Turn Four Valgavoth Deck Tech: Competitive Standard Review

Can I Offer You a Turn Four Valgavoth in this Trying Time?

Discover how to reanimate Valgavoth by turn four using Victor, Valgavoth's Seneschal in this competitive deck tech for Magic: The Gathering Standard.

Duskmourn has hit the shelves for prerelease, but we still have a few days to wait until it hits Arena. For now, we are still theory crafting for the digital client. Last time we went over the newest Mono Black Deck for the format, and today, I figured that it wouldn't be a proper theory crafting cycle for this set if I did not give you at least one reanimator deck, so here we are.

Theory Crafting for the New Set

Today, we are going to look at one of the new cards from the set, Victor, Valgavoth's Seneschal. We will use the card to attempt to reanimate Valgavoth as early as turn four. We have some surveil lands to help put Valgavoth in the graveyard, and Scavenger's Talent allows us to mill plenty of cards. Since we are a reanimator and combo deck, we also have ways to cheat out Rottenmouth Viper, or reanimate it.

Total Cards:

This is a deck that is kind of all in on the combo. We do have some other enchantments in the sideboard that we can use as removal. Some of them have flash as well, which can make up for the fact that we aren't running the regular instant speed removal. I opted to try that because of the payoffs from Victor. We also have flash enchantments to give our creatures hexproof. Since we have a good bit of flash enchantments, we actually are able to do the Victor combo on our opponent's turn too, which should make for some fun interaction whenever we get to try the deck in best of three. Sadly, early access is only best of one, so I was only able to try out the main deck, and I believe that it still ran pretty well. We had a lot of fun games with the deck. You can find the VOD to that gameplay at my Twitch Link below. For now though, let's check out some of the key cards in the deck.

Relevant New Cards

This is the main card that I built around for the deck. We have a few other ways to cheat out creatures so that we aren't a one trick pony, but Victor gives us a unique way to play the game and actually allows us to benefit from playing those low mana enchantments that both build up our board presence, and help amass value. Many of them are two for ones, and he effectively rewards us for playing value spells that we already want to play in this type of deck. He also allows us to surveil, so we can stack our graveyard with the spells that we want to reanimate when we get out the third enchantment for the turn. He is practically begging us to do what the deck wants to do. It's a match made in heaven.

When I first saw the Overlord, I thought that the card couldn't actually be that good. Once I realized that it is best to cast it for the impending cost, it is much better. It's also not a terrible target for reanimation, but the deck has multiple options that we would prefer. It also represents a clock when it is sitting there waiting to become a creature, and we can use it as yet another card that helps us amass residual value on the board. Oh yeah, and guess what? It's an enchantment. It wants us to return non-avatar creatures to hand, but conveniently, it is the only avatar creature in the deck.

This is the big boy from the set. One could make the argument that Atraxa is still better, but we are looking to showcase some new cards, and I love the big guy. He is basically a game ender, and is virtually impossible to remove on his own. The fact that he has built-in Leyline of the Void is also incredibly helpful. His ward cost of sacrificing three permanents effectively gives him annihilator, which is an awesome thing to have in standard. When the deck is working to its full potential, we ideally get him out on turn four.

Old Cards that Perform

Crazy to think that we are now calling this card "old" as it feels like Bloomburrow just came out. Alas, we are in our perpetual spoiler and set release season, so we will have new sets coming through the end of the year. The viper is awesome, it punishes decks that aren't doing anything to a very strong degree. Something else that I love about what this card does for the deck, is that it allows us to pivot to a different game plan if Victor isn't immediately online, and it makes it so that we don't have to mulligan so aggressively. Viper is one of our only cheese-out targets that has an immediate impact to the board with its enter the battlefield effect, so it is never a bad option for cheesing.

Here is another "old" card that is helpful in the deck. What is so nice about this talent is that we can mill ourselves to fill the graveyard, but we can also use it to bring back something in the graveyard. It gives us yet another avenue to get something incredibly valuable onto the board without using too many resources. The fact that it generates food tokens is also pretty helpful. We are in such a fast meta currently with all of the aggro decks, it never hurts to gain a bit of extra life while we are waiting to assemble our combo.

Will it be Any Good?

I think that the deck is pretty well-equipped to have some unique gameplay and have turns powerful enough that will win us the game. The only thing that could be a bit regressive about the deck is the lack of main deck removal. We do have a good bit in the sideboard, but it is entirely possible that we end up going down a few copies of our cheaper spells to add simple removal. I could see cards like Bitter Triumph being particularly useful, because we can discard our reanimator targets to that - and obviously, it is one of the best removal spells in standard. We will have to see if we end up dying too fast to all of the decks that are out there, and who knows, we may even need to have four copies of Valgavoth to make it our main reanimator target, because I have a feeling that Leyline of the Void effects will become very powerful in this new meta.

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I am a Magic The Gathering competitive player, and streamer. I specialize in homebrew decks. My favorite formats are: Standard, Pioneer (Explorer on Arena), and EDH. I first started playing MTG in 2001, and have played on and off since then.

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