CUT #22 Finals - Okaun and Zndrsplt vs. Grenzo

Travis Stanley • June 30, 2023

Deckbuilding

It's been a little bit, but we are ready to see who made it to the finals of CUT #22! Last time, Sinclair, David, and myself battled it out with challenges that we each came up with. Let's see who made to today's article:

Great job, Sinclair and David! You both beat me and got to the finals. I promise I won't take it too personally.

My broken heart aside, let's see what challenges they face now:

  • You can only use cards in your 99 from 8th edition and earlier
  • Your Commander must have come from either Battlebond, Conspiracy, or Conspiracy: Take the Crown
  • You may use 10 cards that ignore the first challenge, but they must be from the same set as your commander.
  • (Travis's Challenge) At least five creatures must share a type

As you can see, since I lost, I got to tack on one more challenge. These challenges seem pretty tough, let's see how they handled it!

First up is David!

 

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Call it Friendo'

With only 22 commanders to choose from and a pretty tight deadline, my gut instinct was to go with Selvala, Explorer Returned. A Selvala deck with Panglacial Wurm would be a great way to simultaneously give your judge a headache, be the biggest nerd at the table, and potentially get disqualified all at the same time.

Alas, Panglacial Wurm is not from before 8th Edition. Instead I channeled all that chaotic energy into my real pick: Okaun, Eye of Chaos and Zndrsplt, Eye of Wisdom.

The Real Deal

So, with Wisdom and Chaos, what is our gameplan?

With our commanders out, we just need to flip coins until:

A) Zndrsplt draws us so many cards that we out value our enemies

B) Okaun gets big enough to start taking out other players

C) We win enough flips to win via Chance Encounter

Since we have time on our side, we need to sow enough confusion in order to complete our gameplan of flipping coins.

Hedging Your Bets

In traditional Okaun and Zndrsplt decks, we would want to manipulate coin flips with Krark's Thumb, and build around it. Sadly, that is not an option for us, so we must make up for a lack of quality with quantity. Our MVP here is Goblin Bomb. It's a flip every single turn, and if we get very lucky, we can sacrifice it late game for 20 damage to an enemy player. All for two mana, what a bargain!

There's a laundry list of honorable mentions. Cards like Orcish Captain, Goblin Festival, and Viashino Sandswimmer are all things we can dump mana into in order to generate a lot of flips in one go.

Go Big or Go Home

Mana is absolutely crucial in this deck, so included is some spicy mana acceleration. It's one of the few strengths of old cards. Sol Ring is a given, but we also have Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, Gauntlet of Might, Thran Dynamo, Mox Diamond, Ancient Tomb, and Fellwar Stone. Conspiracy gives us access to Treasonous Ogre, who usually is good for about 10 mana on the turn we need him.

In short, we broke the bank ensuring that this deck has the resources it needs.

Okaun is a core part of the deck, and our 99 gives him plenty of support. We have Power Matrix, Bestial Fury, and Aggression to give him trample. Relentless Assault and Aggravated Assault will get us some extra combat steps. It's worth noting that both our commanders trigger off additional combat steps. Sometimes it's worth paying for Aggravated Assault just for the extra coin flips.

Keeping Your Poker Face

Given that our goal is to sit back and flip some coins, the last thing we want is for other players to attack us. Crawlspace, Ensnaring Bridge, Silent Arbiter, Maze of Ith, Fog Bank, and Propaganda are there to ensure that the combat math to attack you is just too unpleasant.

There are a ton of coin-flip-related combat tricks. Chaotic Strike, Aleatory, Desperate Gambit, and Fighting Chance all change combat in one way or another, but most importantly they flip coins!

Our disposition should serve to unnerve our opponents. Avoid tapping out if you can to seem like you have an ace up your sleep. A little bluffing can go a long way.

We want the enemy to feel like the gas station attendant from No Country for Old Men facing down Anton Chigur.

Going All In

Now that we have all that pesky wisdom out of the way, we get to the chaos.

A core part of red's identity was expensive enchantments that altered how the game was played, and a bunch of them have coin flips. Bonus! Planar Chaos is a classic example. It makes it so spells have a 50% chance of being automatically countered when cast. Keep in mind, Zndrsplt lets us draw whenever a player wins a flip, so on top of that annoyance, we get value every time an enemy does resolve something.

