Much Abrew: Starfish Brawl
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! This week, we're doing some Brawling but with a Starfish! I knew I wanted to try building a deck around a new legend from Foundations or Foundations Jumpstart, and I came across Plagon, Lord of the Beach while browsing the list. At first glance, the Starfish looks like a butts commander that wants you to overload on low-power, high-toughness creatures and try to use Plagon, Lord of the Beach to push through a ton of damage. While a Plagon deck does want creatures with toughness higher than their power, this isn't to deal damage. The real power of Plagon, Lord of the Beach is that it's an absurd card-advantage engine. If we can curve out with something like Thraben Inspector into Ornithopter of Paradise (or any random one-drop into two-drop with more toughness than power), we can play Plagon on Turn 3 to draw three cards, which is already great. But what makes Plagon, Lord of the Beach truly silly is that once it's on the battlefield, we can blink it for just a single mana with cards like Ephemerate and [[Essence Flux] to draw even more cards! And really, this is how we win the game. Sooner or later, we'll draw so many cards that our opponent just can't keep up. Plus, we can make our random dorks huge as we draw cards thanks to Proft's Eidetic Memory and Wizard Class! How absurd is Plagon, Lord of the Beach? Is a Starfish the best way to draw cards in Brawl? Let's get to the video and find out!
Much Abrew: Starfish Brawl
Wrap-Up
Since we're playing a 100-card singleton deck, we obviously aren't going to break down every card. But I did want to go over the deck's general strategy because I think some people get too caught up on the butts aspect of Plagon, which is actually a fringe upside rather than the reason to build around the card.
Yes, Plagon can help us deal extra damage by letting our creatures deal damage equal to their toughness rather than their power. And if you look at our deck, nearly every creature is tougher than they are powerful. But the best cards in our deck are things like Novice Inspector, Deputy of Detention, and Dour Port-Mage—creatures that technically have higher toughness than power but aren't especially tough. On the other hand, we don't want to overload on bad super-high-toughness cards like Yoked Ox. We want all of our cards to be good but also have enough toughness that they'll draw us extra cards when we play Plagon.
Beyond Plagon and random high-toughness creatures, the next most important cards in our deck are blink spells. In reality, our deck is more of a blink deck than a butts deck. The trick here is that we can play Plagon, Lord of the Beach to draw a few cards, hopefully drawing us into a blink spell, which we can then use to blink Plagon to draw even more cards. The snowball is wild. Once we get Plagon and a few creatures on the battlefield, our deck is full of one- and two-mana draw-a-billions. Once we get going, it's pretty easy to use Plagon and these cheap blink spells to draw our entire deck over a few turns.
The final piece of the puzzle is having no max hand size. It turns out that drawing your entire deck isn't really that good if you have to discard most of those cards to hand size on your end step, so we're playing just about every "no max hand size" card that exists in our colors on Magic Arena. Proft's Eidetic Memory and Wizard Class are especially powerful because they also work as our finishers by adding counters to our creatures for every extra card drawn. So, as we draw through our entire deck, we turn our random dorky high-toughness creatures into massive game-ending threats! If that doesn't work, we also have a Moonshaker Cavalry, which can close out the game in a single turn once we have a big board, and we'll find it eventually since we're so good at drawing cards.
All in all, I think Plagon, Lord of the Beach is insane, to the point where I think it might be the most powerful new legend printed last year. My only worry is that it might be unfun in paper Commander since the blink plan tends to monopolize time at the table and leave opponents yawning. Still, if you like durdling around, drawing tons of cards, and blink-style decks, Plagon is an absurd card and an absolute blast to play!
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.
