Budget-ish Magic: I Cast My Deck for Free with Kylox!
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Budget(ish) Magic! This week, we're doing some brawling with a deck built around a Murders at Karlov Manor card I've been wanting to play since spoiler season: Kylox, Visionary Inventor! As soon as I saw Kylox, I knew I wanted to make a deck where the goal was to get a couple of big creatures on the battlefield, cast Kylox, Visionary Inventor to sacrifice them all, and then (hopefully) win by casting most of our deck for free. I tried to make the plan work in Standard, but it was just too slow and janky. But then I realized that the deck would be perfect for Historic Brawl, where we'd always have access to Kylox as our commander and the card pool is much bigger. The end result is today deck, which can do some pretty absurd things, like cast all (or at least most) of our deck in one turn with Kylox to win the game with one of the biggest, spell-slingeriest turns ever!
Oh yeah, as far as the "-ish" after Budget, it's because the deck is a bit more expensive than I normally like for Budget Magic decks, coming in at 29 total rares and mythics, even though it costs just $53 in paper. I'm honestly curious what you think should count as "budget" for a Brawl deck. Normally, I shoot for 15 total rares and mythics in 60-card formats, but Brawl takes 100 cards to build, which might mean the budget should be a bit higher. Or maybe it should be lower because Brawl is a casual format and we can get away with playing a janky mana base. Anyway, lets get to the video, and you can tell me what you think in the comments!
Budget-ish Magic: Kylox
The Deck
Since we're playing 100 singleton cards today, we're not going to delve into each card in the deck. Instead, we're going to focus on a few groups of cards that really make the deck work, starting with our namesake card (and commander) Kylox, Visionary Inventor. While pretty expensive, Kylox is also incredibly powerful. We need to do a few things to win with Kylox: first, get the seven-drop on the battlefield; second, get a bunch of power on the battlefield to sacrifice to Kylox; and finally, play a deck full of spells that we can cast for free with Kylox. Thankfully, our deck is built to do all these things, and if we can get in a single attack with it, we should be able to use its ability to cast enough spells for free that we win the game.
The plan is pretty simple. We spend the first turns of the game looting through our deck to fill our graveyard and also find our key pieces. Our deck is overloaded with cheap card-draw spells, many of which also let us discard, which is actually an upside rather than a drawback.
Our best card-draw spells also make Treasures, which is our primary way of ramping in the deck and also extremely important to our plan. Ideally, we'll set up a turn where we can play a big threat plus Kylox all at once to play around removal, a plan that requires a lot of mana. If you decide to play the deck and make some Treasure, try to save them up for the combo turn if possible, as having a bunch of mana makes it much easier to go off.
Once we get our graveyard nice and full, we're looking to find a creature or two with power equal to the number of instants and sorceries in our graveyard. We've got a bunch of these in our deck. The best is Melek since it gets double the power of the number of spells in our graveyard, although Crackling Drake, Enigma Drake, Kinetic Augur, and the token from Seize the Storm work as well.
At this point, we play Kylox and sacrifice every other creature on the battlefield. In theory, this could let us cast all the instants and sorceries in our entire deck, although it more often lets us look at 20, 30, or 40 cards and cast all the spells, which should be more than enough to win the game.
So, how do we actually win? First off, I didn't play any extra-turn spells in the deck even though they would be easy wins with Kylox, in part to keep the budget down and in part because I'm not a monster. Instead, we're looking to hit a bunch of big burn spells to get our opponent's life total to zero.
We also have a bunch of spell-copying effects (with Display of Power being the best since it can copy all of our spells on the stack) to help power up our burn. If we cast our Kylox spells in the correct order, we can stack Display of Power so it resolves first and copies all of the other spells that are still on the stack. The game will end pretty quickly once Explosive Singularity starts hitting our opponent for 20 damage. We can also do the same trick with literal storm spells (making sure they are the last card we cast from the Kylox pile to maximize our storm count) and get a ton of damage with Grapeshot or keep casting our deck for free with Mind's Desire.
One last card of note is Mizzix's Mastery, which is basically a backup to Kylox if our primary plan doesn't work. Since we're filling our graveyard anyway to grow Melek, Reforged Researcher and friends, we can often ramp up to eight mana and overload Mizzix's Mastery to have a huge turn, if not winning the game directly then drawing us a ton of cards and setting us up to win with Kylox either later in in the turn or on the following turn.
And that's basically the deck! Otherwise, we're mostly just trying to stay alive long enough to get Kylox on the battlefield with a bit of removal and some sweepers like Star of Extinction and Ill-Timed Explosion.
Wrap-Up
I don't really keep super-close track of my record in Brawl because it's not a super-competitive format (and untapped.gg doesn't automatically track the matches), but I believe we won right around 50% of the time with the deck. We sometimes get run over by aggro if we don't draw a sweeper, and adding in some more wraths could be helpful, but the deck felt solid in general. More importantly, we did some pretty crazy things with Kylox. The storm-style combo turns it enables are almost always game-ending (we only had one Kylox that fizzled, and that's because we only had 10 power on the battlefield), and the stacks it creates are wild! If you like slinging lots of spells and having massive combo turns, then Kylox is a really fun and fairly competitive budget-ish option for Historic Brawl!
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.
