This deck is a modified version of fonzie of mythic gaming’s k’rrik a faster storm deck seen here: https://www.moxfield.com/decks/HYT9YcG0bEK1UMvmEEXtTA
All credit for the description of the write up and card effects goes to fonzie.
How to pilot K'rrik:
Play and cast K'rrik as fast as possible and hope he sticks around a turn (this usually involves mulling aggressively to fast mana or sequencing your rocks and land drops correctly) Advance your boardstate the same turn you cast K'rrik when possible and/or hold up interaction (usually removal to protect against cards like Gilded Drake) Tutor up fast mana, a ritual, or a mana enabler like Blood Celebrant to generate enough mana to cast your "winning" line of play (or if you have enough mana already, tutor up or cast your winning combo/line of play).
Essentially, we're aiming at starting the game with fast mana rocks and/or enough lands to progress a gameplan (depending on whats in our hand) when grabbing our openers. After verifying that we have enough lands/rocks to play the game (usually around 2-3 lands/rocks on average) we can then check for either interaction and/or tutors or potential lines of play that would lead to assembling one of our wincons. What you ultimately mulligan to would depend on turn order and what other lists are in the pod (for whether you can mulligan to a greedy keep with lots of rocks/fast mana or should be mulliganing to interaction/removal). Of course, piloting K'rrik is a bit more complicated than that, but thats a pretty good generalization of the overall gameplan. Just be vigilant of what type of pod your playing into as some lines of play (such as our creature based lines) play favorably to certain pods/environments vs our non-creature spell based lines.
Our Streamlined Wincons/Combos: This is how we actually win...
Winning with K'rrik These combos and lines of play require K'rrik in play and using his ability to pay life for mana costs.
The Chainer-Gray Loop The Chainer Loop consists of having K’rrik in play and assembling on board Chainer, Dementia Master, Gray Merchant of Asphodel, and Dimir House Guard. This can be achieved through manually tutoring for and casting each piece (the slow way) or by using the more efficient line of Buried Alive + a reanimation spell to put the three pieces into your yard and reanimate Chainer to commence the loop. If you do proceed to go this route, you will need a minimum of 10 life to commence this loop after reanimating Chainer. You will use 9 life to first reanimate Gray and net 21 life (assuming you only have K’rrik, Chainer and Gary in play, all three of your opponents are still alive, and your opponents have at least 7 life each) which will then give you the required 18 life to proceed to reanimate Dimir House Guard via Chainer's ability for 9 life, sacrifice Gray to Dimir's ability, and then reanimate Gray again using Chainer's ability for another 9 life.
Alternatively, you can cast Necrotic Ooze and Buried Alive to achieve the same effect (putting Chainer, Gray Merchant, and Dimir House Guard into the yard) without needing the reanimation spell since Necrotic Ooze gains all activated abilites of all creatures in all graveyards.
Additionally, with Chainer in play, you can use Dimir House Guard's transmute ability to tutor for Vile Entomber and cast Vile Entomber to entomb Gray Merchant making it an easy to assemble and hard to counter creature based line. If you only have Dimir House Guard and a reanimation spell, you can transmute Dimir for Vile Entomber and entomb and reanimate Chainer. Then you can use Chainer to reanimate Dimir, use Dimir to sacrifice Vile Entomber, and reanimate Vile Entomber to entomb Gray Merchant to assemble the Chainer-Gray Loop that way.
The advantage of the Chainer Loop is that, once assembled, it can win through Rule of Law & Null Rod type effects since it utilizes creature abilities instead of spell casts and can win at “instant speed” on the stack. You can also attempt to assemble this line using end step Necropotence shenanigans (see the Notable Tech and Strategy section for more info on this). The disadvantage to this combo is that there are several points in which it can be interacted with and it is highly vulnerable to instant speed creature removal.
