Much Abrew: Ketramose Exile (Standard)

Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! This week, we're heading to Standard for a deck built around a card that I think is one of the strongest from the set: Ketramose, the New Dawn! In current Standard, there are a few big card-advantage engines—Up the Beanstalk, Caretaker's Talent, and Unholy Annex // Ritual Chamber—and Ketramose, the New Dawn just might be set to join this list. The idea of our deck today is pretty simple: play Ketramose and then exile as many of our opponent's things as possible, drawing a ton of cards along the way, until we can ride our indestructible Ketramose, the New Dawn to victory! How busted is Ketramose in Standard? Let's get to the video and find out!

Much Abrew: Ketramose Exile

Discussion

• Ketramose just might be legit! Overall, we went 6-1 with the deck, good for an 86% match-win percentage. Even better, our one loss came to mana screw rather than actually getting beaten down while at full strength.
• Ketramose, the New Dawn itself is insane. Not only does it draw a ton of cards, but it also draws a ton of cards as we cast removal spells that we wanted to play in our deck anyway. When cards like Soul Partition, Legions to Ashes, and Anoint with Affliction come along with a kicker of drawing a card thanks to Ketramose, they become some of the strongest removal spells in the entire game!
• While most of the deck is self-explanatory—play Ketramose, exile stuff, draw cards, and eventually win—I did want to shout out Deadly Cover-Up. I've seen some people playing Sunfall with Ketramose, and I'm pretty sure this is wrong because Deadly Cover-Up is so good in the deck. Thanks to collect evidence, it's one of the easiest ways for us to get seven cards in exile to turn Ketramose into a real creature. (It's worth noting here that even though Deadly Cover-Up has collect evidence 6, this technically means to exile six mana value or more worth of cards from your graveyard, so we can exile our entire graveyard if we need to for Ketramose.) Even better, when we exile cards to collect evidence, we'll draw thanks to Ketramose. Then, since Ketramose is indestructible, we'll blow up all of our opponent's creatures but keep our 4/4 lifelinker. Finally, we get to exile a card from our opponent's graveyard and extract all the copies from their hand and deck, which will trigger Ketramose again to draw another card! Basically, with Ketramose on the battlefield, Deadly Cover-Up is five mana to turn on Ketramose, draw two cards, blow up your opponent's board, and exile all the copies of something from their graveyard. What a card!
• So, should you play Ketramose Exile in Standard? I think the answer is yes! The deck felt powerful and put up a super-solid record. Just be warned: the deck plays some super-long, grindy games, so you'll probably want to skip Ketramose Exile if you are looking for quick wins. On the other hand, if you like drawing tons of cards and grinding out value with controlly midrange decks, this just might be the Aetherdrift Standard 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, Bluesky @saffronolive.bsky.social, or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.