Gruul is an archetype that is usually reserved for the aggro decks in Standard. I'm sure that you guys have had enough of that, so I will spare you another Gruul Aggro list that you only play because the deck is good. We are trying something new with this one, and we are taking advantage of the Exhaust mechanic from the new set. It is something that remains to be seen if it is a constructed-playable mechanic, or something that is better suited for limited. I believe that I am pushing the limits of its capabilities here, and that we can do some pretty cool stuff with the deck. One thing that I am excited about is that the deck features a TON of new cards. It will be really difficult for anyone in Early Access to say that this deck didn't showcase any new cards - the creatures and vehicles are almost all exclusively new! We are looking to reduce the activated costs of abilities within the deck, and then get crazy value from it that overwhelms the board. If we play our cards right, we can do some activated abilities for next to nothing, and gain a strong advantage from it. We can possibly also have a Fireball finish if we play our cards right. This deck does a little bit of everything, and I am excited to try it out. Allow me to present to you: Gruul Exhaust!
There are some staple cards that we include when we have activated abilities of creatures. One card that forces its way into the deck is Agatha's Soul Cauldron. It is too powerful not to include. We have a couple of ways to mill our cards, and the meta is pretty removal-heavy. We should have enough ways to get things into our graveyard, and if we don't we simply add one or two more Hedge Shredders to mill more cards. With the Exhaust ability, you sadly can only activate it once, BUT we are going to put multiple instances of said abilities on one creature, thus making it much more palatable. We also will reduce the cost of all exhaust abilities with one of the new cards to be shown later, and with Agatha of the Vile Cauldron. I was surprised to see this card - I did not know that it came out with the Soul Cauldron itself. We have seen the Cauldron so much, but we haven't seen a ton of the actual Agatha Creature. The deck has a few removal spells, but some of our vehicles also have a way to do direct damage, so we don't need to include as many as we normally would. We kept it pretty simple on the lands due to the demanding mana values in some of our cards, and because the deck is a little faster. There are multiple cards that have two pips of each of the colors represented, so we do not want to stall when it comes to having the right mana. Although I have a bunch of new cards from the set in this deck, I will showcase to you five of the ones I think are the most impactful.
Relevant New Cards
This is the card that when I saw it, I got the idea to do an exhaust deck. I thought the ability itself was fine, but when I saw that we could reduce the cost, and that this creature wasn't legendary, I was compelled to give it a shot. The creature itself also has decent stats, and its own exhaust ability isn't half bad either - especially when we are actively reducing the cost!
This one is pretty sweet, and rewards us for playing off of the graveyard. Our deck should give us plenty of room to activate a lot of exhaust abilities, and it shouldn't be too big of a problem getting this card back onto the battlefield. We can also exile it with the Soul Cauldron. Adding graveyard recursion to the deck after we are filling our graveyard seems appropriate, and it is another threat for our opponents to deal with.
I think that this will be useful removal as long as vehicles make enough of an impression in the meta. There are other one mana green spells that deal with threats efficiently, and it may be the case that we end up switching to those at some point. For now, we will try out the new removal spell and see if it does what we need it to.
This is another fun vehicle for the deck, and I think it is helpful to us because we have the Agatha package. The Agatha creature gives us more value when her power is higher, and the Soul Cauldron wants our creatures to have counters on them. This satisfies both wants, and is a card with good stats to boot. The crew cost could be considered a bit high, but theoretically, you could play a creature with a power of two, (we have a one mana creature with two power) and it would then get three power once it has the counter. The crew cost isn't as much of a burden as it would appear to be at face value.
Did you really think that I would miss an opportunity to somehow put dragons on the board? This guy has to fit into our list due to the early value he can provide, and the fact that we could potentially have a one mana dragon from it. The fact that it can give other creatures haste for a very cheap cost is quite helpful, and if we can give other creatures that ability, the deck can start to snowball and do a lot of damage very quickly.
Can we Play this in Ranked?
I'm expecting to start with this deck in the play queue in Early Access, but I have a feeling it may go a little crazy. I won't have a problem giving it a shot in ranked. I think it will be another deck that may surprise people. The Start Your Engines ability is probably the best in the set, and Exhaust follows it up with a close second. We can do some crazy stuff with this deck, and if we are reducing costs as much as possible, I think that the sky is the limit!
