Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Did I Miss How Powerful Eldraine Green Cards Were?

I decided to invest a bit in Eldraine, having gotten a fair amount of Ikoria cards and then working on Theros ones. Getting a couple of Wicked Wolves, a Garruk (the one that lets him make 2 wolf tokens) I decided to make a... Sultai? Is that W/B/G? I think of it as Indatha thanks to Ikoria. Anyway, I made a vaguely wolf-themed deck that I populated with basically all the rare or mythic rare green (or adjacent) Eldraine cards I had.

The deck is cobbled together with cards I have - I haven't spent any wildcards on it yet, though given the early successes, I might be tempted to do just that, once I figure out what the really strongest pieces would be.

It's got a wolf theme, thanks to Garruk and the Wicked Wolves, but I also have some long-running strong cards like Gilded Goose and a pair of Lovestruck Beasts (I'd always figured the fragility of the 1/1 token would be a real downside, but in practice it seems that having a 5/5 for 3 that effectively gets Defender if your opponent has spot removal is still really, really good.

I also happened to have 3 Scavenging Oozes, which are proving to be decent utility and a nice 2-drop (my opponent recklessly chump-blocked with his Thief of Sanity, trying to get it back with a Call of the Death Dweller, not realizing, perhaps, that I could exile it in response.)

Wicked Wolf is proving to be a stand-out, especially as I have a lot of Food-generation in the deck. Being able to take down an 8/8 Ajani's Pridemate with my indestructible wolf (I'm not super concerned that it's coming into play tapped when I'm able to take down my opponent's biggest threat.)

The deck focuses on green as its primary color, splashing in black for Garruk and several Savvy Hunters to keep the food flowing, and then splashing in white for Tolsmir, Friend of Wolves, which might not be worth it, to be honest (again, this is a cobbled deck, and that's just one copy.)

The obvious creature that I don't have a single copy of is Questing Beast, which might be worth splurging some wildcards on given how useful it would be for both this deck and any of my green mutate decks, but I always have a little anxiety about that sort of thing, especially when I haven't filled out my collection of Shocklands (in fact, I don't think I have more than 2 of any of them.)

Thankfully, mana-wise I already have 4 copies of Indatha Triome, which is great for this, not to mention two Overgrown Tombs. For green/white I have a single Temple Garden but I also have a Temple of Plenty, so I've got pretty decent coverage on lands. I don't have any W/B lands because the deck is really primarily green.

I have a couple Arboreal Grazers and Paradise Druids to help ramp things up. The one game in which I actually drew Garruk I was playing against an opponent who made me discard it, so I have yet to get a feel for him (I'm still new to planeswalkers. The only one I use very frequently is Teferi, Master of Time, which I kind of fell backward into three copies of, and he's a key component to my blue Ominous Depths deck, as well as a mill deck that never seems to work as well as my other mill deck.) Conceptually, I find the idea of making two 2/2 wolves per turn pretty nice, even if they have to die for him to actually gain loyalty, and having a -3 to kill a creature off the bat is not bad.

There are still way more Rare and Mythic Rare cards that I'd want to build some super-powerful decks, though I think, as usual, my gamer personality types are clashing with one another. On one hand, I really do like winning, and while I always feel a little cheap when I win due to some silly thing like mana screw or color screw (or flood) I do really enjoy seeing the victory sign at the end. But I also want to make oddball, unusual decks. Admittedly, when I see a new deck type that beats me, I'll often see if I can build something similar (I made a Selesnya counter-based deck using Conclave Mentor, some Hydras, and that insane Aura that doubles a creature's +1/+1 counters every turn after getting trounced by one) but I do love it when I can build something that isn't like what I'm seeing others play, but still actually functions.

Anyway, I'm going to definitely be futzing with this deck for a bit. I can definitely imagine burning at least a couple wildcards for Questing Beast, but we'll see what else we need for it to really shine.

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