Penny Dreadful Temur Eldraziposts, Tron’s little (much cheaper) brother
If the images on this blog weren’t good enough of an indicator, the BFZ block smalldrazi have grown on me, a lot. And if you’ve been playing Penny Dreadful, the insane new format where every card in your deck must have cost 0.01 tickets at time of rotation, there’s a decent you’ve either seen me in the Discord group talking about this deck, played against me on MODO playing this deck, or seen the list on Tapped Out/Mtggoldfish.
But first, you haven’t heard of Penny Dreadful, then lets quickly introduce the format! At the beginning of each new sets release, a bot gathers card price data for the week before it, if a card’s price averages 0.01 event tickets, or tix (a penny, considering each ticket costs 1$) then it becomes legal if it isn’t already, if a card’s price averages 0.02 tix or higher then if it is legal it becomes illegal, and if its illegal it stays illegal. The card pool is vast, and the power level is quite frankly nuts, for more about the format, I’ll just point to Jennifer Long’s lovely article on the format on StarCityGame’s website, http://www.starcitygames.com/article/33860_Penny-Dreadful.html
Now, lets get to the meat and bones of this post, that being the deck I’ve fallen hopelessly in love with over the last few days, Temur Eldraziposts.
This is not the deck’s first iteration, starting as first Grixis Eldrazi Aggro, then becoming just Izzet, slowing down and using cards like Herald of Kozilek and Conduit of Ruin to make our deck play large threats quicker and more efficiently, and running the amazing Coax From the Blind Eternities to take situation game winners from the sideboard and put them into our hand exactly when we need them
We were essentially dropping Black mana in order to play larger, less colour intensive cards to get more worth out of Herald and Conduit of Ruin’s cost reduction, and it worked just fine, but I knew we could do even better. In come the ‘posts, Cloudpost and Glimmerpost.
Cloudpost is the more important of the two, quickly becoming a land that taps for two, three, four mana, and so on. Suddenly instead of just playing a five drop on turn four due to a single Herald, we could get a five drop on turn three if our lands were good, or we could take a slower path with turn three Herald, turn four Conduit into turn five Bane of Bala Ged/Breaker of Armies, or turn six Desolation Twin.
Yet it still wasn’t good enough. We had decent draw power in that version, but still sometimes we just couldn’t get the posts out early enough and had to use plenty of removal such as Brutal Expulsion and Ghostfire, or bounce spells like Repeal… Or Brutal Expulsion, but we’ll talk about Expulsion in a bit more detail later.
With this list, we made our first Penny Dreadful league run at 2 wins, 3 losses. Not great, but for a first brew in the format, my first time playing on Modo (shout-out to the amazing bakert99 for actually paying for my account when I couldn’t get money into my account before the end of the week), not knowing the format’s card pool to the point where we ran Blaze, when the strictly better Crater’s Claws was legal, and my first experience with the PD metagame (graveyard hate would have gone a long way in 2 of the 3 losses) its a wonder we won a single game at all. If you want to view this rough UR version of the deck, you can laugh at me via the below list.
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/493715#online
After much frustration, I realized that the way to bring this deck to its very best, is to try and focus more on the 8-post aspect. Instead of playing UR Eldrazi that had 8-posts in deck to help win eventually, with the help of a single green card, we could be a RUG deck that that focuses on getting those posts out as early as possible, and instead of occasionally getting a lucky hand that drops threats on turn 5, we can aim to start dropping them turn 5 on average.
So, after spending most of my time playing PD trying to make a flawed deck work, we have the most recent iteration of this Eldrazi deck, Temur Eldraziposts! There was one card in particular that made me realize that going three colour would be best, but there was a second that certainly sweetened the deal enough to sell me 100% of the way.
Slyvan Scrying is perfect in this deck, in our opening hand its essentially locus numbers 9-12, allowing us to fetch a post, either let us ramp harder with more Cloudposts, or grabbing Glimmerposts to help push our life total ahead against faster decks. But Void Grafter was a card I was unsure of at first, even thinking of just sideboarding it. It turned out to be an MVP, protecting our threats allowing them not just to come down fast, but stay out. While at the moment I’m not sure if we need four (perhaps a two-two split of main and sideboard would be best so we can mainboard more Eldrazi fatties), I haven’t regretted running four yet, so only time will tell.
We also upped the quality of our threats and made our sideboard even more Coax-friendly with a total of 8 Eldrazi cards in the sideboard. The rest is self explanatory, at least in my eyes.
Scrabbling Claws and Negate hit reanimation decks hard, either eliminating targets such as Worldgorger Dragon from the opponent’s graveyard, or countering their reanimation spells. Reanimator (minus Worldgorger/Necrotic Ooze Combo of course) is usually a fairly good match up post-sideboard, as if we can expand the gap between them discarding targets and actually putting them on board, we can often rush out sizable threats of our own to match them.
Then we have two more Brutal Expulsions, which we moved to our sideboard to maindeck two of Slagstorm, a card that hits no creatures of ours, and often is enough to single-handedly shut down aggressive decks that give us problems.
However, Brutal Expulsion, in the matches we want it in, is well, brutal. Against spells like Grixis/UR spells, Prowess decks, Emerge, any deck with Mom in it (remember, Devoid spells get around Mom’s protection!), it is often an easy two for one, sometimes more. Bouncing a spell and killing a small, often utility creature is a big swing, and Herald of Kozilek can let you do it for as little as two mana some games. It is by far my favorite non-creature spell from the BFZ block, at least out of the PD legal pool (who even cares about the rest?). Some games, we’d much rather just have Negates, or the the pair of Not of This Worlds. (Remember, they’re Eldrazi Tribal spells, Coax can fetch them if you’re worried about your opponent trying to kill your big, scary creatures!)
Each of the SIdeboard Eldrazi are designed not to be specific things for certain matchups, but to be a toolbox. Deepfathom Skulker will be useful if the game gets grindy and we need card advantage, Breaker of Armies very quickly gets rid of any pesky chump blockers, a second Artisian for games where we get multiple threats in the graveyard, and its just too valuable not to have as an option, Vile Aggregate for if we have plenty of Heralds and Void Grafter. Barrage Tyrant flings Eldrazi at the opponent’s face to win through blockers (or Ensnaring Bridge, if someone playing a modern deck wanders into Freeform, as happened to me once), Gravity Negator gives threats evasion cheaply, or can block small, annoying fliers.
But the best part of that sideboard package? Its fully replaceable! Have Eldrazi you think will be more important? That cover weaknesses that I haven’t thought of? Or that shut down certain deck types you’re scared of facing in a league run? As long as they fit into our 60% of the colour pie (plus colourless Eldrazi!) you can slot them in, and use Coax to pull em in when you need most.
I don’t know if I’d say this deck is anywhere near 5-0 worthy in league, but I hope to find out soon after more testing and potential tweaks, yet at the very least I’m confident in sharing this list, and hoping it can get more people into Penny Dreadful.
kaledo-art
annaxmalina
izzy806
pixelskylines
germansingergirl
baratheonpilled
