Single Scoop: Rakdos Graveyard Bash (Standard, Magic Arena)
October is here and I'm excited!! Why? Because October is pretty much Halloween for 31 days. I thought I'd try to make a ton of Halloween themed decks and videos this month. The first deck is a Rakdos deck that relies on it's threats coming back from the graveyard over and over! Of course, this deck may not be able to go over decks like 4C Omnath and Adventures but in Bo1, I run into aggro decks more. Here's the list:
Gameplan
The deck focuses on all of it's cheap and reoccurring threats like Skyclave Shade, Phoenix of Ash, and of course Kroxa, Titan of Death's Hunger
With how popular Rogues are in standard Bo1 queues, I figured I'd play a deck that has a ton of threats that have Escape or just ways to bring themselves back into play if we're milled a ton. Even if we aren't up against a rogue deck, we ourselves have a ton of ways to mill ourselves!
Not only does Mire Triton fill our yard up but it also gains life and is an efficient blocker with that Deathtouch! Of course, we also have Tymaret Calls the Dead to make sure that Tymaret gets to phone all of his friends in the afterlife and to obviously mill ourselves and make some threats along the way. With Timmy calling the dead, we can often get a t4 Kroxa, Titan of Death's Hunger on board which will need to be dealt with before it starts burning away all the opponent's cards.
Our top-end consists of two rogues! Rankle as we all know is a solid threat in the air that has haste so it teams up with Phoenix of Ash quite nicely. It's also a way to get rid of a big individual creature while chipping away at our opponent's hand with Kroxa! A new addition from ZNR is Zagras, Thief of Heartbeats. There aren't a ton of planeswalkers running around in this meta outside of an Ashiok, Nightmare Muse but this card giving all of our threats deathtouch and deathtouch for planeswalkers is a big help. Zagras appeal is that it helps our early game scale into the late game better as our little threats are all forms of removal if the opponent blocks. Oh, and I guess the flying and haste doesn't hurt!
Conclusion
The deck almost ran hot enough for me to get the 7 wins but unfortunately, a red deck burnt us to a crisp. We got extremely lucky this episode by dodging 4C Omnath and Adventures. I ran into the deck a little bit while testing and building the deck and we got demolished by those decks. This deck is definitely worth a shot in best of one but it definitely has no chance in best of three because of the dominance of 4C and Adventure decks in that meta. Best of one allows us to play against more aggro and maybe control decks that are trying to dunk on the aggro decks. The deck could still use some help as I would like to add more copies of Hagra Mauling and potentially Bloodchief's Thirst just to get rid of big creatures from Mono Green. There's also discussion for adding a maindeck way to destroy artifacts because of Lucky Clover. The only issue with overloading our deck with answers like that is that our aggression suffers so I'll have to find the balance on how many copies of what to play in Bo1 on stream!
Anywho, it's October and I'm excited! I'll see if I can do some slightly more Halloween or "scary" themes for October. As always, thank you for watching and supporting the content! See everyone at the next one!
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-Your Friendly Neighborhood AsianAvenger
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