Saltmaxxing in Magic: the Gathering
Well, hello there! Brewer’s Kitchen here and today we’re playing the saltiest deck I’ve ever built.
The Gameplan
What makes opponents salty? According to EDHREC’s salt list, it’s stax, extra turns, stealing permanents and taking excruciatingly long turns. Well today’s deck is doing all of that.
The timeless format is completely broken in half. From the annoying Scam to hyper efficient Aggro, to the Show and Tell Combo deck, you can’t really get away with doing something fair.
Good thing we’re doing nothing fair at all. If you are a Commander player, your blood probably boils if you only hear the name Expropriate. Well, our deck today can cast it as early as turn two. Does that win the game? No. Will 99% of opponents just scoop regardless? They sure will.
The way we do it is a little clunky, but it works surprisingly well. We use Faithless Looting, Faithful Mending or Thrilling Discovery to get an Expropriate, Emergent Ultimatum or Scholar of the Lost Trove into our graveyard.
Then we use Reanimate on the Scholar, or Mizzix's Mastery to cast the Expropriate or Ultimatum from our graveyard. As cool as Expropriate is, it’s usually better to go for the Ultimatum. It allows us to pick three cards from our deck, have our opponent choose one of them, and cast the rest.
We usually have two different piles to search up with this: Jace, Unraveler of Secrets or Liliana, Dreadhorde General, Planewide Celebration and Omniscience. If they give us one of the Planeswalkers and the Celebration, we can proliferate enough to Emblem right away to Stax them out with an Emblem (I know it doesn’t kill them but they usually just scoop anyways). If they don’t we get an Omniscience, which allows us to play all of our spells for free, which usually leads to an excruciatingly long chain of extra turns with Expropriate and Temporal Mastery, while they are getting beaten down by our Scholar of the Lost Trove.
There’s also a one-off Fae of Wishes in the deck, granting us access to our sideboard. So far I didn’t really end up on a final list of seven cards to put in the board. No opponent will give us an Omniscience and a Fae of Wishes with the Ultimatum, so we can force their hands to provide us with a specific card if we put all three of those in a pile.
Now what do we do against interaction and hate pieces? I don’t know. Can I be faster than them? Every card in the deck has to facilitate the gameplan to make it as efficient as possible. You win some, you lose some… don’t play this deck in Best-of-Three…
Wrap up
This deck is incredibly cheesy but catches a lot of people off guard. The combination of giving them the illusion of choice with the Ultimatum, while stealing their permanents and taking extra turns hits brutally hard on the salt scale. I wouldn’t play this against my friends, but on Arena, we’re all faceless, at best emoting, anons that can be ruthlessly saltmaxxed (this is a word now) on without a guilty conscience. After all, they are free to scoop at any point.
If you have questions or ideas for this or any other deck, you can reach me on Twitter @Brewers_Kitchen or at brewerskitchen@mtggoldfish.com.
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