Dear Azami: Havoc

While we have Kaladesh spoilers coming at us from all sides and plenty of interesting Commander cards to look at, I felt it made the most sense to wait until we’ve seen the set in full before we start chasing down its themes and building around its commanders. We had one more fascinating legendary creature from Conspiracy: Take the Crown that I was hoping to take a look at, and this is it: Grenzo, Havoc Raiser!

This is definitely a build-around-me Commander, one that is well-positioned to change the dynamic of the game around him by shifting each player’s priorities and messing with how the game will flow. Grenzo asks a key question: how good are the defending player’s creatures, and what kind of spells you might get to cast off the top of their deck? Inquiring suicidal Goblins want to know! Grenzo will ensure there is a lot more attacking going on than players tend to do when left to their own devices while also making sure that the bulk of this attacking is pointed at people other than you, which will keep games both interesting and fast-paced. Between the card advantage options and pushing your enemies to attack each other, this deck’s just going to be all sorts of nasty to play against once it starts rolling… so our job is to get it rolling.

For starters, I counted this as a 100-card deck, so we’ll need to shave a slot somewhere along the way. I think we can cut a few of the basic lands tactically for potent nonbasics; I’ve pulled five Mountains in order to add the following:

This deck can afford a few lands that enter the battlefield tapped, but not very many – from turn 2 onward we want to be maximizing our mana every turn, so we generally don’t want to have an opening hand with more than one land that starts tapped, because that slight mana stumble will snowball into larger efficiency losses turn after turn. That said, the first three lands are added solely to make up for the fact that this is not a color that is particularly good at drawing cards – we would like to be able to turn dead lands back into spells later in the game, so playing the set of cycling lands will help keep our draws live in those critical later turns.

The other two additions likewise contribute by offering us an important spell-like function to keep the volume of cards that do stuff in this deck nice and high. Spinerock Knoll is an actual free spell on any turn in which an opponent has taken seven damage regardless of who attacked them, so between your fast starts and the ability to Goad an opposing attacker, this is very likely to trigger at many points throughout the game. Homeward Path is a corner-case effect, and one that wouldn’t normally be worth $7 of your slim $40 budget as far as my priorities are concerned, but you really want to keep your creatures on your side of the battlefield tapped and attacking. It doesn’t hurt that the rest of the changes I wanted to make had otherwise only cost $25, so the budget had plenty of room and could afford to find room for a land that can shut down an entire class of cards that might trip you up.

It also doesn’t hurt that none of these creatures really work beneficially with Winding Canyons, tripping up my longest-running joke in the column by finding yet another deck where I just can’t justify cutting a basic and adding a Winding Canyons, and this deck is far too active to want a Thawing Glaciers. The pricey utility-land competition thinned itself out pretty neatly here, as we wanted the one that kept damage rolling rather than any of the ones that build up slow advantages later in the game. Grenzo is not all about the late-game; Grenzo is a wise Goblin who knows that, on a long-enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone falls to zero.

Moving on to the artifacts, we have four cuts but only three additions here in order to get us back down to 99 cards. I am not really liking the three- and four-mana ramp cards existing here solely to afford good spells off the top of our opponents’ decks; if it’s not helping us cast our own spells, it’s not really helping. We can always plan to Goad opposing creatures into attacks rather than flip cards off the top of their deck with any extra triggers, and I think I’m expecting that to happen a lot more often than this build suggests. Your average turn will probably involve attacking for several Goad triggers and two or three flips off of the top just to keep the action flowing, and we’re likely to find cards in the six- and seven-mana range that is the sweet spot for this format rather than have to worry about affording a nine-drop. We don’t want to go too far overboard with ramp cards that don’t easily help us accelerate our own threats out faster, so I’d rather focus on cheaper ramp rocks that help power our own cards first, even if they are less potent later on.

That means Worn Powerstone and Hedron Archive are both targeted for a cut; I don’t think we’re ever really planning to cash the Archive in to draw two cards, so Thran Dynamo is just strictly better and likely still earns its keep since you can deploy it and most of your Equipment cards in the same turn. I also want to cut Quietus Spike, as I don’t think this particular piece of Equipment is really helping much, and I’m likewise cutting Staff of Nin because I believe this deck doesn’t want to deploy very many six-drops itself. We really need to drop our curve considerably here, and most of my changes will operate around that hypothesis… we’re going to lean on our Commander to serve as our personal Howling Mine rather than the Staff, and that’s just more fun anyway!