Important Note - If Dimir House Guard is unavailable, we can alternatively utilize Vilis, Broker of Blood's ability to kill our own Gray Merchant for 29 life each cycle (20 life to kill Gary and 9 life to reanimate him)
Gray Merchant Manual Drain Depending on how low peoples life totals are and what you have on board, sometimes all it takes is 3 or 4 Gray Merchant ETB’s to drain the board. This can be achieved by having Gray Merchant as well as Dimir House Guard on board and casting, sacrificing, and reanimating Gray Merchant enough times to drain the board using our regular reanimation spells. There are enough reanimation spells to be able to achieve this feat.
Note: You can also use some of your own kill spells to kill off your own Gray Merchant if you dont have access to Dimir. Draining via Gray Merchant ETB’s is also a great way get around null rod effects to go for the win.
Aerflux Storm Lines Post PITA Aetherflux Storm Manual Storm & Aetherflux laser beams post Peer Into the Abyss - Sometimes it’s possible to accumulate enough life off Aetherflux to kill off the board from casting all your spells. The Vilis Engine Vilis, Broker of Blood + Aetherflux Reservoir + Blood Celebrant / Skirge Familiar - With this setup on board, we are able to use Vilis to draw cards, use Blood Celebrant to pay life for the colorless costs or use Skirge to discard cards to make mana, and net back our life and then some off of Flux for everything we cast. We can simply proceed to drawing cards and casting cards and shoot the board with Flux.
Note: You are able to "Start the Engine" without necessarily needing Blood Celebrant on board. It will be based more on luck, but it is very likely you will draw into some form of castable "free" spell or castable mana rock and cast it to "Keep the Engine Going" until you eventually draw into a castable tutor, Blood Celebrant, a way to get Skirge on board or stumble upon another combo-based win. The Asmodeus Engine Asmodeus the Archfiend + Aetherflux Reservoir + Blood Celebrant / Skirge Familiar - This setup is similar to the Vilis Engine, just more life intensive since we not only have to pay life to draw cards but we also lose life for each card drawn on top of having to pay life to cast spells. This line is still very much doable however.
Alternatively, with Necrotic Ooze on board and Asmodeus in the graveyard, we are able to achieve the same effect for much much less life.
Note: Similar to the Vilis Engine, you are able to "Start the Engine" without necessarily needing Blood Celebrant or Skirge on board. It will be based more on luck, but it is very likely you will draw into some form of castable "free" spell or castable mana rock and cast it to "Keep the Engine Going" until you eventually draw into a castable tutor, Blood Celebrant, a way to get Skirge onto the battlefield or stumble upon another combo-based win.
Winning with Aetherflux through Null Rod or similar:
If we ever face a situation in which there is a Null Rod effect on board and we don’t have removal for it, it is important to note that the Aetherflux trigger that happens when you cast a spell still works and you are still able to keep gaining life. You just aren’t able to shoot the table with Aetherflux’s laser beams. In such a circumstance Use Blood Celebrant to pay life for mana and proceed with The Chainer-Gray Loop or Gray Merchant Manual Drain.
Winning without K'rrik These combos and lines of play do not require K'rrik in play to assemble a win condition. Having K'rrik in play just helps make assembling these lines easier.
The Citadel Line Bolas’s Citadel + Sensei’s Divining Top + Aetherflux Reservoir - Bolas’s Citadel lets you cast spells from the top of your library. Having a Sensei’s Divining Top on board along with Citadel essentially means you get to draw a card at the cost of 1 life (after drawing a card and putting Top on top of your library). Add in Aetherflux Reservoir to the mix and you start netting an arbitrary amount of life after each cast which ultimately leads to laser beams.
The Asmodeus-Ooze Line Necrotic Ooze + Asmodeus the Archfiend + Skirge Familiar - The Asmodeus Ooze line consists of getting into play Necrotic Ooze and getting Skirge Familar and Asmodeus into the graveyard to begin the line (Alternatively, you can get both Necrotic Ooze and Skirge Familiar into play and Asmodeus into the graveyard to achieve the same results for the line). One of the easier ways to achieve this feat is by using Buried Alive to put all three cards into the graveyard and using a reanimate spell to reanimate Necrotic Ooze.
