The main ideas here are simple, generate an overwhelming number of wolves. Mana ramp into some big enchantments early that make your tokens simply out of control.
We're using Avacyn's Pilgrims and
Scorned Villager
s to mana ramp ourselves into our enchantments. Then we'll kill them off to help Kessig Cagebreakers or wait until they've been bolstered by Cathars' Crusade and simply use them to Feed the Pack.
The big enchantments in this deck are all fantastic alone, but shine like the fist of the north star when working in tandem. Parallel Lives is self explanatory, Cathars' Crusade is simply ridiculous with multiple tokens hitting the battlefield (e.g. Huntmater of the Fells and his wolf both enter with +2/+2 and put a +2/+2 on every other creature you have; with Parallel Lives out, he'll bring in 2 wolves, giving everything +3/+3). Feed the Pack is great later to sacrifice your mana dorks (which are probably 4/4 - 6/6 now thanks to Cathars' Crusade which will net you 4-6 wolves at a time. That makes Cathars' Crusade go nuts. If at any point two of these enchantments stay on the field at a time, in any combination, the game will end quickly. With only one enchantment, you still have a large advantage. If, by chance, they all get destroyed, you can still play the waiting game, boost your creatures with
Elder of Laurels
, use Ulvenwald Tracker to take out anything your creatures are capable of killing, and simply build up a wolf token army.
Kessig Cagebreakers,
Mayor of Avabruck
, Huntmaster of the Fells
and later, Feed the Pack all spawn wolves. With the mayor, you can start making wolves fast. With Parallel Lives on turn 3-4, you really start pumping a scary number of free wolves out per turn.
Mayor of Avabruck
bumps your humans up and then your wolves.
That's the straight forward goal of the deck: overrun the opponent with big wolves.
The utility and combos in this deck go deeper, however.
I haven't seen a deck make better use of the
Elder of Laurels
. His ability benefits from having many creatures (this deck is a token producing machine) and his ability can be used at least four ways in this deck (but I know I've used it in more ways than these).1) Pump up something to be sacrificed to Feed the Pack to potentially double the number of creatures you have each turn.2) Pump up any individual wolf that gets past your opponent's blockers, going right for the jugular.3) Pump up at creature to be Sheltering Worded for a big heal.4) Pump one of the tokens up to take out a large creature that is blocking.
With AVR, the deck has undergone serious changes to take advantage of Cathars' Crusade and Ulvenwald Tracker. Ulvenwald Tracker was exactly what this deck needed. With those 3 cards, two problems for this deck have been solved. With him, you can order your large wolf tokens to shred flyers and destroy annoying 1/1 utility creatures that never attack.
Sheltering Word is good to save a creature from removal, but also stays relevent as a heal later while all your creatures get bigger.
Increasing Savagery can blow something up really high, making for enormous Sheltering Word heals, gigantic Feed the Pack sacrifices, or simply give you board control. Of course, this puts a bullseye on a creature's head for removal, but that's what the Sheltering Words are for; you're anticipating it'll be the target of removal, so you can negate a removal and heal yourself for massive amounts in 1 shot. Always drop Increasing Savagery on a mana dork if you don't have a Sheltering Word handy. You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket if that's the case. If this is on a dork, your opponent has to decide if he wants to remove a threatening dork OR one of your powerful token creator's; either way, something lives and that's a win-win for you.
Lastly, this is Garruk Relentless
's deck. Period. Every ability he has synergizes with this deck.
