Against the Odds: Urborg Scavengers (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! This week, we're heading to Standard to see if we can build the most absurd three-drop ever with the help of Urborg Scavengers! While Scavengers itself has been floating around in Standard for a while, the keyword-eating Spirit has gotten a ton of new support cards in the last few months from Foundations and Tarkir: Dragonstorm. Is this enough to make Urborg Scavengers into a real threat in Standard? What are the odds of winning with the three-drop? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Urborg Scavengers
The Deck
Our deck today is built around Urborg Scavengers, which is sort of a Standard-legal version of Soulflayer with a twist. When Scavengers enters or attacks, we can exile a card from a graveyard and put a +1/+1 counter on it, and then it gets all the keywords of things exiled with it. While we technically can use Urborg Scavengers as graveyard hate by eating our opponent's stuff, our real plan is to turn Scavengers into the most unbeatable, most absurd three-drop ever by eating some keyword-heavy bombs in our deck!
Of course, we need two things for this plan to work: to find Urborg Scavengers and fill our graveyard with cards for Urborg Scavengers to eat. We've got a bunch of ways to do this. Cache Grab and Say Its Name dig for Urborg Scavengers while also dumping some cards in our graveyard. Meanwhile, Kiora, the Rising Tide gives us a way to discard cards from our hand that we'd rather have in our graveyard for Urborg Scavengers to feast on. Plus, we occasionally get a bonus 8/8 Octopus from Kiora since we're pretty good at reaching threshold.
Even our removal spells help support the plan. Quag Feast mills a couple of cards before killing something, while Awaken the Honored Dead is one of my favorite cards in the deck. For three mana, the saga blows up any nonland when it enters, which is huge since, along with killing various creatures, it can get rid of annoying permanents like [Cori-Steel Cutter]] or enchantments like Unholy Annex // Ritual Chamber. The second lore counter mills some cards for Urborg Scavengers, and then the final lore counter lets us discard a card to return a creature or land from our graveyard to our hand. This last mode not only allows us to discard things like Zetalpa, Primal Dawn or Sphinx of the Final Word, which we really want in our graveyard rather than our hand, but also lets us get back an Urborg Scavengers that we mill or that dies. While it might be a bit slow to be a true staple at the moment, I've been super impressed with the saga and wouldn't be surprised if it eventually ended up being a real Standard card.
So, let's assume we fill our graveyard and find an Urborg Scavengers. What are we hoping to exile to build the most unbeatable three-drop ever? The two most important creatures here are Zetalpa, Primal Dawn and Sphinx of the Final Word. The first goal of building an unbeatable Scavengers is protection. Zetalpa offers indestructible, which takes removal spells like Get Lost and Go for the Throat off the table, along with non-Sunfall wraths. While indestructible is great, there's a lot of exile and bounce removal in Standard. This is where Sphinx of the Final Word comes in to give Urborg Scavengers hexproof. If we can get both creatures exiled, we'll have an Urborg Scavengers that has indestructible, hexproof, trample, flying, double strike, and vigilance, which is almost unbeatable for many decks!
We've also got Qarsi Revenant, which is absurd in our deck. It's great to eat with Urborg Scavengers to give it deathtouch, lifelink, and flying. (If we ever get it exiled alongside Zetalpa and Sphinx, adding lifelink to the layers of protection, it becomes very hard to lose since our opponent is unlikely to be able to race us gaining eight or 10 life a turn.) But we can also just mill it over and renew it to give something its abilities in a pinch. Plus, it's a fine three-drop to help us stabilize the board as we look for Urborg Scavengers. Meanwhile, Goldvein Hydra has a specific purpose: giving Urborg Scavengers haste. Since Scavengers triggers when it enters or attacks, this essentially lets us double up its ability. We can play Scavengers, exile Goldvein Hydra to give it haste, and then immediately attack to trigger Scavengers again to exile something else.
Finally, we have Abhorrent Oculus, which basically is our backup plan for winning the game. The deck didn't have Oculus when I first built it, and one of the issues I ran into was that while the deck worked well in games when we drew an Urborg Scavengers early, games where we didn't find a Scavengers went much worse. So, I searched for a backup for Urborg Scavengers. Sadly, there isn't a Soulflayer or another card that directly compares to Urborg Scavengers in Standard, but thankfully, Oculus is perfect for the job. Since we're so good at filling our graveyard, we can easily cast it early in the game. Once it's on the battlefield, manifest dread lets it fill the graveyard for Urborg Scavengers while also building a big board to stabilize the battlefield. The deck improved a ton once Abhorrent Oculus joined the mix, and now, I would say it's one of the more important cards in the entire list!
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, we finished 5-1 with Sultai Scavengers, which is a great record, although we were playing at Gold thanks to the season reset so we might not have been up against the hardest competition. More importantly, the deck felt really solid! We got to see [[Urborg Scavengers] absolutely dominate several games. It turns out that getting a mostly unkillable, double-striking flier on the battlefield early in the game is tough for many decks to beat. While graveyard hate is an issue, as we saw in the video, we often can beat something like Tranquil Frillback by rebuilding, although a Ghost Vacuum sitting on the battlefield is tough (which is why we have a playset of Heritage Reclamation and three The Filigree Sylexes in the sideboard). If you like building hilariously overpowered monsters and janky keyword-soup abilities, keep Urborg Scavengers in mind! The deck is super fun to play and, at least in our small sample size, worked way better than I expected!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
