This deck is very fragile. It struggles to be consistent and is weak to literally everything, but it can win on turn 2. Any ideas to help improve it are always great to hear.
The combo is
Blisterspit Gremlin
+
Song of Freyalise
. The entire deck is 1-mana cantrips outside of a couple key spells, so if you get a Gremlin on the board on turn 1 and a Song on T2, you can theoretically tap the Gremlin to cast spells, untapping it and going through the entire deck until you hit a
Grapeshot
to win the game. In order to cast Grapeshot, you need to pick up a
Claim the Firstborn
along the way, using full-control to double-untap the Gremlin for two mana.
Abundant Harvest
does a lot for deck, possibly allowing the deck to run even less lands. It can be a guaranteed cantrip while comboing off, or it can find a land in the first couple turns of the game to set up.
The Gremlin needs to survive. The theoretical alternative that dodges sorcery-speed removal is casting a
Claim the Firstborn
to give the Gremlin haste, in order to begin the combo instantly. This isn't that practical, but in theory it allows the deck to win after the game plays out a few turns past the comfort zone.
Rosethorn Acolyte
was a consideration, but it does half the jobs that Claim can do and tries to serve the same purpose. Since we only run 3 Claims anyway, I don't see it being useful yet. Maybe if the deck decides to run more 2-drops like
Explore
,
Growth Spiral
, and
Expressive Iteration
. These cards are interesting ideas, but they increase the complexity of the deck a lot, and the former two might require more lands and they also net less cards since you have to play the lands to break even on mana.
Expressive Iteration is good enough that I'm running two of them. If you Claim into Iteration, it can potentially save a game. It's so strong actually that it truly might be worth running 4 and increasing the Claims to a full playset.
Thermo-Alchemist
is cool, but not as good as the Gremlin for full-on combo potential because of the speed of playing the Gremlin on T1, and because the Alchemist does not trigger for enchantments such as
Unbridled Growth
. The damage is a nice idea, though.
The other unavoidable topic here.. the deck can be annoying to pilot. It would be more annoying with Explore, but it's still a bit funky. If you play it the theoretical ideal way, tapping out lands on T1 and T2 for the combo pieces, the deck generally runs fine. The problem is if you end up with untapped lands for whatever reason. You don't really want that anyway, because the lands are often more valuable pitched to a
Faithless Looting
than untapped on the board, but it can definitely happen that you play lands in effort to cast more cantrips to find the combo pieces in the first few turns.
So anyway, when this happens, the game wants to use the untapped lands to cast spells, and you don't want that. You want to keep the lands untapped and use the Gremlin, because he will untap anyway. So you end up having to manually tap the Gremlin for each spell cast, which is not ideal in the Arena engine. The best way around this is to either be tapped out on lands, which is perfect, or to cast an Expressive Iteration as soon as possible to use the mana and be tapped out. Unfortunately, you don't really KNOW that you're going to find a way to double-untap again before you are stuck with Grapeshot in hand, so its not perfect.
Since you're casting
Defiant Strike
s and giving the Gremlin trample, don't forget that you might have an extra few points of damage on the board after Grapeshot.
Maybe running only a single Grapeshot is appropriate,
Thoughtseize
wrecks us anyway so that's probably the case.
Thanks for reading, and enjoy!
