Budget Magic: $100 Simic Crab Spellsliger (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Budget Magic! This week, we're heading to Duskmourn Standard to play a deck I've been having a ton of fun with: Simic Crab Spellslinger! The goal is to fill the graveyard with cheap spells to get Eddymurk Crab and Tolarian Terror cheap, hopefully stick an Up the Beanstalk or two for card draw, and make a massive board of 5/5 Crabs and Serpents to close out the game in just a few attacks! The best part is that the deck's just $100 to put together in paper and 22 rares on Magic Arena (although 12 of these cards are lands and four more are in the sideboard, which means it's even cheaper to put together if you are playing best-of-one or have Standard-legal dual lands)! Can spellslinger work in Simic? How many Crabs does it take to win in Duskmourn Standard? Let's get to the video and find out!
Budget Magic: Simic Crab Spellslinger
The Deck
Simic Crab Spellslinger is a tempo-y spellslinger deck that looks to reduce the cost of Eddymurk Crab and Tolarian Terror so we can get them on the battlefield quickly, draw a bunch of cards with Up the Beanstalk, and beat our opponent down for the win!
The Creatures
Our deck only has two actual creatures (which are very close to being the same card) in Tolarian Terror and Eddymurk Crab. While both technically cost seven mana, since they cost one less to cast for each instant or sorcery in our graveyard, our goal is to get the cost of these cards down to one or two mana, which lets us quickly flood the board with 5/5s to take over the game. While the two cards are super similar, they each have a different upside. Tolarian Terror is generally the worse of the two, but we can get its cost all the way down to one mana thanks to its single blue pip, and ward 2 offers a bit of protection from removal, especially in the early game. Meanwhile, Eddymurk Crab is insane since we can flash it in (for as little as two mana) during our opponent's turn to tap down two of their creatures, which almost makes it like a Fog on a 5/5 body!
The other key card in our deck is Up the Beanstalk, which plays incredibly well with our creatures. The enchantment draws us a card whenever we cast something with mana value five or greater, which means every Eddymurk Crab and Tolarian Terror we cast comes with a kicker of drawing us a card. This makes sure we have a steady stream of threats and that we find our removal. We'll eventually find more copies of Up the Beanstalk, and it becomes pretty hard to lose once every Crab is drawing us multiple cards.
While much of the rest of our deck is cheap spells to fill the graveyard, two more are important to our plan: This Town Ain't Big Enough and Stormchaser's Talent. This Town Ain't Big Enough looks like draft chaff, but it's actually my favorite card in the entire deck. For five mana, it can bounce two of our opponent's nonland permanents, but it's just two mana if we bounce at least one of our permanents, which is how we often use the card. Since This Town Ain't Big Enough costs five mana, it will always draw us a card with Up the Beanstalk, even if we're casting it for just two mana, and it lets us do some super-fun tricks like bouncing Eddymurk Crab so we can cast it again to tap down our opponent's threats for another turn and draw even more cards with Up the Beanstalk. It also plays really well with Stormchaser's Talent, which can we play to make an Otter token, bounce with This Town Ain't Big Enough, and then replay to make another Otter.
Speaking of Stormchaser's Talent, in most games, we just play it to make a 1/1 and use it as bounce fodder for This Town, although every once in a while, we'll have a game where we end up leveling it up, most often just to level 2 to get back a spell. But I did have one game with the deck that I won by getting it to level three and making Otter tokens.
As far as our spells, we've got a bunch of cheap ones for filling our graveyard. Bushwhack and Analyze the Pollen are basically lands that cost one mana (but give us back that mana by putting a spell in our graveyard to reduce the cost of our Crabs and Terrors). These cards let us cut down to playing just 18 real lands. If you decide to play the deck, it might be tempting to cut these cards during sideboarding sometimes, but don't—without them, the deck won't have enough lands to function properly.
Cache Grab and Seed of Hope are our best graveyard-filling spells. With a bit of luck, these cards can get enough spells in our graveyard that we can cast our Eddymurk Crabs and Tolarian Terrors on Turn 3, and they also help dig to find our Crabs and Up the Beanstalk. Seed of Hope is funny in the deck. Since we're playing 26 non-permanents, it whiffs fairly often, although whiffing isn't the end of the world because it means we added three spells to our graveyard, which equals a three-mana reduction on Eddymurk Crab and Tolarian Terror. Oddly enough, we sometimes hope that we find zero permanents with the card just so we can get as many spells into our graveyard as possible.
Finally, we have a bit more interaction in Into the Flood Maw and Three Steps Ahead. Keep in mind that we can also use Bushwhack for extra removal once we get one of our 5/5s on the battlefield since they are typically big enough to beat anything our opponent might play in a fight!
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, the deck was great! We played 10 matches with the deck and won eight, giving us an 80% match-win percentage. I think, overall, this is either the most competitive budget deck we've played in Duskmourn Standard or the second most behind Eerie Auras (which has been 5-0'ing leagues on Magic Online lately and might be a real deck).
As far as the budget, if you are looking to cut the cost further, the easiest place to look is the mana base. In paper, you can cut Hedge Maze and replace it with more basics to save $40, dropping the deck's price down to around $60. Meanwhile, in Arena, you can cut up to 12 rare dual lands from the deck and replace them with tapped common duals and more basics, although if you add too many tapped lands, it will slow the deck down a bit and likely drop the win percentage. Still, as a short-term plan while you are waiting to get the rest of the duals, I think you could play the deck with something like six common tapped dual lands and six more basics, and still win a decent amount of matches.
More importantly, I found the deck to be super fun to play! It builds massive boards, draws a ton of cards, and has some really sweet instant-speed tricks thanks to Eddymurk Crab and This Town Ain't Big Enough. If you like Crabs or unique tempo decks, give Simic Crab Spellslinger a shot! It just might be the perfect Duskmourn Standard budget deck for you!
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.
