Muerra, Trash Tactician "Storm is for Trash Pandas" - Plot Twist #14

Muerra, Trash Tactician by Volkan Baǵa

Welcome back to Plot Twist, the series where we build a Commander deck that looks like it'll tell one kind of story only to throw out a twist for our opponents mid-game. If you're joining us for the first time, welcome! I'd encourage you to check out the previous articles in the series to get a sense for the types of stories we're looking to tell.

Last week, we built a Type Hack Deck around Haytham Kenway from the new Assassin's Creed Universes Beyond set that looked to win the game by turning all our opponents' creatures into Assassins that would be unable to block our Knights as long as Haytham was in play. This week, we're back with some exciting new cards from the upcoming Bloomburrow set. This set had me hooked from the moment I saw spoilers at Magic Con: Chicago earlier this year. It's very reminiscent of Brian Jacques' Redwall series, which I absolutely devoured as a kid. In particular, I was immediately drawn to Muerra, Trash Tactician because of the cheeky name and interesting impulse-draw ability.

How Does Muerra Work?

Muerra, Trash Tactician uses the new expend keyword ability from Bloomburrow that cares about the total mana you've spent to cast spells during a turn in two ways: first, when you expend four, Muerra's ability triggers and you gain three life; second, when you expend eight, Muerra triggers again and exiles the top two cards of your library, which you can play until the end of your next turn. It's worth noting with expend that you can only trigger each of Muerra's expend abilities once per turn, but they can trigger on every turn, so, if you have enough mana, you could conceivably trigger Muerra on your turn and each opponent's turn.

Muerra's last ability (okay, technically first if you read the card in order) allows you to add or for each Raccoon you control. At the very least, Muerra, Trash Tactician will count itself, allowing you to recoup your initial investment of three mana over time.

We're in a unique position with this decklist because, as far as I can tell, today's decklist was the first Muerra, Trash Tactician deck that went up on Archidekt, and at the time of writing, Muerra's EDHREC page shows only 13 decklists. We're still two weeks out from Bloomburrow officially releasing, so we can take the initial data with a healthy dose of salt, especially given that this deck was likely one of very few available decklists for other brewers to look at.

All that being said, it looks like Muerra decklists are either built to be either Raccoon kindred decks, featuring cards like Bramble Familiar, Bark-Knuckle Boxer, and Scrappy Bruiser, or decks that care about casting cards from exile, similar to Faldorn, Dread Wolf Herald. I feel pretty confident that our opponents won't know what to expect when we sit down across from them with Muerra, Trash Tactician, but we're still packing a surprise for them this week, because this deck is secretly a storm deck.

Doing the Twist

That's right, we're doing storm the difficult way: by playing Gruul and playing it in Commander. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the storm archetype, it gets its name from one of the most notoriously busted mechanics; it has dominated most eternal formats at one point or another, using cards like Tendrils of Agony, Grapeshot, and Mind's Desire. In more casual Commander, the storm archetype doesn't come up too often, though Brain Freeze is one of the best win conditions in cEDH.

Because Muerra, Trash Tactician has abilities that make mana and generate card advantage for us, we've got two pieces of our storm puzzle readily available in the command zone. Storm can be a tricky archetype to build because you need a balance of mana to cast all the spells you need, enough cards in hand to cast sufficient spells in one turn, AND the right combination of spells to actually do something that impacts the game. There's plenty of room to fail with a storm deck if you don't find the right cards, but every good Plot Twist deck has a chance to fail gloriously, doesn't it?

There's a Storm on the Horizon

Since we're playing a rather fragile archetype, a good portion of our deck needs to help us set up for one big turn. We're running more than our usual ten mana rocks/dorks, plus a few rituals, like Battle Hymn, Brass's Bounty, Mana Geyser, and Seething Song. Rituals are fantastic with Muerra because they immediately recoup the mana we spent to cast them while also counting towards the total amount of mana we've expended this turn. We're also running cards like Ashling, Flame Dancer, Birgi, God of Storytelling, Jeska's Will, Past in Flames, Seasons Past, Storm-Kiln Artist, and Urabrask that are fantastic in storm decks that care about casting a lot of spells because they can give us extra mana and/or cards when we need them.

