Much Abrew: Free-Win Gruul (Timeless)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! Natural Order is a pretty busted card. Being able to tutor your best green creature directly to the battlefield for the low cost of four mana and sacrificing a green creature is a pretty absurd deal. As such, it seems like Natural Order should be good in Timeless—it's a staple all the way back to Legacy, after all. My initial plan for making Natural Order work in Timeless was Elves, although in practice, Elves is pretty bad in Timeless since there are so many cheap removal spells and Orcish Bowmasters running around to snipe Elvish mana dorks. Today's deck is my attempt to make a non-Elves Natural Order deck work in Timeless. The goal is simple: load up on as many ways to get free wins as possible (we have three different "free win" plans altogether) and hope that we can stick at least one of them early in the game to get the win! Is Natural Order good in Timeless? What about Sneak Attack? What other free win plans do we have? Let's find out on today's Much Abrew About Nothing!
Much Abrew: Free-Win Gruul
Discussion
- Record-wise, we ended up winning 57% of the time with our Free-Win Gruul deck, and the current build is actually a bit better than that. After playing a few games with the deck, I made some changes, and we managed to win 64% of the time across 14 games with the second version of the deck!
- As I mentioned in the intro, the deck started off as an attempt to break Natural Order in Timeless. The basic plan is simple: overload on mana dorks (that don't die to Orcish Bowmasters, like Deathrite Shaman, Delighted Halfling, and Gilded Goose), ramp into Natural Order, and then use Natural Order to find one of our massive finishers—Atraxa, Grand Unifier, Worldspine Wurm, or Ghalta, Stampede Tyrant.
- Each finisher serves a different purpose. If we don't think we can win right away, we can snag Atraxa to refill our hand. If we aren't expecting exile-based removal, we can go for Worldspine Wurm and hopefully win in just one or two attacks. Meanwhile, Ghalta, Stampede Tyrant is just a one-of, but if we happen to have one of our other finishers in hand, we can tutor it up and then use its enters-the-battlefield trigger to dump our hand of Atraxas and Wurms to build a massive, unbeatable board on Turn 3!
- Since we're playing a bunch of big finishers and mana dorks for ramp, free-win plan number two is Sneak Attack, which we can use to cheat our big finishers into play from our hand for just a single mana. The downside of Sneak Attack is that we only get the creature it sneaks into play for one hasty turn. But this doesn't really matter much in practice thanks to Atraxa, Grand Unifier's card advantage and the Wurm tokens Worldspine Wurm leaves behind.
- Our third free-win plan is a classic: Turn 2 Blood Moon. Since we're playing endless mana dorks to power up Natural Order, we can drop one on Turn 1 and follow up with a Blood Moon on Turn 2, which beats some decks all by itself by ruining our opponent's mana and making it impossible for our opponent to play Magic. While this isn't our primary plan—we'd rather win by cheating a massive finisher into play if given the choice—the deck supports the Blood Moon plan so well that it would be malpractice not to include it in the deck.
- And that's essentially the entire deck. The basic theory is to mulligan aggressively for a hand that can execute one of our three "free win" plans and put our opponent to the test. If they have an answer (most commonly a counter), they'll probably win, but if not, we're pretty likely to get a free win by Turn 3 or 4! The deck is super high in power but not always that consistent. If our opponent can kill all of our mana dorks, we sometimes get stuck with a bunch of expensive stuff in hand and no way to get them on the battlefield. But if you like massive plays and cheating huge monsters onto the battlefield on the cheap or just like janking opponents out with Turn 2 Blood Moon, Free-Win Gruul might be the perfect Timeless 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.
