My mission: to create a deck based around each planeswalker in the game. Not all will be original, not all will be tournament worthy, but all will hopefully be fun and interesting. I call it my "Walk The Walk" series.
So far we've covered Venser (WtW 1: Sojourning Savant), Nicol Bolas (WtW 2: Respect Your Elder), Ajani (WtW 3: Heart (& Soul) of Gold), Chandra (WtW 4: She'll Bring The Heat), Liliana (WtW 5: This Might Hurt...A Lot), Garruk (WtW 6: A Beast of a Man), Jace (WtW 7: Mind (and Deck) Tricks), and most recently Elspeth (WtW 8: Champion of the Masses). Now it's on to a planeswalker I've always wanted to take a crack at, because I love dragon decks. No I really need to go on? Because that alone should be enough to tell you we're talking about
Sarkhan Vol
.
Unfortunately, it's not as easy as just loading a deck with Sarkhan and a bunch of dragons. Especially since I want to keep this Extended-legal (though reaching back for the likes of, say, Dragonspeaker Shaman is very, very tempting), I have to build up to releasing those dragons on a by-then suspecting opponent. I have to bide my time with some lowly chump blocking creatures and gather enough land to start cranking out the big boys. Thankfully, the chump blocking creature part plays right into the overall strategy of this deck. How, you ask? Those dragons also happen to all have devour. So any little creatures left over when the dragons arrive become tasty morsels to gobble up and make the dragons even bigger.
Let's get to some specifics. First we have Awakening Zone to crank out some Eldrazi Spawn each turn, Growth Spasm which pulls double duty creating another Spawn and pulling much-needed land from your library,
Nest Invader
to provide cheap blocking potential, and
Brood Birthing
to then multiply the Spawn. One of the nice parts about using the Eldrazi Spawn is that, in a pinch, they can be sacrificed to generate extra mana and pay for the more expensive dragons. Gotta love that versatility.
We also have more traditional devour targets: Goblin tokens, which come from the very appropriately-named Dragon Fodder and a few more from Siege-Gang Commander. Devour those Goblins as needed, but they're really good targets for Voracious Dragon for obvious reasons.
Finally,
Khalni Garden
and Mitotic Slime make for more good creature token generation.
While that's going on, you can take other measures to buy a little time too. Act of Treason can wreak havoc with creatures your opponent gets out first,
Colossal Might
can suddenly turn one of your little blockers into a killer and take down a big attacker, and
Sarkhan Vol
's first two abilities can provide more cover as needed.
If you can hang on long enough for the dragons to start hitting the table, the tide will definitely turn in your favor.
Hellkite Hatchling
can hit early on and soften things up, but once the likes of
Predator Dragon
, Voracious Dragon, and especially Dragon Broodmother hit, victory will soon follow. The Broodmother has the added benefit of generating tokens that can either devour other stuff or sit around to be devoured themselves and make the next little dragon broodling that much bigger. And if Sarkhan gets enough counters to fire off his "ultimate" ability, the skies will be thick with dragons and your opponent will be lean on life.
And Sarkhan will be grinning from ear to ear.
