Moving on to Theros

Having invested heavily in Ikoria (which I read is pronounced "ick-or-i-a" instead of "eye-kor-i-a," as I'd assumed, which... feels wrong) I've been putting more of my gold (and actually splurged on some gems as well) to get packs of Theros Beyond Death stuff. I did manage to get two copies of Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath, which was cool.

I've been trying to build decks around these cards, but I'm having a bit less luck landing on a really effective theme. Mutate decks from Ikoria are pretty idiot-proof - you just toss in every creature you have in the colors you're playing that has the word "mutate" in it and then add in some cards that will help your monster from dying and you're about 90% there.

Having opened a Purphoros and a Klothys on my packs, I decided to play a little with gods and demigods. I made a mono-red deck with Purphoros (just one copy - I'm hesitant to invest my wildcards just yet) with two copies of Anax (the mono-red demigod.) This deck... sometimes works, but it's a little rough around the edges. I suspect the reason I see more Heliod decks is that, with Ajani's Pridemate pretty easily attainable and quite powerful (and synergistic with Heliod) it makes for a decently effective archetype.

I think a Purphoros deck really needs to take advantage of expensive creatures that have a flashy ETB or Attack effect (I'm blanking on the name, but there's a legendary dragon that does 4 damage to one target and 2 damage to two other ones whenever it attacks, on top of being a 7/7 flyer, which seems perfect for this.)

The question, then, is how to build it the rest of the way. I've tried to make it an aggro deck, but I think that aggro red doesn't have the staying power to actually make use of those expensive creatures, forcing them to sit in hand if I don't have Purphoros. I'll need to look into a sort of Red midrange/control and possibly just load up on big creatures.

I've had a bit more luck with a Gruul Klothys deck (which happens to have a lot of the stuff from the red decks.) Klothys has a pretty useful once-a-turn trigger that not only hoses graveyard decks, but also gives you either extra mana for your big dudes or, ironically, a bit of Orzhov-style bleed (I guess the damage is from red and the healing is from green?)

Anyway, I'm trying to work on archetypes outside of Mutate after spending a week making nothing but that kind of deck.