Budget Magic: Say Its Name | 12-Rare Budget Magic
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Budget Magic! This week, we're heading to Duskmourn Standard to see if we can Say Its Name thrice and summon an Altanak, the Thrice-Called, maybe as early as Turn 3! If that doesn't work, we can always use something like Valgavoth's Faithful or The Cruelty of Gix to reanimate Altanak, the Thrice-Called after discarding it to reanimate a land, or a Valgavoth, Terror Eater to (hopefully) ward our opponent out of the game with the massive 9/9 lifelinking flier! Oh yeah, the best part is that the deck only takes 12 rares to put together on Magic Arena, and four of those are Fabled Passage, which you probably already have! How realistic is it to summon Altanak with Say Its Name on a budget in Duskmourn Standard? Let's get to the video and find out!
Budget Magic: Say Its Name
The Deck
Say Its Name is a reanimator deck that can summon Altanak, the Thrice-Called with Say Its Name or simply reanimate something like Valgavoth, Terror Eater with Valgavoth's Faithful, and then hopefully win the game with our massive monster!
Say Its Name
Our deck's primary plan is to get an Altanak on the battlefield as quickly as possible with Say Its Name. If we can get three copies of Say Its Name into our graveyard, we can simply exile them to put an Altanak into play from anywhere. This gives us a massive 9/9 trampler that draws us a card if our opponent targets it, possibly as early as Turn 3!
Even beyond cheating an Altanak into play, Say Its Name is a solid card, filling our graveyard and letting us return a creature or land from our graveyard to our hand. It joins Cache Grab and Gnawing Vermin as graveyard-filling cards that can help set up our reanimation plan by getting cards like Altanak and Valvagoth into our graveyard.
We talked about it before, but we have three reanimation targets. First, we have Altanak, which has the upside of being able to put itself into our graveyard since we can discard it to reanimate a land. Second is Valgavoth, which can be almost unbeatable for some decks thanks to its ward ability while also being a 9/9 flying lifelinker that can close out the game in just a couple of attacks. Finally, we have one Lumra, Bellow of the Woods as a backup reanimation target. Lumra can return all of our lands from our graveyard to the battlefield, which, alongside the ramp from Altanak, gives us a backup plan of simply ramping into our huge finishers.
As far as reanimation, our two options are fairly unique in Valgavoth's Faithful and The Cruelty of Gix. Valgavoth's Faithful plays especially well with Say Its Name. We can play Valgavoth's Faithful, use it to reanimate something, and then use Say Its Name to return Valgavoth's Faithful to our hand to reanimate something else in the future. The Cruelty of Gix is also a permanent, so we can find it (or Valgavoth's Faithful) with Cache Grab to increase the deck's consistency greatly.
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, we went 3-3 with Say Its Name, a solid if unspectacular record. In general, the deck felt incredibly powerful but somewhat inconsistent. Our two big finishers, Altanak and Valgavoth, are sometimes game-ending. But other times, our opponent simply Sunfalls or has targeted removal with some useless permanents to sacrifice to ward and kills them, leaving us without much going on. Graveyard hate is also a problem, although this generally wasn't a deal breaker since it's not incredibly heavily played at the moment.
As far as the budget, it's obviously a bit more expensive than normal in paper, at $165, thanks to Valgavoth. While the card is probably necessary, you can try replacing it with another, cheaper finisher if you want. I think the deck will be worse for it, but it would cut a ton off the budget. The good news is the deck is super cheap on Magic Arena, where Valgavoth costs the same as any other mythic, which was the primary goal for the deck since we've had a couple of solid paper-focused budget decks already in Duskmourn Standard.
So, should you play Say Its Name in Standard? I think the deck has potential. Overall, I think it's sort of middling in terms of how competitive it is—it can get some spectacular wins but also be blown out by aggro or graveyard hate. But Altanak, the Thrice-Called was impressive. It has so many sneaky synergies and Say Its Name is good enough on its own that I could imagine a deck like this taking off eventually. If you like reanimating huge monsters or are a fan of Beetlejuice, the deck seems like a fun option to mess around with on the ladder. But I think it probably ranks behind Eerie Auras and Flash in terms of how strong the deck is overall.
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.
