This is my favorite and most fun deck to play with! The idea is to load up your graveyard with as many creatures as possible, and to do it as fast as possible to bust out a mighty monster to absolutely wreck your opponent.
To that end, we have to tackle a few challenges: ya gotta feed that graveyard some creatures on the quick-and-snappy (hence the high creature ratio), then ya gotta plunk out a critter that loves havin' other critters all up in there, then ya gotta keep feeding the beast once it's got a taste for blood, and for god's sake give it trample so you don't get chumped.
The answer to all these challenges comes directly in the form of our star finisher Splinterfright. This guy does everything including feeding the graveyard, gettin' pumped with each creature in there, and trampling all over your opponents hopes and dreams; and he does this all in one tight little package. Sounds awesome right? Well he can't do it alone.
Main Effort:
Most games you're probably gonna wanna get to an end game where you're trampling past your opponent's defenses with a super-pumped Splinterfright. This scenario can be achieved pretty consistently and pretty quickly by Ramping up with Birds of Paradise and Satyr Wayfinder, and by milling your deck into the grave with Hedron Crab and the fetch-lands, and Satyr Wayfinder (again). Alternatively, if you get a sweet starting hand you can achieve a faster win without Splinters by targeting +X/+X boosts to our birds. This is a very aggressive build that tries to go much bigger than the competition much faster than the competition.
Consistency:
To keep the Engine running smooth, we gotta make sure we get the pieces that we need, they're not always gonna be in our starting hands, but if Fauna Shaman is in there, then you're only barely a turn behind. We can fetch, find and cast a Splinterfright as early as turn 3 if we need it, or you can find any of the answers you're looking for from pumping the grave to grave-retrieval to instant speed protection. Running as much self-mill as we are, a lot of the time a nifty card you want will wind up in the yard, but don't fret, simply search for another copy from the library. remember, we want the grave to be as deep as possible to really plant our roots. However if we need it (say our whole deck is just about in the grave), graveyard retrieval is available x3 in Soul of Innistrad, Nyx Weaver, and Liliana, Heretical Healer
with her minus X conveniently placed at 3 starting loyalty. all options have their merits, but retrieval in general is largely not what this deck wants to do. We just want creatures in the grave, hence we are running 4 Street Wraiths.
Supplement:
Renowned Weaver - Combat tricks like you wouldn't believe.
Plaxmanta + Spellskite - Protection.
Nighthowler - Fetchable Finisher.
Gnaw to the Bone - Play it from the grave. Never die.
Land Base:
Misty Rainforest, Verdant Catacombs, Polluted Delta
Not gonna lie, fetch-Lands are pretty necessary. Double landfall triggers and speeds up the milling process to reduce land-draws and land-mills.
There's been a lot of shifting of cards in the main deck and the maybe board throughout the deck's history. There are some cards in the maybe board that I absolutely love and it breaks my heart to not include them and im always looking for excuses to put them in. There are a few good alternatives in here to consider but through testing I have found these just don't perform as well for whatever reason.
Quickling is nifty for protection and triggering ETBs.
Screams from Within + Strength from the Fallen
is a crazy combo that can make some crazy stuff happen, it just doesn't have good synergy with a non-filtering self-mill build. Maybe to consider for a delirium build.
Sidisi, Brood Tyrant is just a bit too slow and too expensive to just be starting a token generator engine.
This build is very aggressive but also very resilient to a lot of disruption and removal, taking an advantage from our own cards wandering into the grave. Two-for-ones against this build are uncommon and one-for-ones prolong a stronger swing-back.
Our major weakness is a lack of removal on our end disrupting our opponents schemes, however attempts to supplant the need for removal with aggressive attacks and forcing blocks. It largely takes a racing mentality, however not as straight-forward as 'red-deck-wins'.
Another Glaring weakness is our vulnerability to Grave-hate; comes with the territory. The build will usually outspeed hate, however in a pinch, the mainboard can switch tactics to opponent-mill.
Our Sideboard has snappy disruption with Venser, Shaper Savant being able to open the doors for us to pull a finisher if there are some pesky shenanagins going on the opponent's side, and Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord is an alternate win-con for various forms of lock-down. The Beautiful aspect to our sideboard however is the modal attribute it has to shift the strategy of this deck to go from graveyard based aggro to heavy opponent-mill. By sideboarding out our graveyard-based aggro for an opponent-mill strat, we effectively neuter any attempts at grave-hate that they might board in, and can employ a fairly effective control scheme.
Flip
