How They Brew It - Necrobloom's Astral Slide Adventures
The Necrobloom by Ivan Shavrin
Home, Sweet Home
Welcome to Realtor Real Tour. I'm your host, Michael Celani, and as a house hunter, I have over one thousand confirmed kills.
Meet the Stanton family. John Stanton is a junior placement specialist at Edible Arrangements with a Bachelor's degree in strawberries. His partner, John Stanton, works in a factory mixing red and yellow pigments to make orange. John and John are looking for a quiet, twenty-three hundred square acre log-cabin high rise close to their jobs, the beach, downtown, and the country. Their budget is five easy installments of $19.99 and a coupon valued at 1/100th of a cent. To find a cozy condo for this charming couple, I'm going to have to dig deep with an expert in the area.
Nobody is better at dredging up desirable pieces of land than The Necrobloom. It creates creature tokens whenever a land enters under your control, but that's not why we've brought him on today. No, we're focusing on the fact that it gives every land card in your graveyard dredge 2. That means if you'd draw a card, instead you can choose to mill two cards and return that land card from your graveyard to your hand. We're building from the ground up to create the perfect reanimator strategy until the only graves left belong to your opponents!
House Flipping
Just like a holding company gobbling up affordable housing so they can artificially inflate the cost of homes in an area, we're don't intend to actually use our lands for more than an ever-increasing store of value. That's because The Necrobloom is the ultimate house-flipper: he rescues broken-down land for a second shot at life. If we can get some benefit from sacrificing or discarding a land card, then The Necrobloom guarantees we can always get that benefit.
The obvious winners here are the Channel lands, which we're unequivocally treating as spells. I'd only drop them onto the field if doing so meant I could save my firstborn child, and even then I'd hesitate until he stops messing around in class and learns his fractions, Jimmy. Eiganjo, Takenuma, and Boseiju each have their own role to fill, whether it be making combat a pain, recurring anything important that got milled, or stopping anything useful from sticking to your opponents' boards.
Common fetch lands are here, too. Though we're not focusing on it, The Necrobloom does have a Landfall trigger, and it would be wasteful to not use all the parts of the commander. Any of these will fix our mana and generate two Plants, and you can even dredge them if you find yourself wanting more creatures for whatever reason. Notably, Demolition Field is a rather expensive version of a fetch land that can also stop enemy nonbasics.
But it turns out that there's a sizable chunk of land cards that have built-in cycling. The play pattern is simple: with The Necrobloom on the field, you cycle away one of these lands, use that land's newly developed dredge ability to replace the draw, put the card you just cycled back into your hand, and mill two cards. In other words, if you stumble upon any cycling land, you have an infinitely repeatable way to fill your graveyard... provided you have the mana to pay for it.
Sprucing up the Place
Buying or building a home is expensive, especially when your homeowner's association demands five grand a month and has outlawed the color puce. When you have to pay , , , , , , , , or even to cycle your lands, you're going need lots of mana. Getting an illicit amount of energy for cycling used to be something only Lance Armstrong had to worry about, but luckily The Necrobloom blesses us with the miracle of horticulture to make up for our sins.
Every time we play a land, we're getting at least a single Plant, and potentially more if that land happens to be a fetch land. Since Plants are both creatures and tokens, we can hack them to produce mana.
With cards like Cryptolith Rite, Citanul Hierophants, and Insidious Roots, this illegal grow operation in the back of the house becomes a perfect little side-hustle to your banal ramp spells like Sakura-Tribe Elder, Springbloom Druid, and Arcane Signet. Score for all you green thumbs out there.
And for those of you out there that are less into plants and more into nuclear weapons, don't worry. Fluctuator and Bone Miser both make a significant number of your lands free to cycle, so feel free to dunk your entire library into the 'yard only to Eerie Ultimatum it back.
A Strong Foundation
The Necrobloom can burn through libraries faster than Caesar could in Alexandria, but the end result of both is the same: a healthy supply of dead people. What better thing to do than bring them all back so we can add our three opponents to that pile?
A downside to dredging your entire library into your graveyard is that you're going to get called a cheater likely to dredge away your actual reanimation spells, but there's a few ways around that hurdle. Dread Return and Unburial Rites can animate a creature through its flashback cost, so you can cast them even if you've milled them. Priest of Fell Rites can unearth itself to reanimate a creature for five mana. Even in dire cases, you can return something like Victimize from the graveyard through a Timeless Witness or Dryad's Revival.
The benefit of being in specifically is that there's so many creatures that reanimate when they enter, too. Bring back a Karmic Guide, for example, and you could parlay that into getting back an Angel of Indemnity, which gets back an Eternal Witness, which returns your original reanimation spell to your hand. If you have Preston, the Vanisher or Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines on your side, even better: those triggers end up doubled for some absurd value.
Our end-game targets don't really matter. I've included the three above, but go ahead and decorate the top end of your deck with whatever creatures you want. You can include Craterhoof Behemoth, Ashen Rider, Reya Dawnbringer, Avacyn, Angel of Hope, or even Wood Elemental. Be creative!
Astral Projection
As an expert house hunter, I've seen a few things in my time, like that inexplicable stairs toilet. One thing's for certain: my current plan is way too straightforward. Self-milling so that you can reanimate creatures? Any commander could do that. But The Necrobloom's affinity for cycling lands in particular lets us include two very important pieces which change everything.
Yes, the deck for them has finally arrived: both Astral Slide and Astral Drift turn all of our infinitely recurrable cycling lands into instants that blink creatures. Not only does this render all your dudes practically immune to removal, it also makes every reanimation target significantly stronger.
As an example, notice how a lot of our reanimation spells are actually creatures? When we cycle a land into Astral Slide, we can target our reanimator creatures and use that to do more reanimation. And since every time we dredge a land back into our hand, we're putting two more cards into the graveyard, so there's always an abundance of targets.
Some of our removal spells are creatures, too. If we can repeatedly blink Reclamation Sage, Skyclave Apparition, or even Ravenous Chupacabra, you can selectively take out opposing threats as they come up.
It's important to note that the Astral pair are both slow blinks, so any removal you're banking on won't happen immediately. The silver lining here is you can use the threat of removal as a way to make a deal. As an example, if an opponent plays a Rhystic Study, you can blink your Reclamation Sage in response, then threaten to remove it when it returns unless that player acquiesces to your demands. This is known in the business as "extortion," and it's a great way to get people to do what you want.
The most fun thing to do with this, though, is to blink your lands to get an absurd amount of Plants. Dryad Arbor is naturally both a creature and a plant, but if you want to really go crazy, Life // Death turns all your lands into creatures. If you find your Fluctuator, you can blink all of your lands and create tons of tokens. It probably won't win you the game, but it's pretty funny!
Closing the Deal
Faced with a few different options from the esteemed Super Property Bros, John and John decided to choose option number π, the beach-side bungalo in Siberia, Russia. They put in an offer and closed on the house for $10,000 less than asking price, as they were holding the agent at gunpoint during negotiations. John and John have been living there with their family of fifty ghosts for three years and are getting married next fall. Another happy customer! Until next time, I'm Michael Celani, and this has been Realtor Real Tour.
If you liked this How They Brew It, come check out our Discord, where you can chat with likeminded brewers, suggest ideas for the column, and vote on which you want to see next! You can also check out my other projects on my website. See you around!
