How They Brew It - Zada's Treasonous Desires
Zada, Hedron Grinder by Chris Rallis
Papers, Please
You! Greenhorn! Where have you been? That's twelve seconds behind schedule; you're lucky Our Benefactors aren't present to take notes. I'm Michael Celani, editor-in-command for Victory Today, the Nation's premiere and only state-approved newspaper. As a journalist, I take my oath to report the truth (as determined by The Governing Body's Five Great Arbiters of Truth, may they always reign) very seriously. If I didn't, we'd all get sent to prison forever. Happy to have you on board!
As you make your way to your assigned Truth Station, take note of Zada, Hedron Grinder, our distributor. Zada relays any single-target instants and sorceries cast upon her to all the other foot soldiers on the ground. Put another way, if you've got words to share, Zada can share them. That's good, because we've got a lot of people to propagandize!
The Art of Persuasion
Yup, it's all about persuasion. It's about getting the people to see the world from the correct point of view. It's about convincing a bunch of dorks to fight and die in a no-holds-barred four-person wizard brawl. How can we make that happen?
By verbally threatening them, of course! When you cast Threaten, you gain control of a target creature until the end of turn. That's not all, though; you also give that creature haste and (crucially) untap them as well. It's all fine and good if you just want to brainwash an enemy for a turn, but The Governing Body isn't content with anything other than complete and total domination. We're mass media, after all, so instead of picking off dissidents one by one, we're going to cast these spells on Zada, Hedron Grinder to distribute our threats to everybody!
When we threaten Zada, we get to untap all our creatures, gain control of them, and give them all haste. This interaction seems inane -- why bother gaining control of your own creatures -- but it's actually much more useful than it looks on the surface for a plethora of reasons. We'll go over why in detail later; instead, let's get started by looking at the many threats we're going to hurl at our own creatures.
Heinous Acts
Like a child losing on Xbox Live, our repertoire contains a vast array of threats. We've got a ton of them, for two main reasons. The first is that we need the redundancy. Our deck is built around the interaction of casting Threaten on Zada, Hedron Grinder, so there have to be copies readily available at all times.
The second and much more interesting reason is that there's actually a variety of helpful side effects available on different threats that we can exploit if they're copied for each creature we control. Let's take a look at three broad categories:
Mana Aplenty
One of the major downsides with building a deck around threats is that they're inherently mana-hungry spells. Most cost at least three mana, and as the game progresses you'll often find yourself hoping to cast multiple in a single turn. Spells in this category all overcome that weakness, since they can break even or even go mana-positive when duplicated across your whole battlefield. Involuntary Employment and Traitorous Greed are especially potent, and they play like powerful rituals if your board state is wide enough. Sibling Rivalry creates Powerstone tokens, which help cast the variety of artifact creature spells we include. Finally, while Furnace Reins does tie your mana generation to combat, it redeems itself by only costing three mana instead of four.
Churning Through
There's more ways to get value out of a threat than just generating mana, though. If you find yourself with a hand that's not quite what you want, Bloody Betrayal creates a Blood for each creature you control, meaning you can cycle away junk cards for cheap. Kari Zev's Expertise lets you cast a two-cost or less spell for each time it was copied, which is especially efficient if you can parley that into cheap draw spells such as Playful Shove and Expedite. Song-Mad Treachery can act as a land drop if need be, and Hijack, for lack of a better place to put it, has worth since you can use it in a pinch to steal enemy artifacts for a turn. It's surprisingly helpful if an opponent is carrying The One Ring and you just need to draw two or three cards.
The Pen is Mightier
But ultimately, our Zada plan is going to look like a lot of other Zada plans: we're going to buff our army up using combat tricks and swing out for a massive attack. While we're building our resources by untapping our creatures repeatedly, we might as well include the various threats that also happen to make our creatures more evasive or boost their power. Going through each of them would be redundant, so check the decklist below for a complete inventory.
