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Budget Magic: Golgari Hideaway (Streets of New Capenna Standard)


Hey there, Budget Magic lovers, it's that time once again! This week, we get to check out our new Streets of New Capenna Standard with a deck I'm super hyped about: Golgari Hideaway! The goal is simple: use Fight Rigging or Cemetery Tampering to cheat something huge (like Toxrill, the Corrosive or Titan of Industry) into play as quickly as possible and trust that the fatty will bring home the victory. Since we need to play big creatures for Fight Rigging and fill our graveyard for Cemetery Tampering anyway, we've got a solid backup plan of using Diregraf Rebirth to reanimate our finishers. What is Streets of New Capenna Standard like? What's the best way to build around the hideaway enchantments on a budget?  Let's get to the video and find out; then, we'll talk more about the deck!

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Budget Magic: Golgari Hideaway

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The Deck

Golgari Hideaway is a unique deck. I guess it's technically a midrange deck but also a reanimator deck, and our ability to cheat things into play quickly almost makes it feel like a combo deck sometimes. Probably the best way to think of Golgari Hideaway is like the Standard version of Legacy Sneak and Show, with our deck having multiple ways to cheat some of the biggest, most game-ending creatures in Streets of New Capenna Standard into play early in the game.

The Hideaway Cards

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The foundation of our deck is our two hideaway cards, Fight Rigging and Cemetery Tampering. At a glance, it might not look like the two enchantments really synergize with each other since Fight Rigging cares about having a big creature on the battlefield while Cemetery Tampering wants a full graveyard. But as we talk about the support cards, you'll see the two cards are more connected than they might look. 

Finishers

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In some sense, we don't really care what is hidden away under Fight Rigging and Cemetery Tampering—a free card is a free card. But in our perfect world, we'll manage to hideaway either Titan of Industry or Toxrill, the Corrosive, two of the most expensive and powerful creatures in all of Standard, either of which can win the game more or less by itself. Titan of Industry is quickly becoming one of my favorite Streets of New Capenna cards, offering two of its four abilities when it enters the battlefield. We'll usually make a 4/4 Rhino token, giving us a massive 11 power and toughness on the battlefield, and then—depending on the situation and matchup—blow up an artifact or enchantment (which is good in many different matchups since cards like Fable of the Mirror-Breaker, Reckoner Bankbuster, and Esika's Chariot are super popular in Standard), gain some life (the Rhino + gain five option is great for stabilizing against aggro), or put a shield counter on something (especially good against the removal and sweepers of control). It's really hard to lose if we can do this by Turn 4 or 5, which is our deck's goal. Meanwhile, Toxrill, the Corrosive is absurd against creature decks, slowly eating away our opponent's creatures and giving us 1/1 Slugs in their place. 

Triggering Fight Rigging

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Fight Rigging is—by far—our easiest hideaway card to trigger, with either Shakedown Heavy or Egon, God of Death having enough power to trigger it the turn they come into play. Our best draws involve playing Shakedown Heavy on Turn 3 and then, on Turn 4, playing a Fight Rigging, hiding away a finisher, going to combat, putting Fight Rigging's +1/+1 counter on Shakedown Heavy, and getting a Titan of Industry or Toxrill, the Corrosive for free, which is an almost unbeatable start. Egon, God of Death can do the same thing, although we do need to make sure we have some cards in the graveyard if we want to keep it around (more on this in a minute).

Apart from triggering Fight Rigging, both Shakedown Heavy and Egon, God of Death are good creatures, mostly because they have a massive amount of stats as compared to their mana cost. Shakedown Heavy doesn't usually deal combat damage because most opponents will let us draw a card to remove it from combat, but that's fine—we get a free card and a 6/4 back on defense. Meanwhile, Egon, God of Death is a huge 6/6 deathtouch, assuming we have enough cards in our graveyard to keep it on the battlefield. Egon's backside can help with that, but we've got a bunch of other ways to fill our graveyard as well...

Triggering Cemetery Tampering

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First off, it's worth pointing out that Cemetery Tampering is much, much slower to trigger than Fight Rigging is. Twenty cards in the graveyard is a lot, and even with support (and Cemetery Tampering milling three cards each turn), it takes a while to build up a graveyard big enough to cast our hideaway card. The good news is that we don't need to trigger Cemetery Tampering on Turn 3 or 4 for it to be good because it helps support our other cards in the meantime by filling our graveyard to keep Egon, God of Death alive and drives our backup reanimation plan. That said, we are hoping to cast the card we hide away under Cemetery Tampering eventually, so we have Teachings of the Kirin and Witherbloom Command to help fill our graveyard, while Teachings of the Kirin gives us an early-game creature (or two) against aggro, and Witherbloom Command can be removal or help make sure we hit our land drops in case we need to hard-cast our finishers.