I added a Show and Tell into the deck. Normally you'd play it alongside a big win-on-the-spot creature, like Craterhoof Behemoth, but here it's a political piece. You hope each of your enemies drops their best thing and fight it out. Maybe you use it to counterbalance the table against the strongest player. I felt that it fit the theme.

If things do go awry and your enemies have too many strong things, there is a theft sub-theme going. Dack Fayden will steal your enemies' best artifacts, Bribery gets their best permanent from their deck, Sower of Temptation and Control Magic their best creature. Stolen Strategy lets us play our enemies' decks if we like.

The last few cards are old weird cards to keep our opponents on their toes. Jester's Mask lets us sacrifice it to replace a player's hand with anything we like from their deck at instant speed. Teferi's Realm forces each player to phase out a card type they control at the start of their turn. This combines really well with Nevinyrral's Disk. Take a look through the list, and I guarantee you that you'll see a card or two that you've never seen before.

Cashing Out

This deck is filled with old and hard to find cards, which is a shame. I can't recommend going out and buying this deck, but, this would be the perfect deck to print out and bring to a casual/proxy friendly Commander night. Who knows, it might just be your lucky day.

Thanks, David! Hopefully the coin-flipping duo can flip you all the way to first place!

Now it's Sinclair's turn!

 

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This deck is trying to do three things in order to win:

  1. Get as many Goblins out as you can with Grenzo, Dungeon Warden's ability.
  2. Keep your opponents off of their mana base.
  3. Get close to infinite with Reito Lantern and Ashnod's Altar.

With Grenzo as the commander, you generally want to cast him for three mana so that his power is higher than the majority of the creatures in this deck, then start getting as many creatures out with his ability as possible. Theoretically, you can Amass enough Goblins with Siege-Gang Commander, Goblin King, and Goblin Warchief. Then all it takes is getting Goblin Pyromancer at just the right time and you can take out your opponents without much from the other parts of the deck. Due to the way Grenzo works, you don't care about having all that much mana most of the time, so you rely on constantly destroying all the lands on the field with cards like Epicenter and Cycling Decree of Annihilation to try and keep your opponents from amassing their own army of blockers.

In order to win with this deck the most consistent way, you'll need Ashnod's Altar, which is probably the most important card in this deck. Skirk Prospector and Phyrexian Altar can be imitations of it (while using Heartstone) to get to the two mana needed to activate Grenzo's ability and cycle through your deck until you can find the missing pieces of the combo. In order to find the combo, you need to have Reito Lantern, Ashnod's Altar, and Siege-Gang Commander. With these three, you can produce infinite mana and infinite Goblin tokens by looping the Siege-Gang Commander, then sacrificing it and the two Goblin tokens to make six colorless mana. Use three of that colorless mana to put Siege-Gang Commander on the bottom of your library and two of it on replaying the Siege-Gang Commander from the bottom of your library with Grenzo's ability. Do this loop approximately three-trillion times and then activate Grenzo's ability until you hit Triskelion, Goblin Warchief, or Skirk Prospector. You will win with near infinite damage by using the same loop with Triskelion, or get 3,000,003 hasty Goblin tokens, or deal infinite damage with Siege-Gang Commander's last ability sacrificing your Goblin tokens for the red mana needed. While Gamble and Demonic Tutor will help you get whatever missing piece you need into your hand to cast, Goblin Welder will bring back one of the pieces if it accidentally ends up in your graveyard early game.

Thanks, Sinclair! Ah, yes, a tried and true creature type, Goblins. Have been with Magic from the very beginning. Here's hoping they launch you to a win!

There you have it, the finalists for CUT #22! A big huge thank you to both David and Sinclair for coming back on and taking on another CUT challenge! You guys seriously are the best. Remember to vote for which deck you think did the most with the challenges presented, and make sure you come back next time where the winner will be revealed and we will meet our next batch of deckbuilders. Next time, we'll take a trip to Middle-earth, where the decks will be using cards from Lord of the Rings: Tales from Middle-earth! Thank you so much for reading and voting, until next time, remember, if you don't love it, CUT it!

If you or a friend would like to participate in a future CUT article, send an email to the.only.travis.stanley@gmail.com, or reach out to me on Twitter @chipman007!