Adding back in, I want to give this deck a Mimic Vat so it can keep the pressure on and maybe even keep the card advantage rolling – it copies our creatures and our opponents’ with equal aplomb so long as something has died and gone to the graveyard. And to replace the mana rocks we cut, I’ll add a Mind Stone and an Everflowing Chalice – the Chalice can still be that Hedron Archive if you want it to be on turn 4, but it can also be played on turn 2 or 3 to great effect and we’ll appreciate its flexibility more than we will the Archive’s ability to turn into two cards later on. This helps us to both drop our curve and play our cards faster, both of which match my goals for fixing this deck’s flow during a game.

Moving on to the spells, I have five cuts to make and four additions – I wanted room for one more creature card, overall since this deck is going to work or not work based on its ability to deploy a critical mass of creatures and I wanted one more attacker rather than one more supplemental spell. My cuts are as follows:

Fury of the Horde – This deck does benefit from Relentless Assault-style effects, but I just don’t think we’re going to have a lot of extra red cards in hand to pitch to this. Or to perhaps put it more succinctly, I suspect those two red cards will be quite a bit more valuable than an extra combat phase might be, and that we can afford to play the lower-cost versions of this spell just fine already and don’t need so pricey a discount on the seven-mana version.

Shattering Spree – Your metagame may vary, but this is a card that is either going to demolish an opponent or sit in your hand completely useless and you don’t get to know which before you decide what deck you want to play. Removing an opponent from the game is just as effective as destroying their artifacts, and you’re a pretty aggressive deck already if you want to be. The utility you’re seeking from this card might otherwise be replicated by using the Goad side of Grenzo more – get your opponents fighting amongst themselves and they’ll either take each other out or soften each other up. I’d rather just outright kill an opponent who’s meddling around with their artifacts than rely on playing a powerful but narrow spell.

Faithless Looting – There are decks where this card is welcome and then there are decks who find every resource to be scarce; this deck is one of the latter. Rather than filtering your draws, you want to start flipping over cards off the top of your opponents’ decks… every card we draw has to be worth a card’s worth of stuff to you, smoothing your draw is good but ending up down a card at the end is decidedly not.

Outpost Siege – I am skeptical that this will be worth casting for the damage side of the card, and flipping an extra card off of the top of our deck each turn is not nearly as much fun as flipping one off the top of an opponent’s. Card advantage is generally good, but in the context of this deck it’s not really valuable to us to flip over one of our cheap drops later in the game and then elect to cast something huge thanks to Grenzo’s trigger instead. Our stuff gets outclassed so quickly that the conditional card-draw is just not really worth it to us, once we get rolling we’re going to be fine either way.

Rage Reflection – Too many six-drops. I’m still happy to keep Berserkers’ Onslaught because it at least costs a mana less, but six mana is just too much. I’ll be cutting something like half of the expensive creatures in the deck for the same reason, so we might as well get it started here.

Adding back in, I wanted an efficient token-maker, another weird old card that will make it harder for our opponents to block, and a bit more removal while we were at it. Hordeling Outburst is nothing special to write home about, but it’s really efficient at what it does, setting up Grenzo’s triggers quite nicely even if you lose a Goblin or two while we do it. Once an opponent’s Goaded and started attacking each turn, it’ll get easier to get those triggers in, so we care more about the fact that this generates three creatures than we do about the fact that they’re only 1/1s. As for the Weird Old Card department, I found you this one:

While it’s true that your opponent’s ground-pounders will still be able to block yours just fine, inverting which creatures have flying is a potentially valuable evasion tool. For a low investment, those Goblins may just take to the sky and make peoples’ lives miserable.

For the removal effects, I added the following:

I have nothing but good things to say about Meteor Blast, as it scales to the level of however much mana you have available to you and can mess over multiple opponents at the same time while generating a quite nice many-for-one card advantage. While not quite as efficient as overloading Mizzium Mortars, it makes up for that fact by being able to deal damage to players as well as creatures. This deck has a lot of chip-shot effects that get a bit of extra damage in, like Ankh of Mishra, so every card that just happens to add a bit of damage to an opponent will add up. Also, whenever your removal-light deck can favorably compare a card to overloading Mizzium Mortars, that card’s probably going to be worth considering.

This also explains the last addition: even without any ability to manipulate the top of your deck or find Bonfire of the Damned when you need to draw it, just having it in your deck means that sometimes, just sometimes, you’ll miracle a Bonfire of the top and wreck somebody. When your deck has a lot of removal already, the Bonfire becomes less important… but with only a little bit of removal, that Bonfire will have an outsized impact on the game whenever it comes up.