War is Peace
We've alluded to threatening our own creatures to untap them, so now it's time to get to the heart of the question. Which creatures are we going to instill with so much fear that they get up, again and again, past their own breaking point? Man, when put that way, it seems like this totalitarian regime we live under is kind of a bumm- Phew! Almost had an original thought for a second there. Anyway, praise be to our glorious soldiers:
The Humble Dorks
It should come as no surprise that many of the creatures in the deck are mana dorks. They fulfill multiple roles at once: not only do they act as warm bodies at which Zada can fling copies of spells, they also help you cast those spells in the first place since they tap for mana. They'll also end up being the creatures that will deal the final blow when all is said and done; all they need is for your combat tricks turn them into powerful fighters first.
Threatening these creatures untaps them, meaning that, with enough dorks, they pay for the spells themselves and can potentially even make mana per iteration. That's especially true if you happen to find Alena, Kessig Trapper, the deck's most powerful dork, who is capable of generating five or ten mana all by herself. One thing to note with these creatures is that the haste can matter. Newly entered dorks (cast off a multi-discover from Daring Discovery, for example) may find themselves suddenly able to tap for mana once under the effect of a threat.
Living Lands
What may actually come as a surprise, though, is the deck's heavy focus on manlands. These are lands that effectively turn themselves into dorks at a moment's notice. Like the dorks above, they make mana and reset every time you play a threat. Unlike the dorks, though, they are very likely to stick through board wipes, meaning they can help rebuild if you find yourself on the wrong end of God's wrath.
Recruitment Drive
Our last category of creatures creates more creatures every time we threaten them. Young Pyromancer and Stormsplitter each create new soldiers whenever we cast an instant or sorcery spell, whereas Orthion, Hero of Lavabrink and Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker can tap to clone a creature you already have. When going to clone creatures, it's hard to go wrong picking a dork. Not only do they make subsequent threats easier to pay for, they act as additional bodies that immediately help boost the power of value spells, like Ancestors' Aid or Blazing Crescendo.
You may also want to consider copying the two recursive creatures in the deck: Ardent Elementalist and Pinnacle Monk. Paired alongside a repeatable threat, like Traitorous Greed, you can easily go infinite, and our threats are so robust that not even an Authority of the Consuls can shut it down. If you need it spelled out for what that'll look like to your opponents, imagine a boot stomping on a human face forever.
Future Tech
The main battle plan of The Governing Body is clear: play a lot of dorks and token-makers, cast your threats to untap them multiple times for mana and additional creatures, buff them up with combat tricks, like Valley Rally, and finally go in for the kill with one incredibly overwhelming combat step. But we're nothing if not fun here in the Nation, so let's just take a look at some cool stuff this strategy lets you do.
No Defectors
Humble Defector requires that you pass it off to another player once you activate it, generally meaning you can only guarantee two cards from it before it's gone forever. Instead, consider activating its ability in response to a copied threat on the stack; it will come right back to you!
One Shot, One Kill
Bloodshot Trainee needs tons of set-up before it can start mowing down enemies, but thanks to our many pump spells, this Goblin combatant will reach its fitness goals without even breaking a sweat. Pepper your opponents with four-damage hits to their creatures every time you cast a threat and watch them squirm.
Scuttle the Ship
One of our mana dorks happens to be Scuttlemutt, who can change the color of creatures. Changing the color of creatures happens to greatly increase the range of targets for Pyroblast. You're not getting this every game, but it'll be a memorable story when you finally pull it off.
A Ghastly Sight
It's worth noting that although our strategy is to Threaten our own creatures, it's still possible to target enemy creatures with the spell. That's where Herigast, Erupting Nullkite comes in: you can use its emerge ability to sacrifice anything you've stolen before it can make its way back to its original owner.
All Will Be One
And speaking of stealing enemy creatures, one spell that can turn any run-of-the-mill threat into an Insurrection is Display of Power. Simply get all your copies of your threat on the stack through Zada, Hedron Grinder, then copy the copies with Display of Power. Unlike Zada copies, you can actually choose the targets of these ones, so take over your opponent's army in addition to your own!
See Ya in the Funny Papers
There you have it, greenhorn; how we in the great Nation kept everything in check. Rampant, unadulterated fear. It's a shame Our Benefactors literally just got bored with our planet and hopped dimensions to see if they could conquer Super-Mars instead. Oh well, it was a great three-day weekend while it lasted. Think they'll ever come back?
If you liked this How They Brew It, come check out our Discord, where you can chat with like-minded 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. Hope you enjoyed reading, and I'll see you next time!
