It’s the second game of your Reanimator mirror match. You keep a strong, fast hand and open up with a Careful Study, discarding a fattie in the process. Your hand looks good, but your opponent looks suspiciously happy too. On her turn, your opponent casts Reanimate targeting your monster and proceeds to beat you to death with it! Oh well, maybe you’ll take the next game…
With four Reanimator decks in the latest StarCityGames.com Legacy Open tournament, the possibility of a mirror match has turned into a reality. If the deck remains popular going into the summer, the players who are knowledgeable about how to act and when to act in the Reanimator mirror match will have a definite edge. Little has been written about how modern Reanimator deals with itself in a tournament, so this column will outline how to get those edges you need for success.
For a deck that is so fast in the first game, Reanimator slows down into a very different deck postboard when facing another Reanimator deck. The reason is that both decks are good at disruption and they have a strange tendency to play cards that will help the other Reanimator player just as much. Your Exhume, after all, will work for everyone at the table. Thus, the key to mastering the Reanimator mirror match is understanding the give and take; when to go for it and when to sit on cards. In this article, I’ll discuss these issues, especially regarding postboard games.
First, we should understand why sorcery-speed spells affect how we play. All of the relevant spells for getting a monster into play are sorceries; you cannot respond to an opposing spell with a sorcery and you have to tap mana on your turn to accomplish the task. Ergo, we want to develop a good manabase in play; three lands is plenty to make everything happen in Reanimator mirror matches. The decks packing Dark Ritual have a slight edge in this regard because they can use the spell to accelerate a Thoughtseize into an Entomb or Exhume.
Next, we have to look at the process of actually getting our creatures onto the battlefield. This happens with either putting them in the graveyard or using Show and Tell to play them from our hand. You absolutely must be careful with Entomb; as mentioned earlier, a quick Entomb for an Iona can help your opponent, who can even spend a Mystical Tutor to find their Reanimate. Careful Study is also risky; you ideally should have a reanimation spell to back up the card. Show and Tell is a convenient way to avoid the graveyard and the hate directed at it, but it also lets the opponent get out one of their own monsters, which may trump yours. For example, an Empyrial Archangel will block just about anything you can deploy.
Let’s talk about those creatures you can put out. If you have an Entomb and the opportunity to bring back a target, I suggest getting Iona, Shield of Emeria if possible. Naming Black, she shuts down the opponent’s reanimation and also cuts off a lot of their sideboarded answers like Diabolic Edict. Coming up next on the list is Terastodon. As a 9/9, this angry elephant will tear through anything in its way. You can modulate its ability to make fewer than three tokens, and you can hit your own permanents as well. Turning excess lands into eighteen power of attackers the next turn is potent indeed! Empyrial Archangel and Blazing Archon are both good at defense, though lackluster as attackers. I would recommend siding out some number of beasts, since they can end up as dead draws, but you would also run the risk of having too few creatures in the face of graveyard hate. Opposing Reanimator decks often run at least one Coffin Purge, and an opponent with two at their disposal can blast through a lot of your creatures before you get a chance to pull them out.
One saving element of Entomb that makes it potent is its instant speed. In response to an opposing Exhume, you can get a creature of your own, even an Iona to legend-kill theirs. Alternately, you can use it to make sure an Exhume of yours is still effective; because the sorcery does not target, you can use Entomb to get a creature with Exhume still on the stack and reanimate it instead. Because of its flashback, Coffin Purge is a natural partner with Entomb. Because of these factors, I keep my Entombs in, though I substantially slow down the time that I cast them, preferring to use them in reactionary applications.
There are two distinct play strategies that you can employ, based on how risk-adverse you are. You can go for a quick creature, aiming to knock out the opponent quickly. If you can get an Iona out on the first or second turn with disruption or backup, this is a good strategy. If you have a more mundane hand, though, you should consider slowing down and using your cantrips and search differently. A Mystical Tutor is a potent weapon in this match because it can get Diabolic Edict, Show and Tell or Coffin Purge. If you use the tutor to get a Coffin Purge, you force the opponent to spend two cards to overcome it in basically any situation. Otherwise, they will have to use Show and Tell. If you are going for the strategy of clearly getting the Coffin Purge, make sure you have a monster in your hand to match theirs, in case they try to Show you something.
