Good day, folks! It's been ages since I've found the time to dive into a passion of mine—brewing MTG decks. This started as a hobby and ended up with me playing and brewing decks for a team on the tour. Those were the old days. Now I'm busy running a business, but the passion never died. Now YOU lucky few from HIVE get the glory of a washed-up ex-pro’s janky-ass deck brews!
I just downloaded MTG Arena again—by far my #1 way to play Standard. I've been out of the game for a while, so I wanted to play a format with a lower power level. After skimming through some sets I missed, I found a sleeper card, Starscape Cleric, and I HAD to brew around it. This little gem gave me an idea for a deck, involving another white card I came across, Raise the Past.
Just like that, we're back, baby! Here’s what I’ve been COOKING fools on the ladder with—my homebrew Juiced Graveyard deck.
Our strategy is fairly simple but very strong. We want to get as many lifegain triggers as possible to trigger our second effects. We play lots of 2 mana or less creatures that get us life when another creature enters, and they all stack.
With those in play we can get both Starscape Cleric and Amalia to abuse thier ability. One will deal damage each seperate time we gain life, and one will explore each seperate time we gain life. Explore is nice because it can move creatures into your graveyard... more on that later.
We can abuse these triggers with a couple of creatures in our graveyard. Using Raise the Past, we’ll get exponentially more triggers with each creature we return. Lucky for us, we can return EVERY SINGLE CREATURE in our deck. All of them stack triggers with each other.. See where I am going with this?
We can win just by building a decent board of creatures, having them attack, or stacking up triggers. We more often win by getting a few creatures into our graveyard, then returning them all at the same time. This can be done simply by blocking, eating removal spells, or the occasional self-mill/explore/surveil. We play a few cards to help move things to the graveyard, along side the explore from Amalia.
All in all, I haven’t seen anyone playing this nonsense on the ladder yet, and it’s been crushing. This could very well be a sleeper deck, an outlying Tier 1 deck, but it needs more testing in Mythic.
It plays as a combo deck with the reanimate game plan but builds a board faster than some aggro decks. It's also a combo-type deck that has a VERY good matchup against mono-red. Rare.
Cheers, I’ll be back with another mess sometime soon! <3