With Necrotic Ooze now in play, it gains all activited abilities of all creatures in all graveyards. This means that we can now discard a card to generate a mana and spend to draw 7 cards utilizing via Necrotic Ooze utilizing Skirge Familiar's ability and Asmodeus's first ability.
Note: Having Asmodeus in the graveyard and utilizing Necrotic Ooze to active the draw ability bypasses Asmodeus's Binding Contract effect.
To begin this line without K'rrik in play we require a way to generate 3 black mana. This can be achieved by either having access to the mana or having at least 3 cards in hand to discard for mana or some combination of both. Otherwise, we'd need at least 6 life using K'rrik's ability to pay life for the 3 black mana to start the line. Upon resolving the first activation of drawing 7 cards, we just need to discard 3 of the 7 cards we drew to generate the mana needed to activate the ability to keep drawing more cards.
Now that we have assembled the line, we are at liberty to draw out our deck, discard what we want to discard for mana, and play any cards we want or may need to play depending on boardstate.
With this established we are able to go into any of our wincons:
The Chainer-Gray Loop (Great if you need to win at "instant" speed or through Rule of Law) Gray Merchant Manual Drain Praetor's Grasp someone else's wincon using Blood Celebrant to convert mana into any color we need You can Praetor's Grasp someones Thassa's Oracle, use Blood Celebrant's ability to generate the blue mana and use the Asmodeus Ooze line to draw out your deck. Once you reach the last few cards of your deck, if there are less than 7 cards in your deck but still more than required to win via Oracle, instead of using Asmodeus's ability to draw 7 cards because that will cause you to lose, you can use any of the several tutors in the list to add the last few remaining cards to your hand to make sure you meet Thassa's Oracle winning requirements.
Other Notable Lines These are essentially "one-card" creature based line enablers that can lead to assembling one of our other wincons (such as the Asmodeus-Ooze line or the Chainer-Gray Loop). The benefit of these lines are that they are hard to counter and play favorably to a stax and slower midranged gameplans. The drawback, is that they are sometimes very life intensive and the lines may need to be spread over one or two turn cycles.
The Fleshwrither Line The Fleshwrither line leads to assembling the Asmodeus-Ooze line.
Cast Fleshwrither and use the Transfigure ability to tutor into play Necrotic Ooze Have Necrotic Ooze use Fleshwrither's Transfigure ability to tutor into play Balthor the Defiled Use Balthor's ability to put Necrotic Ooze and Fleshwrither from graveyard into play Transfigure Fleshwrither for Vile Entomber to entomb Asmodeus the Archfiend You now have Necrotic Ooze with Asmodeus in yard that you can use to draw the resources you'd need to finish assembling the Asmodeus-Ooze line.
You can either use a tutor to hand to tutor for Skirge Familiar and use Asmodeus's ability via Ooze to draw enough cards to force you to discard down to hand size at cleanup step (discarding Skirge and proceeding into the win at next upkeep) - This is usually the safer and easier way to do it - OR tutor for/use Entomb, Unmarked Grave or any other immediate entomb effect and use it to entomb Skirge to try to assemble the line and try to win on your turn. The Sidisi Line The Sidisi line requires K'rrik in play leads to assembling the Chainer-Gray Loop (assuming K'rrik is in play):
Cast Sidisi, Undead Vizier and use her exploit trigger on herself to tutor for Chainer, Dementia Master. Cast Chainer, Dementia Master and use his ability to reanimate Sidisi. Sidisi will enter and exploit herself again to either tutor for Gray Merchant of Asphodel (assuming you are able to hardcast him) OR tutor for Entomb / Unmarked Grave to entomb Gray Merchant. If you entombed Gray Merchant, use Chainer to reanimate him and gain life back; Otherwise, cast Gray Merchant to gain life. Use Chainer to reanimate Sidisi again, this time exploiting Gray Merchant to tutor for Culling the Weak. Reanimate Gray Merchant again gaining even more life and draining the board even more. Cast Culling the Weak, sacrificing Sidisi as cost and generate 4 mana. Use Chainer to reanimate Sidisi again, exploiting either herself if you want more tutors or Gray merchant if all it takes is one more life drain and tutor for Dimir House Guard. Use the mana you made from Culling the Weak to cast Dimir House Guard. You have now assembled the Chainer-Gray Loop and can proceed to win. Note: Depending on your life resources and mana available once you've reached the point where you have Chainer in play and Sidisi in yard, there are many options at your disposal as far as tutoring, just be conscious and what would be the most efficient use of your life, mana and tutors.
