, so we can keep trying for a while.
If we can manage that, closing out the game is basically a case of finding an overrun effect. While this list does not run Craterhoof Behemoth, it does run Tooth and Nail and Defense of the Heart for pulling things out of the deck, which gives us good options. If we're looking to build our own HOOF, pulling out Pathbreaker Ibex + Surrak, the Hunt Caller
does a decent impression. If we're less picky about the specifics,
Kamahl, Fist of Krosa
can be activated to end the game, and Nylea, God of the Hunt on her own gets us most of the way there too.
I've run out of things to say. It's a stompy green deck. It's not like this is particularly complex. You overrun and then stomp them flat. Go take em out!
