Endless fields of barley and death...
This is my Scarecrow tribal deck featuring Reaper King; it's the first EDH deck I ever made, and it's still probably my strongest. Sticks & Straw is reliable and beginner-friendly deck, but it also offers incredible rewards for acquiring deck knowledge - the more familiar you are with the cards and tools at your disposal, the more wild and fantastical your combos can become!
While playing Sticks & Straw is pretty straightforward, I did want to provide a little guide for the strategies I've found to work best over the years. This is one of my favorite decks because of how flexible it is, so none of this is set in stone, but I always find that having a goal in mind makes gameplay run much smoother.
Rickety First Step
The biggest character in this deck is Reaper King itself. The pumpkin lumpkin has a really strong ability that reads:
"" Whenever another Scarecrow comes into play under your control, destroy target permanent. ""
The first goal in almost any game is to get Reaper King out and in the fields as soon as possible. You can cast anything you want to do this, but my specific advice is to avoid casting any scarecrows until the grand gourd is already out on the field.
There are a few exceptions to this: Scuttlemutt, Oasis Gardener, and Pili-Pala to name a few. You can use these lil guys to fix your mana and ramp a bit. It is preferable to play them after Reaper King is out, but if they can help you get him out faster, then don't hesitate to use them early. Also, don't forget that Reaper King has a very unique mana cost:
Each of these can be paid with a specific color, or two 'any' mana. This means that two mana of any color, or even Sol Ring can help you mana fix.
Colorful Cornucopia
Fundamentally speaking, there are a limited number of scarecrow creatures in this deck, and that means that there's a limit on the number of times you can make use of Reaper King's fantastic ability... right? Well, get excited for all of the wonderful artifacts in Sticks & Straw!
This deck has a hand picked selection of over 20 artifacts that let you break the limit. Once the game has started, and the duke of daikons is out and frolicking, you're going to want to start looking into ways to create scarecrows every turn, and even create multiple scarecrows each turn. The way you do this is... well, that's the fun of the deck. You can get really whacky. There's too many combos to list here, but I'll give you a few going from basic to advanced:
Grim Poppet
+
MImic Vat
This combo is fantastic. Not only does it let you cast an expensive creature for less than half price, Grim Poppet has a really rude ability that lets you place -1/-1 counters on any target, for free, at instant speed. There are lots of combos like this in the deck, made possible by cards like Prototype Portal or Sculpting Steel. Making scarecrows by just copying them will work for most games, and is what I encourage beginners to focus on.
Prototype Portal + Sculpting Steel
More intermediate level combos involve targeting things other than scarecrows so that you can make more scarecrows. This is a pretty classic and straightforward example of that - multiple copies of Sculpting Steel means you can make copies of scarecrows whenever you want. But it also means you can make another Panharmonicon or six, double down on your Strionic Resonators, or just grab another Sol Ring for kicks and giggles.
Pili-Pala + Pili-Pala + Clock of Omens + Gilded Lotus
This combo gives you infinite mana of any combination of colors - it is wild, unhinged, completely impractical, and has actually won me two games before! To demonstrate the sequence: first tap Gilded Lotus for 3 mana, then use Clock of Omens to tap two Pili-Pala so that you can untap Gilded Lotus. Using 2/3 floating mana, untap the first Pili-Pala for 1 mana of any color, then use your remaining 2/2 mana to untap the other Pili-Pala for 1 mana of any color. Rinse and repeat.
March of Sticks
The last thing I want to touch on is managing table aggression and the sideboard.
For table aggression, it's not just that Reaper King is strong, it's that Reaper King can be really mean and un-fun. If you just want to win games with this deck, just cast Reaper King + Rite of Replication: Reaper King will trigger exactly 25 times, letting you destroy basically anything you want, and then no one will want to play with you again. Instead, my advice is to use the following few rules:
- Don't go after lands. Like, maybe if one player is really far ahead, but in general lands are the lifeblood of the game, and if you take someone's lands away from them you're basically crippling them for the rest of the game.
- Don't attack with Reaper King until he can OHKO. Reaper King is a strong monster in general, and he can be really hard to deal with. The Runes of the Deus cycle is in this deck so that, eventually, Reaper King can one shot a player with unstoppable commander damage. But that's after everyone has had time to build up and react to what's happening.
- Don't go infinite on mana. Of all the broken things this deck can do, going infinite on mana is probably the most common one. It's not even intentional sometimes - Rings of Brighthearth is just a really good card. But try not to do it.
This deck has a small selection of cards that tend to end the game quickly when paired with Reaper King. They are:
- Rite of Replication
- Blade of Selves
- Three Dreams
- Legacy Weapon
- Door to Nothingness
These aren't meant to be used as quickly as possible, but rather act like panic buttons - when a player is going to lose or win, and you don't want that to happen, grab one of these cards. This deck has a sideboard of other cards you can swap out and around these five. In general, the sideboard is also filled with panic button cards, they're just of different flavors and speeds.
