Animar Artifact Creature Storm | $100 Budget Animar, Soul of Elements Deck Tech

Animar, Soul of Elements | Illustrated by Peter Mohrbacher

Animar, Soul of Elements | Illustrated by Filip Burburan

Hey, Nerds! For this week's deck tech, I wanted to step away from the world of Duskmourn: House of Horror to talk about one of my favorite commanders: Animar, Soul of Elements artifact creature storm. Our strategy is pretty simple. We'll play a ton of artifact creatures to reduce their cost to zero, then use a variety of win cons to close out the game. 

Ramping

The ramp is pretty basic: it's creature-based. Since we have over 50 creatures in the deck and the combo is focused on creatures, I didn't want to waste valuable spots on Rampant Growths or Farseeks. The one piece of "ramp" I want to discuss is Meria, Scholar of Antiquity. The ability is what's tapping the artifacts, so even if a creature came into play this turn, we can use it to add a green. This is essentially budget Urza, Lord High Artificer for our deck. It lets us ramp and dig deeper to find combo pieces.

Card Draw

Card draw is key to find and win with our combo, and I wanted to make sure to include ways to get that stapled on bodies. My personal favorites are Canoptek Spyder, Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain, and Paradoxical Outcome. Not only can Paradoxical Outcome draw a million cards, it also acts as board wipe protection so we don't lose to a well-timed Farewell. To help filter our draws, I also included Abundance. Sometimes the key to winning is hitting playable cards, and this makes sure we get something to do with our mana.

The Combo

The primary card we are looking for is Ancestral Statue. It acts a self-contained Cloudstone Curio since Animar can reduce its casting cost to zero, allowing you to get infinite enters, storm, and leaves the battlefield triggers. Then all we need is Impact Tremors, Molten Gatekeeper, or Reckless Fireweaver to burn out the table. Alternatively, if we have one of our card draw creatures, we will find one of these win conditions. Finally, Aetherflux Reservoir also gives us the win by blasting the table. You could opt for some other storm cards, such as Grapeshot, Brain Freeze, or Mind's Desire. However, I wanted to stick with a more creature-centric build, so I excluded those.

Finding the Combo

Since Ancestral Statue is the linchpin for the deck, we need ways to get it out of our library. Fabricate is a cheap artifact tutor that does exactly that. We can use Neoform and sacrifice any number of our three-mana creatures to cheat it into play. And finally, Kuldotha Forgemaster lets us sacrifice some artifacts to cheat Statue directly into play at instant speed.

Protecting the Combo

To make sure we can assemble our combo, I included several pieces of recursion. We have the usual suspects with Myr Retriever, Scrap Trawler, Junk Diver, and Workshop Assistant, some of which are part of our back-up combo, which we will get to shortly. But what if Statue, or any of our artifact pieces, gets exiled? Well, Karn, the Great Creator can return exiled artifacts to our hand. That's right, his minus two ability lets us get stuff from exile, and it gives us the added benefit of turning off our opponents' artifacts. I didn't include Mycosynth Lattice to lock the game, but if you wanted to, I wouldn't blame you.

The Back-up Combo (Plan B)

I mentioned some cards being used in a back-up combo but unlike the above combo, this one requires four-cards - Sai, Master Thopterist, Myr Retriever, Scrap Trawler, and Ashnod's Altar. If you have Animar or some other cost reducer in play, you don't need Sai.

You need Sai, Scrap, and Ashnod's in play and Retriever ideally in the graveyard. Sacrifice Scrawp Trawler to Ashnod's and return Myr Retriever to your hand from the graveyard. Cast Myr Retriever using the two floating mana from Ashnod's. Sai triggers making a Thopter. Sacrifice Myr Retriever and return Scrap Trawler to your hand. Sacrifice the Thopter to add two more colorless. Then you cast Scrap Trawler and repeat the process. Even if we don't have Walking Ballista in hand, we can win with the army of Thopters.

The Back-Up Back-Up Plan (Plan C-Z)

Our back-up back-up plan is to just beat face, and thankfully artifact beatdown isn't hard to do. Steel Overseer can grow all of our artifact creatures, like Sharding Sphinx, Myr Battlesphere, and Kappa Cannoneer. If all else fails we have Chandra's Ignition to sacrifice a big creature and burn down the table. I wanted to add Fling effects to the deck, but that might be a bit too cute. 

Upgrades

If you want to spend a little bit more money there are some great upgrades you could make to the deck.

First would be adding Displaced Dinosaurs and cutting a big creature like Myr Enforcer. While Myr Enforcer does have affinity, I think Displaced Dinosaurs helps the beatdown plan a ton. It turns our cheap creatures, like Ornithopter and Thopter tokens, into 7/7 dinos.

All Will Be One is another combo finisher and just a general value engine for the deck. Every time Animar, or any of our creatures, gets a counter, we get to ping an opponent.

Cloudstone Curio has dropped to under $10 recently and lets us combo with any two cheap artifact creatures.

Urza, Lord High Artificer is a no-brainer to add as it turns all our artifacts into Mox Sapphire and lets us cheat cards into play.