This leaves us with just the creatures to get straightened out, and as a rule we’re going to be cutting seven-drops here in order to make room for more cards in the two-to-four-mana range so we can get ahead on the board early in the game and start Grenzo’s snowball effect rolling. We’re also going to cut some of the more corner-case cards that might just be entirely wrong for any given table rather than awesome when they hit exactly the right opponent in favor of cards that are going to be 80% as good in 100% of the games, increase the deck’s removal a little bit more here while we’re at it and focus on dropping the curve.

I have nine cuts I want to make and ten additions, so let’s see what it is we’re leaving on the cutting-room floor…

Our first three additions are all going to focus on bringing that curve down and two of them also exist to keep hassling our opponents on the nonbasic-land vector that is already a minor theme here to keep opponents under pressure from Zo-Zu and Ankh of Mishra:

Iron Myr isn’t fancy, but like Palladium Myr it’ll get the job done and can contribute later on to triggering Grenzo, even though it’s only a 1/1. The two Miners are here to keep the opponent honest and prevent anyone from getting too far out ahead; if someone’s a dedicated ramp deck, your other two opponents won’t really think you’re being mean or unfair if you blow up a nonbasic land a turn and may even applaud you for doing so. Breaking up land combos like Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth plus Cabal Coffers or being able to kill a Maze of Ith that’s otherwise in your way is likewise potentially fair game as well. The important thing to remember is that you want the ability to do so, but this doesn’t require you do it. The threat of the card is almost as potent as the card itself, as you’re not actually getting a very good deal spending your turn tapping three mana and a Miner in order to blow up one person’s land – two whole other opponents will continue developing their battlefield while you don’t, leaving you behind in the exchange. I’ve happily played both in mono-red Commander decks for some time now to good effect, and the key to their use is moderation and reading the table. You never want to use them to keep someone down because that’s the ultimate feel-bad moment of the format, but keeping somebody honest is perfectly fair.

Two of our additions are going to help supplement the deck’s removal package, and either of them will work quite nicely stuck under a Mimic Vat while we’re at it:

Good old Flametongue Kavu is all but guaranteed to kill a relevant creature and provide a solid body, while Cyclops Gladiator is one of those weirdly forgotten cards that doesn’t see a lot of play in the format and continually flies under the radar because it didn’t ever break into a Constructed format. As a three-mana 3/3 it would have owned two years of Standard, but that fourth mana effectively precluded it from really finding a home and the triple-red casting cost keeps most Commander players from looking at it twice. But we’re playing a mono-red deck that has Equipment to boost our creature stats and plenty of ways to give red creatures +1/+1 to boot, so this is going to potentially pick off a key creature each combat for free while attacking for a good chunk of damage. Add in the fact that it can potentially clear your opponent’s only available blocker and keep Goading the rest of their creatures to keep them tapped turn after turn and this is a strong addition even if it’s not a consensus format all-star.

Our last five slots are going to be dedicated to playing around with token creatures some more, as we want to keep building up our side of the board with plentiful bodies and can rely on Grenzo and the rest of our cards to make those bodies relevant. One of these cards is a little weird, but that’s a feature to you rather than a bug… the other four are pretty straightforward as token-makers and will churn out bodies for Grenzo to put to work without minding the inevitable attrition rate that comes from attacking real cardboard with 1/1 tokens.

The Spiritbinder takes some work to make it happen, but the same kind of work your Commander is already focused on – and one inspired trigger will have a habit of leading to more of them as the benefits accumulate, especially when Grenzo is helping to clear the way by Goading your opponents’ suitable blockers. The only thing that stands out here as unusual is Chancellor of the Forge, and that’s just because I was cutting the expensive drops… I’m willing to make concessions in that regard for a creature that is just so on-plan, as immediately doubling the number of creatures you have available to you will just overwhelm the board with chump attacks and Goad triggers and completely shift the game as soon as it lands. That’s far better in-context than any of the Dragons we’d cut, even the ones with interesting combat damage triggers, because those little 1/1’s can potentially turn the tide against a board of far superior creatures.