Sideboarding is often based on what you want to bring in instead of what you’d like to take out. While some decks have cards that are just plain dead in certain matchups (Swords to Plowshares against combo, for example), Reanimator has no such problems. Therefore, consider what cards you should bring in and what you should be concerned about. Both you and your opponent will have some graveyard hate and either a kill or bounce spell to pack. You will be bringing in between two and five cards, and what you take out for those cards is somewhat dependent on how you want to play. Dazes are moderately good; since Reanimator is mana-light, you can frequently have effective Dazes into the mid-game. However, they are much worse on the draw, since your opponent will always have a land more than you, so it’s an easy decision to take them out for sideboard cards.
Consider how Force of Will operates in the Reanimator mirror. It will often be used to back up one of your spells or stop a creature that you cannot remove from the graveyard. In the meantime, you will spend a Mystical Tutor or cantrip to fuel it. In that regard, Force of Will is a very costly spell to cast. You have more efficient alternatives, like Coffin Purge or a Mystical Tutor for Diabolic Edict. I know it sounds terrible, but you should think about whether you want to keep all copies of Force of Will in. I am comfortable swapping one out for a boarded Duress or Thoughtseize all day long. Past that, it’s hard to shave anything else out; you can cut an Exhume because they are symmetrical and a Careful Study because you can’t safely cast them early. Past that, if you run a Sphinx of the Steel Wind, you can cut that; it’s usually the least powerful creature in the mirror.
Reanimator decks differ on the number of Duress effects that they run, and that influences whether you want to go for Show and Tell or not. For decks that run up to six of these effects, Show and Tell is great because you can take a peek and see if they are sandbagging a creature. Thoughtseize will even clear it out of the way! For a deck that needs to conserve its hand disruption spells, though, Show and Tell is often too costly to bring in a second copy without some Edict-style creature removal to back it up.
Since you have to build a different sideboard for each tournament, I can’t pin down an exact one to use, but there are some recurring themes. If you plan to face many other Reanimator decks, then two copies of Coffin Purge are essential. If you cannot stop the monster from hitting the table with those, a Diabolic Edict is also crucial because you can tutor it up so easily. Gatekeeper of Malakir plays the same role, but it cannot be found with Mystical Tutor, so you still need the Edict. I like another Duress or Thoughtseize, which can come in if you have the room. You also have to think about how you’ll deal with Blazing Archon. As a creature, you cannot kill it with Terastodon, and if it’s protected with another beast (or the Jesse Hatfield tech of fetching a Dryad Arbor), you can’t clear it out with an Edict. I really don’t want to bring in a Wipe Away/Echoing Truth for it, but those cards can be helpful in taking out an Iona naming black too. Though Extirpate is very uncommon in paper Reanimator decks (it’s prevalent in online Legacy), it serves three valuable purposes. It will obviously foil a reanimation plan or scoop out Coffin Purges, but it will also afford a glimpse into the opponent’s hand and foil a Mystical Tutor. I suggest running no more than one; they’re very useful in other matchups as well, so I would likely have an Extirpate on my board.
But beyond the specific cards that you bring in, your play style will influence your success the most. Enough play and practice will help you realize those comparatively rare times when you can go for it fast and heavy, and those other times when sitting on an Entomb for several turns is preferable. You can easily punish an opponent for making mistakes — using that Brainstorm to get a fattie when they cast Show and Tell or jumping an Entomb in right before their Exhume, for example. Reanimator is the best-performing deck right now, so if you plan to play it, know how to beat the top-table competition!
Until next week…
Doug Linn
legacysallure at gmail dot com
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