Much Abrew: Zetalpa and The Grim Captain (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! Zetalpa, Primal Dawn is a weird creature. You almost never want to hard-cast it at eight mana, but its intoxicating mix of keywords, including double strike, flying, and indestructible, gives it some strange uses. Take our deck today. We have two primary plans. First, we can get Zetalpa into the graveyard and then exile it with Urborg Scavengers to build a Standard Soulflayer—an almost unkillable double-striking threat on the cheap. Second, we can take advantage of the fact that Zetalpa is a Dinosaur and, thanks to our odd mix of creature types, use it to summon the Grim Captain from Throne of the Grim Captain, and, if things go well, even use The Grim Captain to cheat Zetalpa into play! Is either plan consistent enough to work? Let's get to the video and find out on today's Much Abrew About Nothing!
Much Abrew: Zetalpa and The Grim Captain
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, Zetalpa and The Grim Captain was pretty rough. We went 5-11 with the deck for a 31% win rate. While we did get some hilarious wins, including one where we managed to cheat Zetalpa, Primal Dawn into play with Malcolm, Alluring Scoundrel, of all things, we never managed to summon The Grim Captain, which was disappointing considering we played 16 matches with the deck!
As I mentioned in the intro, our deck has two plans—build a game-ending Urborg Scavengers or flip Throne of the Grim Captain—and it turns out that both plans have problems. While Urborg Scavengers felt good in general, we did learn that even if we manage to exile a Zetalpa, Primal Dawn with it to make Urborg Scavengers indestructible, it's still very much killable in our current Standard thanks to Anoint with Affliction along with random edicts and Sunfall. But having Urborg Scavengers die after it becomes indestructible (or hexproof, thanks to Valgavoth's Lair) wasn't Scavenger's biggest issue. The real problem is that there's a window to kill the three-drop while its "exile a card from a graveyard" trigger is still on the stack and it's a lowly 2/2 that dies to Cut Down. Unlike Soulflayer, which has all of its abilities when it enters the battlefield, this window makes it tricky to resolve a Urborg Scavengers if our opponent is untapped, even once we get our graveyard set up. Basically, the Urborg Scavengers plan felt fairly solid, but it wasn't straight-up unbeatable.
Meanwhile, Throne of the Grim Captain basically just flopped. As I mentioned before, we didn't flip it a single time, which makes sense after looking at the decklist. While we do have a split of Merfolk, Dinosaurs, Pirates, and Vampires, we don't have that many of any single creature type. (For example, we only have four Dinosaurs in our playset of Zetalpa and only one Vampire in a playset of Elenda, Saint of Dusk.) We had games where we managed to mill nearly half of our deck and still didn't find all four creature types Throne of the Grim Captain needs, and it gets even harder once we start exiling Zetalpas and Elendas to Urborg Scavengers. After playing the deck a bunch, I think Throne of the Grim Captain is basically just in the deck to mill every turn because the math in flipping it consistently just doesn't add up. And if we're never getting The Grim Captain, better mill options might exist for the deck.
So, should you play Zetalpa and The Grim Captain in Standard? I think the answer is pretty clearly no. The deck just wasn't consistent enough to be competitive. The good games with the deck were really good, but we had a lot of clunky games in between where we mostly just played odd underpowered creatures and tried to set up payoffs that never came together. That said, I think that Urborg Scavengers has real potential in Standard thanks to the new Foundations additions to the format. I'd be interested in trying to build a version of the deck that doesn't use Throne of the Grim Captain to see just how strong the Standard Soulflayer can be when we're not restricted to playing a bunch of random Merfolk, Pirates, Dinosaurs, and Vampires.
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.