Putting it all together, we get the following:

Commander: Grenzo, Havoc Raiser

Sean McKeown

Test deck on 11-30--0001

Commander

Creatures (32)

• 1 Zo-Zu the Punisher
• 1 Godo, Bandit Warlord
• 1 Dwarven Miner
• 1 Iron Myr
• 1 Dwarven Blastminer
• 1 Orcish Squatters
• 1 Flametongue Kavu
• 1 Homura, Human Ascendant
• 1 Taurean Mauler
• 1 Stigma Lasher
• 1 Kazuul, Tyrant of the Cliffs
• 1 Cyclops Gladiator
• 1 Inferno Titan
• 1 Steel Hellkite
• 1 Palladium Myr
• 1 Chancellor of the Forge
• 1 Urabrask the Hidden
• 1 Balefire Dragon
• 1 Instigator Gang
• 1 Pyreheart Wolf
• 1 Hellrider
• 1 Krenko, Mob Boss
• 1 Hellkite Tyrant
• 1 Goblin Diplomats
• 1 Felhide Spiritbinder
• 1 Archetype of Aggression
• 1 Goblin Rabblemaster
• 1 Paragon of Fierce Defiance
• 1 Flamerush Rider
• 1 Pia and Kiran Nalaar
• 1 Scab-Clan Berserker
• 1 Hanweir Garrison

Lands (36)

• 29 Mountain
• 1 Smoldering Crater
• 1 Forgotten Cave
• 1 Blasted Landscape
• 1 Spinerock Knoll
• 1 Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle
• 1 Homeward Path
• 1 Hanweir Battlements

Spells (31)

• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Ankh of Mishra
• 1 Price of Progress
• 1 Bonesplitter
• 1 Tenza, Godo's Maul
• 1 Grafted Wargear
• 1 Whispersilk Cloak
• 1 Savage Beating
• 1 Fireshrieker
• 1 Chaosphere
• 1 Mind Stone
• 1 Ruination
• 1 Bedlam
• 1 Thran Dynamo
• 1 Everflowing Chalice
• 1 World at War
• 1 Mimic Vat
• 1 Strata Scythe
• 1 Caged Sun
• 1 Chaos Warp
• 1 Swiftfoot Boots
• 1 Curse of Stalked Prey
• 1 Bonfire of the Damned
• 1 Mizzium Mortars
• 1 Five-Alarm Fire
• 1 From the Ashes
• 1 Hordeling Outburst
• 1 Break Through the Line
• 1 Mob Rule
• 1 Berserkers' Onslaught
• 1 Meteor Blast

As always, for your participation in this week’s edition of Dear Azami you will be receiving a $20 coupon to the StarCityGames.com Store. You’d asked to keep the budget to $40 and we ended up keeping it under $35, even after swapping out a Mountain for a costly Homeward Path that will only come up in a quarter of your games at most. You don’t need a big budget to get an interesting deck built around a synergistic Commander; none of the cards in this deck are particularly expensive, but it will still work quite well at its appointed task of swarming opponents with Goad triggers that keep them at each others’ throats and flipping extra cards off of the top of their deck turn after turn. Big, interesting, and fun things should happen even though your opponents’ cards will all be bigger than yours – it’s just going to be more satisfying to you when you beat them with those cards because you didn’t have to draw them; that’s what your stupid Goblin tokens are for.

Pricing them out individually, our additions cost as follows:

With Kaladesh soon to be revealed in full, I expect we’ll probably start working on Commanders from that set as early as next week… so if you have a particular favorite from the new legendary creatures spoiled so far, feel free to let us know by building a first draft of a deck for them and submitting it via the email link below. Rashmi, Eternities Crafter is obviously quite powerful and Kambal, Consul of Allocation is so Orzhov it hurts, but to me the most flavorful new Commander released so far is Depala, Pilot Exemplar – who doesn’t find the idea of Dwarves-in-Cars Tribal an interesting idea?

But enough about what I find fascinating. We all know I can be dazzled by the silliest of things… what Kaladesh Commanders have caught your interest? Let us know and we can start building around ’em!

Want to submit a deck for consideration to Dear Azami? We’re always accepting deck submissions to consider for use in a future article, like Brendan’s Queen Marchesa deck or Kat’s Bruna, the Fading Light deck. Only one deck submission will be chosen per article, but being selected for the next edition of Dear Azami includes not just deck advice but also a $20 coupon to StarCityGames.com!

Email us a deck submission using this link here!

Like what you’ve seen? Feel free to explore more of Dear Azami here, in the Article Archives! And feel free to follow Sean on Facebook… sometimes there are extra surprises and bonus content to be found over on his Facebook Fan Page as well as previews of future columns!