Flavor of the Month: Strictly Butter

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We're Crab People Now

Welcome to Flavor of the Month, where we use cards' flavor as a recipe for building decks! Often in this column, we focus on flavor text, but what...okay, hear me out: what if we checked the flavor by eating the cards?

Whatever you do, don't eat the delicious cards, as Gatherer itself will tell you in its rulings. To clarify, I don't mean the literal cards themselves: cardboard and ink are not part of a balanced color pie diet. I'm talking about what's depicted on the cards: a Prize Pig

We all gotta eat. Even The Gitrog Monster

So, as a combination of my love of both flavor text and puns, I bring you the deck Strictly Butter, inspired by creatures that go well with heaps of butter. It's also a type I've wanted to do something with after seeing the flavor text on Wishcoin Crab

That's right, we're going crustacean typal. We're trawling the oceans for food (or at least heading to our local Red Lobster). Or as Charlie Kelly succinctly put it:

As for the pun, perhaps a little explanation is in order for some. In Magic, we have the term "Strictly Better," meaning Card A does everything Card B does but with bonus positive effects or at less cost, so Card A is strictly better. Of course, anytime anyone says something is strictly better than something else, Twitter (I refuse to call it X) spits out three reply guys who shout that there are weird corner cases that rarely ever happen in real life and yet make the "strictly" better card a potential liability. Sure, Mana Drain

Ingredients

Do these distinctions of strictly betterness matter? Not really! Not to us, at least. We're going strictly butter, which means every creature we play has to be delicious with butter (with a couple of well-reasoned exceptions). That means we're looking at Crabs, Lobsters, and Homarids.

Well, I'm being told by the angel-winged editor that appears on my right shoulder when I'm writing that the only Lobster in Magic is Rock Lobster

In case you're worried that the lessons of your tenth-grade biology class were lost on you, fear not: you're not failing to remember what Homarids are. They don't exist, just like Goblins, Sphinxes, and your childhood friend's uncle who "worked for Nintendo." In Magic, Homarids are sentient Lobster monsters (the name deriving from "Homaridae," a synonym for "Nephropidae," which is the taxonomical family that Lobsters belong to; you can thank me if you're ever on Jeopardy!) that are native to bulk boxes and my own personal nightmares. There are also not too many of them out there, so Crabs are going to have to do the heavy lifting and/or pinching in this deck.

Mechanically, Crabs in Magic's history don't have a ton going on. They're known for having big butts (AKA high toughness) and an inability to speak in falsehoods. Hedron Crab

Even though those are the only Crabs that specifically support these themes, Hedron and Ruin have been impactful enough in competitive 60-card mill decks that, as much as Crabs have a "thing," milling is it. But fortunately, we can teach the other Crabs to use their hard shells like Millstone

Preparation

We are, of course, making a couple exceptions to our "Crabs and Lobsters only" creature typing for this deck. Three, to be exact. First, our commander Phenax

Our last typal stretch is Consuming Aberration

Our Crabs and Homarids are here for more than just toughness-milling with Phenax, of course. There are some fun little weirdos in our midst, like Vexing Scuttler

We're running snow lands as opposed to regular Island

With Phenax out (and he will probably stay out most of the time, at least in enchantment form, thanks to the built-in indestructibility), Horseshoe Crab

One of the cards in this deck with the highest ceiling and the ability to snowball a game is Uchuulon

There's really only one thing on the menu when your opponents play against this build, and it's their own deck. In their graveyard. So in addition to plenty of Crabs and Homarids to do the milling, we want cards that either lop off more of our opponents' 99 or help us stay alive and in the game until we can finish the job.

While Tasha's Hideous Laughter

There are a few Crab-flavored cards that aren't actually Crabs, too. Surprising no one, we're running Crab Umbra

We will need to keep the cards flowing, of course; good thing that's what blue's been doing best since Alpha's Ancestral Recall

Court of Cunning

That's the plan! Pretty straightforward, but crustaceans aren't known for their long-windedness. I'm honestly pretty excited about this deck if only for the opportunity for some very novel plays: I think taking out an opponent's fresh The Ur-Dragon

Yield

Wishing for More Pinches Wishes

That's it for this trip to Legal Sea Foods, and as someone who actually really dislikes eating anything that lives under the ocean (honestly, it's a hellscape down there, and crustaceans are just ocean insects that you couldn't pay me enough to eat), I'm relieved to be back on dry land. Join us next time for another flavorful build, and in the meantime hit me up on social media or in the comments below and tell me about what you thought of this deck, or what creature type would be better with butter, or how you can't believe we did a whole deck based on a pun. It won't be the last time, I'll bet. Until then, be well.