Much Abrew: Djeru and Hazoret Double Reanimator (Modern)
Hello, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Much Abrew About Nothing. This week, we're going all-in on cheating massive things into play from our graveyard and / or library with the help of the new March of the Machine rare Djeru and Hazoret! Our deck's plan is simple: stock our graveyard as quickly as possible, use Goryo's Vengeance to reanimate Djeru and Hazoret with haste, attack with the new God, and hopefully spin into something like Emrakul, the Aeons Torn or Atraxa, Grand Unifier to win the game! How good is Djeru and Hazoret in Modern? How quickly can we get an Emrakul onto the battlefield? Let's get to the video and find out on today's Much Abrew About Nothing!
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Much Abrew: Djeru and Hazoret Double Reanimator
Discussion
- Record-wise, you're seeing a combination of two different leagues I played with the deck. In the first league, we finished 2-3, but I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to mulligan super-aggressively for the Turn 2 nut draw, so I fired up another league...and went 2-3 again. Apparently, Djeru and Hazoret Reanimator is just a 2-3 kind of deck, at least when we play it.
- The idea of our deck is pretty simple: try to reanimate something massive with Goryo's Vengeance as quickly as possible. With our best draws, we can be casting Emrakul, the Aeons Torn or Atraxa, Grand Unifier and smashing our opponent with Djeru and Hazoret as early as Turn 2, which is almost always enough to win the game!
- Of course, for this plan to work, we need to be able to get our massive finisher into the graveyard. For this, we turn to cards like Insolent Neonate, Voldaren Epicure, and The Underworld Cookbook, which we can play on Turn 1, and hopefully set up the ability to discard a finisher and reanimate it on Turn 2 or, at worst, Turn 3.
- The plan of using Goryo's Vengeance to reanimate things like Emrakul, the Aeons Torn isn't exactly new, but what sets today's deck apart is Djeru and Hazoret, which does a couple of really interesting things for the deck. First, one of the downsides of Goryo's Vengeance is that the creature it reanimates only sticks around for one turn. As such, it's possible to reanimate a Turn 2 Emrakul, annihilate the opponent's board, hit them down to five, and still end up losing the game once Emrakul exiles itself. Djeru and Hazoret gives us a way to get a permanent creature out of Goryo's Vengeance. We can reanimate Djeru and Hazoret; hopefully hit an Emrakul, an Atraxa, or even just another Djeru and Hazoret in our top six cards; and play it for free, giving us a massive finisher that should stick around long enough to win the game. Even better, with how Djeru and Hazoret is worded, we actually get to cast the legendary creature that it finds, which means we'll get Emrakul, the Aeons Torn's cast trigger—and getting an extra turn with an Emrakul on the battlefield is essentially unbeatable!
- The other thing that Djeru and Hazoret does is give us a way to cheat one of our huge finishers into play if our graveyard gets shut down. In Modern, pretty much every deck has some form of graveyard hate, and as powerful as Goryo's Vengeance can be, something as simple as a Leyline of the Void, Rest in Peace, Grafdigger's Cage, or Relic of Progenitus would basically just ruin our day—but not anymore. If our opponent has graveyard hate, we can shift gears and work toward hard-casting Djeru and Hazoret, which can then cheat an Emrakul or Atraxa into play from our library, avoiding the graveyard-hate problem.
- Outside of Djeru and Hazoret shenanigans, we have a couple of backup plans in the deck. The first is Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar, which can sometimes take over a game by finding The Underworld Cookbook, making some food, and shooting down our opponent's board. The other is one copy of Cragganwick Cremator. While we never actually pulled it off, the idea is that if our graveyard gets locked down, we can use Wishclaw Talisman to tutor up Cragganwick Cremator and hopefully discard an Emrakul to its enters-the-battlefield trigger to throw 15 damage at our opponent's face!
- In general, Djeru and Hazoret Reanimator felt like a super-high-risk / super-high-reward deck. Our best draws feel almost unbeatable, but there a lot of hate cards can ruin our reanimation plan, and Djeru and Hazoret itself can be inconsistent. While it does sometimes hit an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and win the game on Turn 2, we had several occasions where it whiffed altogether. Mathematically, this makes sense. Assuming all of our Atraxas and Emrakuls are still in the deck, we have about a 54% chance of hitting one of them with a Djeru and Hazoret trigger. The rate increases to 84% if we also include Asmor and additional copies of Djeru and Hazoret as "hits" (they are legendary creatures, so we can cast them for free with Djeru and Hazoret's ability, although they aren't nearly as game-ending as Emrakul and Atraxa). So, getting stone nothing is rare, but hitting a game-ending bomb is far from a sure thing.
- One word of advice for the deck: if you decide to give it a try, mulligan aggressively for the combo. We need three things to win the game: a discard outlet (of which we have many); a finisher like Emrakul, Atraxa, or Djeru and Hazoret; and Goryo's Vengeance. Our best hands will either have all three pieces or two pieces and a Wishclaw Talisman to snag whatever we happen to be missing. I tried keeping some "value" hands with the deck with some random Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacars, Insolent Neonates, and such, and they usually weren't enough to win the game.
- Oh yeah, also keep in mind that we have four Urza's Sagas in the deck, mostly to find [[The Underworld Cookbook]. Sometimes, playing Urza's Saga on Turn 1 is correct in this deck even though we can't really make Constructs because a Turn 1 Urza's Saga gives us a Cookbook on Turn 3, which we can use as a discard outlet for our reanimation plan.
- So, should you play Djeru and Hazoret Reanimator in Modern? I think the answer is maybe. It really depends on how lucky you are feeling. As we discussed before, the deck is high risk / high reward. When things come together, you can easily 5-0 with the build, but if you run into a lot of graveyard hate and low-roll with Djeru and Hazoret, you could just as easily 0-5. Either way, slamming Emrakul into play on Turn 2 feels pretty good, so if you're looking for something different to try in Modern, I think the deck is worth taking out for a spin, at least.
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.