We can technically trigger Muerra, Trash Tactician's expend abilities on each player's turn, so we're running both Seedborn Muse and Wilderness Reclamation so we can generate extra mana by untapping our lands multiple times per turn cycle. In particular, we're excited about seeing either of these cards with Bootleggers' Stash, so we can save that extra mana for later in the form of treasures. We have a couple of instant-speed ways to win the game (or set ourselves up to win on our next turn) that will work well with this extra mana, and we're running Emergence Zone because sometimes you just have to live the dream.

Storming Off

Once our Rube Goldberg machine of setup cards is on the board, we'll eventually need to get around to winning the game. We've got Chatterstorm, Elemental Eruption, Empty the Warrens, Hunting Pack, and Spreading Insurrection as cards with the actual storm mechanic, each of which can potentially get us enough creatures to win the game. Hunting Pack in particular is interesting because if the player before us casts a bunch of spells on their turn, or if there's a big counterspell battle between our opponents, we can cast it afterwards and untap with a bunch of 4/4 Beasts. Elemental Eruption creates 4/4 Dragon tokens that have flying and prowess, so we can buff them by casting a more noncreature spells. Lastly, Spreading Insurrection is great in combination with any of the other storm cards because we can use the copies to steal our opponents' blockers (looking at you Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre and Aurelia, the Warleader). If we're ever able to cast Hunting Pack on an opponent's end step, cast a bunch of spells on our turn and end our mini-storm with a Spreading Insurrection, then we'll have accomplished everything this deck wants to do.

It's also worth mentioning that we can, in theory, generate infinite storm with a very specific set of cards in this deck. With Birgi, God of Storytelling and Goblin Anarchomancer out, we can cast Grinning Ignus and bounce it back to our hand with its activated ability. As we go through this loop, we'll net each time and add to our storm count. We could also potentially do a similar loop with Runaway Steam-Kin and one of Birgi, God of Storytelling or Goblin Anarchomancer out, but it requires more mana to start. We can repeat this loop with Grinning Ignus any number of times, generating mana and storm count as we go before eventually winning with Comet Storm or Crackle with Power. These loops are one reason we could consider running Grapeshot in the deck, but we'll have a tough time getting our storm count high enough for Grapeshot to work most of the time, and since Grinning Ignus' ability can only be activated at sorcery speed, this whole combo is a little too fragile for us to rely on it.

While it isn't technically a storm card, Arcane Bombardment is fantastic in our deck because it allows us to cast spells for free whenever it triggers. While the cards exiled under Arcane Bombardment are selected randomly, we do still get cast triggers because of the way it's worded, so we should be able to count those spells in our storm count (feel free to yell at me in the comments below if I got that wrong). For similar reasons, Mizzix's Mastery lets us exile all the instants and sorceries in our graveyard and cast them for free when we pay its overload cost. We get to pick the order in which the cards resolve, too, so it's a great way to rebuy our storm cards for another big win attempt. Lastly, we're running Surge to Victory because if we're ever able to resolve it after we get a bunch of tokens from Chatterstorm or Empty the Warrens, then we'll be living off the high from that victory for years.

Jeff, Where are the Trash Pandas?

They're right here of course! Thanks to our friends at Scryfall, we can see that Raccoons (unsurprisingly) are not a heavily supported creature type. We'll want Muerra, Trash Tactician to generate us some extra mana, though, so we're going to fit a few Raccoons into our decklist this week. Bramble Familiar is a mana dork that can later bounce itself and turn into a card selection spell to help us get a key piece like Arcane Bombardment or Seedborn Muse. Wandertale Mentor is another new Raccoon from Bloomburrow that synergizes really well with what Muerra, Trash Tactician wants us to be doing already. It seems like Byway Barterer will be a great way to refill our hand since Muerra is exiling cards rather than letting us draw them, so we'll be happy to draw it most games. Coati Scavenger is a Raccoon that can act as a Regrowth effect under the right conditions to get back a crucial permanent from our graveyard, and we shouldn't have difficulty getting to descend 4 since we have 75 permanents in the 99 of our deck.

