I’ve featured Krark-Clan Ironworks decks in this space before. I like wacky combo decks and I like the fact that the cantrip artifacts you use to fuel the mana engine naturally give the deck the necessary velocity to set up the combo consistently.
But most KCI decks are really built around Faith’s Reward and Open the Vaults, like the old
The key is the combination of Myr Battlesphere and Sanctum of Ugin. Once you get to seven mana, you can cast Myr Battlesphere and sacrifice a Sanctum to find a second copy. Myr Battlesphere brings four friends with it, so you can generate ten mana by sacrificing all five creatures to Krark-Clan Ironworks, enough to cast the second Battlesphere with three mana floating.
From there a second Sanctum of Ugin can find your singleton Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. The second Myr Battlesphere gets you ten more mana, leaving you two short of casting Emrakul, which conveniently comes from sacrificing the Krark-Clan Ironworks to itself. Perfect!
Yes, finding two copies of a given land is tough, so you’ll often need to find more than one copy of the various creatures, but that’s not quite as difficult as it may seem due to the other innovation in this list, Scrap Trawler. Being able to chain your various cantripping artifacts with one or more Scrap Trawlers on the battlefield will quickly result in turns where you draw ten, fifteen, even twenty cards, provided you sequence carefully, which will certainly require some reps.
To me this evolution feels similar to Legacy Elves adding Natural Order and Craterhoof Behemoth. It’s strange to try to win small when you can go way over the top, but being able to win small from a lower base of resources gave that deck much more resilience than it used to have, and I’m hopeful that will be the case here.
As an added benefit, the removal of white cards frees up the space for Ancient Stirrings and Thoughtcast, which are absolutely phenomenal in this deck. Along with Mox Opal, this deck is utilizing narrowly powerful cards the way Elves uses Glimpse of Nature and Gaea’s Cradle, which is really exciting.
Just don’t run into too many Stony Silences.
Creatures (7)
Lands (15)
Spells (38)
