Much Abrew: Temur Battlecrier Storm (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! This week, we're heading to Standard to play one of my favorite decks in a while: Temur Battlecrier Storm Combo! The idea is to use a combination of Temur Battlecrier and Outcaster Trailblazer to draw most of our deck, potentially with the help of Roaming Throne to double up Outcaster Trailblazers triggers, and then use Dragonhawk, Fate's Tempest to exile enough cards (potentially with the help of a Roaming Throne on Dragon) to burn our opponent out of the game on the spot! How good is the combo? Is Temur Battlecrier a legit Standard card now? Let's get to the video and see!
Much Abrew: Battlecrier Storm
The Deck
The basic plan revolves around the absurd cost-reduction ability on Temur Battlecrier, which makes spells we cast during our turn cost one less for each creature we have with power four or greater. If we can get a couple of high-power creatures on the battlefield, Battlecrier makes our next most important card—Outcaster Trailblazer—free. (Technically, it costs one mana, but we make that back from its enters trigger.) Outcaster Trailblazer not only adds another four-power creature to the battlefield to further power up Temur Battlecrier but also draws us a card whenever a creature with power four or greater enters the battlefield.
Next, we're looking for two things: Roaming Throne and copying effects. Thanks to it being colorless, once we start to combo, Temur Battlecrier will make Roaming Throne quite literally free, and the first copy typically will name "Human" to double up Outcaster Trailblazer's ability to draw us even more cards. Then, we have Visage Bandit, which potentially can be free during our combo turn thanks to plot, and Molten Duplication, which we can use to copy our Roaming Thrones or Outcaster Trailblazers to draw through our deck at lightning speed. As we draw through our deck, we'll find more Roaming Thrones, Outcaster Trailblazers, and copying effects, which means that once we start the snowball, we might be able to draw our entire deck in one turn!
From this point, we have two ways of winning the game right away. The most straightforward is Imodane's Recruiter to give all of our creatures haste, potentially with the help of our one copy of Stormscale Scion to make a massive board of Dragons. But an even more common way to win is with direct damage from Dragonhawk, Fate's Tempest. When Dragonhawk enters, it exiles X cards from our library, where X is the number of creatures we have with power four or greater, and then deals two damage to our opponent for each of those cards on our end step. This means we need to exile 10 cards to deal 20 direct damage to our opponent, which probably sounds like a lot but isn't in reality thanks to Roaming Throne. Once we get our Outcaster Trailblazer card draw going, we typically set extra copies of our free Roaming Thrones on "Dragon" to double up Dragonhawk's trigger, which means we really only need about five creatures with power four or greater on the battlefield to deal 20 damage by exiling our deck! And that's basically the plan. The rest of it is just ramp like Llanowar Elves, Herd Heirloom, and Lumbering Worldwagon to speed up the process.
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, I went 9-1 with the deck, which is about as good as it gets, especially for a wacky combo deck. The deck is actually surprisingly powerful, in part because while the combo itself is spectacular, we don't really need to play a bunch of bad cards to make it work. This means the backup plan of just beating down with oversized Temur creatures is pretty realistic. The one card in the deck I'm not totally sold on is Visage Bandit—it felt a little bit slow and clunky, while Molten Duplication was absurdly strong. Next time I play the deck, I'm planning to cut a couple of copies of Visage Bandit for the fourth Molten Duplication and maybe a removal spell of some kind.
So, should you play Battlecrier Combo in Standard? I think the answer is an easy yes! The deck does spectacular things, it's unique and fun to play, and it posted an insane record across our 10 matches! If you're looking for something different to do in Standard, give Temur Battlecrier Storm a shot!
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.
