Monday, August 10, 2020

Ketria (Ok, Temur) Adventures!

 While I've got my Boros Winota deck more or less working as intended, I realized that I've got a reasonable number of the rares needed for the Temur (U/R/G) Adventure deck.

This deck focuses on Eldraine Adventure creatures - those hybrid sorcery/instants that you can play before you cast the creature proper. They're one of the coolest mechanics to come out of that set, and this deck comes with a couple of cards that interact with adventures.

Those cards are Edgewall Innkeeper and Lucky Clover. The former is a 1/1 human peasant that has you draw a card whenever you cast a creature with an adventure (you don't need to have cast the adventure part first.) This not only fills your 1-mana slot, but it also fuels your later-game throughput.

Lucky Clover is an artifact for 2 that lets you copy any adventure spell you cast and potentially have it target other things.

The rest is a rogue's gallery of great adventure cards. Bonecrusher Giant, Lovestruck Beast, Brazen Borrower, Beanstalk Giant, etc.

Fae of Wishes requires you to build a sideboard, even if you're accustomed to playing best-of-ones, as its adventure lets you choose a card you own from outside the game (I'm actually not sure if a sideboard is required for casual games.) Thus, you can toss in a whole bunch of single-copies of powerful red, green, and blue spells that you'll be able to grab, always having the right tool for the job.

Not having a ton of rare wildcards left, I'm missing some pieces of the deck's main archetype (a lot of 4-ofs I only have two of) and so I've thrown in a lot more situational and less clearly great adventure cards. (Luckily, I have 4 Ketria Triomes and two of I think all the shocklands at this point, so mana isn't too bad.)

Even though I've only one about half (maybe less) than the games I've played with the deck, it's really just a lot of fun - many of the cards are cheap, which means you won't usually find yourself unable to do anything.

I've also got to say that I love the art of Edgewall Innkeeper - it's one of the coziest illustrations on any Magic card - methinks that when I send my Ravnica D&D group to Eldraine, they're going to meet a kindly old innkeeper just outside Castle Garenbrig.

EDIT: Blowing some Rare and one Mythic Rare Wildcards, I now have 3 Lovestruck Beasts, 3 Bonecrusher Giants, and two Brazen Borrowers (one more of each than I had previously) and was thus able to cut some of the less exciting cards (including the fairy whose counterspell effect basically caused it to fizzle its own exile to play the creature itself if you had a clover out.) While I'm sure it would run better if I just made all of these 4-ofs (which I could do but would burn nearly all my remaining R and MR wildcards) I've actually been very happy with the deck's performance in this state.

Basically, the Lovestruck Beast is just nasty in any situation, and with the clover, you can often get a spare "beauty" to keep it fully active. Brazen Borrower just becomes mean when you're bouncing two cards at a time, and Bonecrusher Giant hitting for 4 is a lot more than 2.

One thing that isn't immediately obvious when playing the deck is that by combining Beanstalk Giant and the Lucky Clover, you actually ramp up super-fast (and given that the Giant's Rampant Growth variant puts the land into play untapped, a single cast on turn three can still leave you enough mana open for a two-mana adventure - or a maindecked Negate, which I have.)

Supplementing my lack of all the perfect components (I only have one Escape into the Wilds) I've thrown in some of the obvious good green cards, like Nissa Who Shakes the World and Questing Beast, which don't synergize with the rest of the deck all that much, but are so freaking good that it's not like, bad to have them. I had four Garenbrig Carvers, but the creature side of that card is so overpriced that I decided to swap out two of them for Garenbrig Squires, which are... also not great, but are at least a 2-drop that can occasionally get buffed up if you cast adventure creatures on your first main phase (and turn the Brazen Borrower into a minor combat trick.)

In this latter state of the deck, my win rate definitely feels over 50% - the real question I have is whether we're going to see the metagame shift to countering this, which I imagine would involve board-wipes, flying creatures, artifact destruction (though the deck isn't terrible even when you don't have the Clover out) and maybe even some anti-big-creature things like that indestructible goblin whose name escapes me at the moment.

Still, adventure is just a natural high-value element to a card, and when you can multiply that value with Lucky Clover and feed your hand with Edgewall Innkeeper, this is one of those decks that is pleasingly solid on the fundamentals, without any single card defining the power of the deck.

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