The Backup Plan

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Since our deck is already full of big creatures to hide away under our enchantments and we're filling our graveyard for (and with) Cemetery Tampering, we've got a really obvious backup plan: reanimation! While our main plan is to cheat Toxrill or Titan of Industry into play with our hideaway cards, we're not above sneaking them into play from our graveyard with Diregraf Rebirth, which happens to be the perfect reanimation spell for our deck since it has flashback, so we can mill it and then cast it from our graveyard. While not quite as fast as Fight Rigging, a Turn 5-ish Toxrill, the Corrosive or Titan of Industry is still more than good enough in most matchups.

Removal

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For removal, we have Bloodchief's Thirst and Infernal Grasp to help slow our opponent down a bit while we get things set up to cheat one of our finishers into play. In some situations, Witherbloom Command can work as an additional removal spell, but giving a creature –3/–1 means it's fairly limited in what it can kill.

The Mana

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There's not much to say about the mana of Golgari Hideaway. We've got two dual lands in Deathcap Glade and Witherbloom Campus, along with a bunch of basics. This leaves us with a mana base that is fairly consistent but not especially powerful. If you're looking for a way to add a bit more juice to the deck, creaturelands like Lair of the Hydra and Hive of the Eye Tyrant along with channel lands are solid upgrade options.

Wrap-Up

Record-wise, Golgari Hideaway was great—we ended up going 6-1 in our seven matches, and our one loss was because we kept a hand without black mana, never drew a black source, and died without doing anything at all. However, take the record with a grain of salt since this was recorded on early-access day (thanks again to Wizards for the account and cards to use!), which means not only that we were playing best-of-one but also that a lot of players were trying brews, so it's not exactly representative of the top-tier Standard meta. Still, the deck felt really powerful and was way better than I expected it to be. There isn't really any reason to think that it shouldn't work in best-of-three as well—Toxrill, the Corrosive and Titan of Industry are great at closing out the game, whether you have a sideboard or not. 

As far as changes to make to the budget build now that we've played some games with it, I'm pretty happy with where it landed. The mana base could be more powerful, as we talked about a moment ago, but I'm not sure there are really any changes to make that wouldn't add to the budget.

So, should you play Golgari Hideaway in Streets of New Capenna Standard? While I'm hesitant to make any bold proclamations based on early-access day, I think the answer is yes. The deck felt surprisingly powerful. The nut draw of cheating something huge into play on Turn 4 with Fight Rigging is obviously strong, but the most impressive part of the deck was probably its ability to grind out wins with graveyard synergies or reanimation when we don't have the Fight Rigging draw. Add in the massive three-drops and good removal, and it seems like Golgari Hideaway or something similar might actually be pretty decent in Streets of New Capenna Standard!

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The goals for our ultra-budget Golgari Hideaway list are twofold: get the deck down near $50 in paper and also cut as many rares and mythics as possible, for the sake of Magic Arena players. The end result is a build of Golgari Hideaway that's missing a couple of strong cards but still looks pretty functional. The biggest loss—by far—is Toxrill, the Corrosive, which is great in the deck, but—at over $12 a copy—is just too expensive for the ultra-budget build. It gets replaced by Bookwurm, which is still pretty scary on Turn 4 but certainly isn't Toxrill. (If you have a favorite finisher, feel free to play it instead.) Otherwise, we cut the mana base to the bone, dropping our rare dual land for Riveteers Overlook, and switch up our graveyard-filling two-drops, with Witherbloom Command and Teachings of the Kirin turning into Mulch and Warlock Class. The end result is a build of Golgari Hideaway that should play much like the one from the video but will miss having Toxrill, the Corrosive to sweep the opponent's board and has slightly worse mana. 

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Finally, our non-budget list. The non-lands in the main deck are mostly unchanged, but we get some big upgrades to the mana base and the sideboard. While I stuck to straight green-black, I think it's also possible that splashing into a third color could be worthwhile. Streets of New Capenna brought with it some interesting new graveyard fillers in Dimir, like Aven Heartstabber and Snooping Newsie, which could replace Teachings of the Kirin and / or Witherbloom Command if we went Sultai Hideaway. I'm not sure if it's worth the effort and loss of consistency, but it might be, especially if control is popular in Streets of New Capenna Standard, which would make having access to some sideboard counterspells super-helpful. For now, I'm planning to say Golgari, but we'll see what happens after the new Standard meta solidifies.

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.



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