Strengths Our primary strength lies in our speed. We are able to cheat on mana by paying life and this enables some pretty explosive turns. We are able to proactively and consistently threaten win attempts turn 2-3 and surprisingly a high amount of times as early as turn 1.
Our second biggest strength lies in our abundance of tutors. Because we run so many tutors (and are able to cheat at mana) we can effectively search for our best lines towards assembling a wincon or search for needed removal/interaction really early on in our turns. Our tutors effectively become what we need, when we need it.
Our third biggest strength is our abundance of instant speed creature removal. Black is able to control the board in ways other colors don’t do as efficiently. Where we lack in counter spells, we make up for in board control.
Finally, our versatility in our wincons allows us to easily pivot towards a win line that can win through most board states.
Tech & Strategy Some cards you should take a closer look at...
Our "I Win" Cards: These are some of our "go-to" cards that usually end up winning the game if they resolve while K'rrik is in play on our field.
Vilis, Broker of Blood – Draw engine and removal on a body
Final Parting – Tutor to hand plus entomb effect all-in-one (Usually used to entomb Vilis and get Reanimate to hand OR Asmodeus to graveyard and Necrotic Ooze to hand)
Buried Alive – 3 entombs in one spell...yes, please! (Usually a win if a reanimation spell or effect resolves alongside Buried Alive)
Peer into the Abyss – Drawing half your deck usually leads to a win
Fleshwrither – One card combo chain that gets around Rule of Law...yummm
Dimir House Guard – Another Fleshwrither...how cool is that!
Other Utility Cards & Synergies: Skirge Familiar – This is one of our best utlility creatures as it functions as both a discard outlet and a source of mana production. This means that Skirge essentially functions as our second K'rrik and becomes a way to save life after resolving Peer into the Abyss, into Vilis storms or as a combo piece to the Asmodeus-Ooze line.
Heartless Summoning – A godsend of a card, especially with the new creature lines...Not only does it cost reduce K'rrik, it also makes all our creature lines virtually free to cast and substantially cheaper to execute.
Necropotence + Emergence Zone / Chainer, Dementia Master / Necrotic Ooze / Shallow Grave – Because Necropotence is a triggered effect that happens at end step, if we have an instant speed reanimation spell in hand, we are able to cast it in response to Necropotence’s exile trigger to attempt to do some end step shenanigans (such as reanimating a Vilis in an attempt to keep drawing and looking for more instant speed spells we can cast with the ultimate goal of assembling the Chainer line using our instant speed reanimation spells or having a Necrotic Ooze on board). This also allows us to get around Silence type effects which cease at end of turn (after discarding down to hand size). If we add in Emergence Zone to the mix, it enables us to potentailly attempt to assemble a win because we are able to cast spells during our end step before our opponent’s get an untap.
Fleshwrither / Dimir House Guard / Dimir Machinations – These are our utility "toolbox" tutors that can find several different targets depending on what we need.
High Market / Culling the Weak / Sacrifice / Several of our kill spells – Our utility sac outlets and some of our kill spells can be very useful in abusing our creature's effects, especially when combined with reanimation spells.
For example, you can stack several activations of Asmodeus the Archfiend's draw ability and use a sac outlet to sacrifice it in response to the Binding Contract trigger to prevent those cards from getting exiled and instead added to your hand directly.
