Companion Decks

I don't want to jinx it, but MTGA hasn't been crashing as much as it was before today - I think it's only crashed once today.

So, I've been playing around a bit.

At this point, I have mutate decks for each of Ikoria's Triomes, and so I went ahead and, in my typical OCD fashion, changed each so that their basic lands reflected the appropriate triome (while I don't know if there's any official word on it, it seems that each of the Ikoria basic land arts correspond to one triome or another, and I sorted them out that way.)

One of the signature features of that set was also a group of Companion creatures - I think one for each color pair, each using Hybrid mana. I realized I had a few in my collection, and decided to try building a deck around one.

Here's how Companions work - you can put a creature of this sort in your "Companion Zone" if you meet certain requirements. The one I went with, Gyruda, Doom of the Depths, requires you only use even-costed spells.

Then, while playing, at any time you can spend 3 mana to put the Companion into your hand.

I'll confess that I'm not sure these things are powerful enough to be worth the cost. You can always just toss them in your deck the normal way, with no deckbuilding requirements.

My one game with this deck was a bit cheesy I was playing against a Mutate deck and threw down Etrata the Silencer, the Ravnica-block vampire who is unblockabale and when you damage an opponent, you exile one of their creatures with a Hit counter on it, then shuffle her back into your deck. If the opponent has three creatures with hit counters on them, you win.

Now, because of the odd rules of Mutate, when you exile a mutate monster, you exile all the creatures attached to it. And each of them get a Hit counter. So I just swung in for the attack - they were playing G/W, and didn't happen to topdeck anything that could keep Etrata from attacking. With a creature that was already stacked to three by the time I played Etrata, I was able to wipe them out in a single swing.

So word of advice: it you're playing against a mutate deck, Etrata is a total hoser.

Still, I have yet to see how effective Gyruda itself is.