Like any under-supported creature type, we're running a few staple Shapeshifter creatures to help increase the density of Raccoons in our deck. Universal Automaton and Masked Vandal seem like two we'll be happy to see in our opening hand because they can come down before we cast Muerra, Trash Tactician, allowing us to get an extra mana from Muerra's ability on the following turn. Masked Vandal can also help us remove a problematic artifact or enchantment for good when we need to. Taurean Mauler and Chameleon Colossus are both Shapeshifters that can become serious threats on their own. Chameleon Colossus is a great mana sink for either Muerra's triggered ability or extra mana from our various rituals, and don't sleep on its protection from black coming in handy at times since black creatures won't be able to block it, as we explored in last week's Haytham Kenway decklist.

It's also worth mentioning that we're running Maskwood Nexus because it can turn all the tokens we generate from Chatterstorm, Elemental Eruption, Empty the Warrens, and Hunting Pack into Raccoons. If we turn a boatload of Squirrels, Dragons, Goblins, and Beasts into Raccoons, it's going to be a memorable game no matter who wins in the long run.

A Few Additional Twists for Good Measure

As always, our favorite part of any Plot Twist deck is the strange cards we stumble across along the way! This week's deck features Bonus Round, which won't work perfectly with our storm cards (for the storm ability to trigger, you have to cast a spell like Chatterstorm, but spells copied by Bonus Round aren't cast unfortunately), but it will allow us to copy spells like Comet Storm and Crackle with Power that we can sink large amounts of mana into. It should (yell at me in the comments if this interaction doesn't work like I think it does) also copy spells that you copy with Arcane Bombardment, since Arcane Bombardment mentions that you cast the copies created by it. Similarly, Nalfeshnee lets us copy spells we cast from exile with Muerra, Trash Tactician, Party Thrasher, and Wild-Magic Sorcerer. We love adding cards that inject a little randomness, be it cascade, impulse draw, or anything else where we're unable to directly control what happens, into our Plot Twist decklists because they increase the dramatic tension of everything we do.

I remember Bootleggers' Stash got a lot of hype when it was first previewed (shout out to Kyle for reminding me it exists!), and it seems like it could be really good in this deck? We'll want to bank a ton of mana for our storm turns, and Bootleggers' Stash does this extremely well. Similarly, I'm not sure exactly where Battle Hymn fits best since it's a ritual that cares about how many creatures you have, but it's an instant, so I'm very intrigued by it. Last but not least, Seasons Past feels like such a good card for Commander, and we'll be looking for more decks to add it to moving forward.

Here's the full decklist for you to peruse:

Roll the Credits

I hope you enjoyed reading the latest edition of Plot Twist featuring Muerra, Trash Tactician. Next time you sit down for a game of Commander, see what sort of plot twists you can add to take the game's narrative in a new direction.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on today's deck and what cards could find a home in it in the comments below or on Archidekt. The Maybeboards of my decklists are always filled with cards I thought could work but didn't make the final decklist.

You can find me on Instagram at @girtenjeff and you can check out my other articles here or see what decks I'm currently playing here. I recently took apart two decks (my Isshin, Two Heavens as One Deck and my Killian, Ink Duelist Reanimator Deck) because they no longer sparked joy and built a Karador, Ghost Chieftan Cycling-Reanimator Deck that has been a complete blast to play. I'm constantly toying with new ideas like this Colorless Combo deck and would love to hear your thoughts on them there.

Stay tuned to see what other twists and turns are headed your way in the next edition of Plot Twist.