August 3rd Deck Tech [Chancellor Frites]

August 3, 2012

More Building on a Budget, gotta try to squeeze every ounce out of Scars Block before it rotates in 5 weeks. I try to keep the cost low so you can build the deck for around $20.

I’ve been wanting to try to run a crazy multicolor deck, 5 color decks are always cool. But we can’t afford a good mana base so 5 color control is out, but what if we didn’t really care about our mana base? Enter Reanimator, cheating the cost of admission and making magic happen. So here we go with Chancellor Frites.

We’ll start with our big fatties. Normally I start out the tech talking about the mana base and end up at the top end, but here the mana is much more complex than slapping together a few basic lands and a utility land or two and our fatties are simple and easy. Frites is a Reanimator deck, meaning we seek to put our fatties into the graveyard and then reanimate them with Unburial Rites for value and circumventing possibly restrictive costs.

I’ve been wanting to make use of these guys for a long time, so it’s time to let the Chancellors shine. They’re fairly big, pretty powerful, and don’t just languish if you have them in your opening hand. Chancellor of the Annex is first on our list, Giving you a free daze in your opening hand is already pretty good, once you get it out having a nice flyer and permanent daze is also really good. Chancellor of the Tangle is your other chancellor, you get to mana ramp/fix on turn 1, and with how important your 1/2 mana enablers are, this can be an invaluable advantage. It’s not permanent ramp, but almost all of your enablers sit at the 1-2 mana mark and require green. Your last fatty is fairly subjective, but I wanted to make use of Flayer of the Hatebound, so a-flaying we will go. Flayer lets you get some extra value and damage out of each reanimated creature, with multiple Flayers, the triggers stack, and with some crafty use of flayer triggers you can do tons of damage.

Now that we have our reanimation targets we need our graveyard enablers. Mulch is simply fabulous, it lets you dig into your deck, grab those useful lands, and then dump your fatties into the graveyard. This card is spectacular, is finds your fatties for your graveyard, helps fix your mana, and gives you looting targets. The little brother to mulch in this deck is Tracker’s Instincts. It doesn’t grab out lands, but lets us dig just as deep, and offers us a flashback option should we mill it away or just need more dig. If we only see 1 creature and it’s a hard to cast fatty we MUST take it making this sub optimal, but with 9 mana dorks we hope to avoid that situation. In the event we do get a card into our hand we want in the graveyard, we’ve got Faithless Looting to put it where we want it. We get a single cast out of this letting us dig and fill our graveyard, and the flashback cost is very reasonable letting us get more value out of it. Our last enabler is just a fixing/ramp spell, Rampant Growth lets us find the basics we need and fix our mana to make things happen, with 5 colors running about getting the right mixture is important. Rampant Growth is far superior to Farseek in this situation; without true dual lands to search for, we need to account for the eventuality of searching for a forest using Chancellor as our green source on turn 1.

9 Mana dorks are there to back us up as well, Avacyn’s Pilgrim, Llanowar Elves, and Birds of Paradise are there for fixing + ramping + enabling Tracker’s Instincts. Each is very important (birds more so than others, but more expensive than others) allowing us to fix our mana and accelerate up the curve. Llanowar Elves is NOT interchangeable with Arbor Elf in this situation, with the very real situation of having Elves as your only green producer cast off of Chancellor’s turn 1 mana production.

Now we get into the complexities of the giant mess that is our mana base.

As a general rule of thumb, 4x mana dorks usually = 1 land, and with 9 dorks we can pretend we’re running 25 lands, which is a comfortable number given the important of always hitting 4-5 mana on/ahead of time.

Evolving Wilds is an all-star in this lineup, it lets us get whatever color we need. Given how slow our first 3 turns usually are coming into play tapped isn’t a big detriment.

Green is very important to us, especially on turn 1, so that’s going to be a somewhat dominant color. With 6 forest + 4 Chancellor of the Tangle, we should reliably have at least 1 green source on turn 1 letting us get out our 1-mana dorks or 2-mana fixers/enablers.

Red is also extremely important during the early turns by giving us access to Faithless Looting. While we have no red hungry cards, we still need that mana reliably so 5 is a decent amount to help us find at least 1, and with all of our other fetch we shouldn’t run into to many problems.

White is another very important color, though we won’t need it until at least the 4 mana mark, so we have some time to get fetches on-line to find it, but with a Chancellor of the Annex requiring tripple white to hard-cast, we want enough available so that doesn’t become an impossible pipe-dream.

Black is in a weird spot, we don’t need it until 5 mana, and even potentially not at all, but we have plenty of fetch, and in some matchups where we need to squeeze value out of each spell getting to hard-cast Unburial Rites is very important. Other times we don’t need to reanimate a lot of threats and casting Rites from the graveyard for cheap is the best option.

Blue is run as a single fetchable island, we only need it for flashback on Tracker’s Instincts, which is usually one of the first cards to side out when sideboarding. It doesn’t add much, but you get to say you’re running 5 colors in a budget deck.

While this is the budget outline you can up the budget and power/consistency of this deck by just jamming in whatever you want into it. If you want to run any other reanimation targets, just swap them in. Any dual lands you have laying about, especially M10 style “buddy lands”, are great for giving you more colors more consistently. It’s very modular and scalable for each person’s play style.

The sideboard is also of interest. Mental Misstep is pretty important here, more so than in other decks. Nothing quite hurts like getting your reanimation target snagged back to your hand, or that feel of having your graveyard removed from under you (stupid Tormod’s Crypt). Phyrexian Ingester is your out against other decks that go big, or when you just need more removal. Ancient Grudge is your out against artifacts, they are taken over Naturalize due to the large amount of cards you will uncontrollably put into your graveyard, being able to make use of them even when in the graveyard is fairly important. Whipflare and Rancor are your outs to token and other small creature spam strategies that can chump you all day long. Big hulking creatures are good, but aren’t worth much if you can’t connect for damage. Best Within is your generic removal option when you just need something that hits anything.

This is a deck that you can’t be afraid to aggressively mulligan, you really need your enablers, they usually work to move you towards either of your two goals. You either want to reanimate a big creature quickly, or ramp and hard-cast your big creatures. You have a lot of dig options, you will easily see at least half of your deck each game.

5 colors can be an ambitious undertaking, but with a ton of fetch and fixing it’s not impossible. And occasionally we get to live the dream and play in Magical-ChristmasLand.