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Graham, also known as HamHocks42 on the internet, is a Twitch streamer who adores Magic: the Gathering in all its forms and tries to find the fun, even in the most competitive and sweaty environments.
Mill is an often misunderstood and maligned archetype that gets people hot and bothered in multiple ways. As a reanimator player, I love watching my deck flip into my graveyard, but for the rest of the player base, it’s often a frustrating sensation as a world of possibilities unravels before their eyes.
Well, there are a ton of cards from Duskmourn that support a mill package, and I want to focus on one today: Doomsday Excruciator. Doomsday Excruciator is a throwback reference to the card Doomsday, which strips your library down to only five cards that you hand select. The potential of this card is bananas and is the backbone of combo decks in Vintage and Legacy. Unfortunately, Doomsday Excruciator is nowhere near as good with twice the mana investment, and it doesn't allow you to select the cards you're left with, which means it just doesn't do the same thing.
What the Build Around Does Well
Brewing decks is more than just finding a card that inspires you and picking what cards to put around it. You also have to take into account the context the deck finds itself in. If your brew is soft to the most popular deck in the format, it’s just not going to be successful no matter how consistent it is when put against different matchups. Power creep exacerbates this as the speed of the game increases, requiring your deck to either pop off faster or answer a variety of threats within even the first two turns in order to be successful.
Today, I want to look at the most popular archetypes in Standard and look at play patterns we can focus on to give our janky brews a fighting chance.
Red-Based Aggro
Every set, Wizards of the Coast prints rares and mythics that look super niche and, generally, are considered missed opportunities by the larger community. Brewers like me, though, look at these cards and it feels like WotC is saying, “I dare you to build around this thing.” And today, we're building around one such I-dare-you build around: Funeral Room // Awakening Hall.
The Build Around
Maybe I've oversold how niche this card is. A Bastion of Remembrance type effect for three mana is not bad on its face for aristocrat strategies and Commander players will likely lean on this card a fair amount, but in current Standard, no good aristocrat shells exist, so I doubt it will see much play. For our purposes today, though, it presents some interesting synergies.
The Duskmourn streamer event was this past week, and it gave jank-minded creators like myself a chance to tinker with some absolutely busted new cards in a low-pressure environment where we could focus on experimentation. I was drawn to a ton of cards like many folks such as the overlords and Valgavoth, Terror Eater, but the splashy mythics weren't the only gems tucked into this set. The rare slot also has a ton of potential and today, I'm going to talk about a deck featuring The Jolly Balloon Man.
The Gimmick
>Can Duskmourn Make Reanimation Competitive in Standard?
It makes sense that a themed after modern horror would have an emphasis on the graveyard. So much of horror, after all, centers around the fear of dying and what might happen afterwards. The way Duskmourn handles reanimation effects, though, is very crafty because it allows the theme to exist in both black and white with some crossover that feels in-line with Duskmourn’s creepy vibe while also aligning well with the history of the archetypes.
What Makes a Good Reanimator Deck?
Valley Floodcaller has a ton of potential by giving all noncreature cards flash and having a Jeskai Ascendency like ability that lets otters and other Bloomburrow folk untap and effectively prowess. This deck is an attempt to leverage the Floodcaller's innate power and flexibility alongside other spells and even an old classic, Monastery Mentor.
The Primary Build Arounds
With so much of Magic: the Gathering's design seemingly focused on casual Commander play where giant effects and crazy interactions are critical to the game's success, lots of incredibly powerful interactions find their way into formats like Standard. Wizards has a keen eye for effects that are known problems, so safety valves are commonplace with cards often limiting eligible targets or only triggering once per turn. Today, we're working with two such examples and finding a way around them so they can work together to create a semi-infinite that's good enough to win the game.
The Combo’s Core
This week's deck is a new take on a classic formula that takes me back to a simpler time when Standard's ban list was as long as my arm and everyone was complaining about Oko, Thief of Crowns. Another card got a ton of attention as well: Fires of Invention, and it was equally problematic. Well, Fires of Invention is perfectly legal in Explorer and, to my knowledge, isn't seeing a significant amount of play. I aim to change that with this beauty.
The Primary Gameplan
Fires of Invention is a four-mana bomb that denies you the ability to cast on your opponent's turn while giving you the ability to free cast two spells on your own turn as long as you have at least enough mana to otherwise spend them. This sounds like it doubles your mana when, in fact, it often will triple it. While you can cast two spells, your mana is free to spend on abilities, so make sure any Fires deck you make has plenty of activated abilities. Such as:
