Down To Brew - Jundelireanimator


It’s fun to play big creatures, but sometimes it’s hard to play big creatures, and it’s not fun to not play big creatures just because it’s hard to play big creatures. However, what if big creatures weren’t hard to play? That would mean that you could play big creatures, which would be fun. My solution? Jundelireanimator.

Jund (Black/Red/Green) + Delirium + Reanimator = ‘Jundelireanimator’ (Jun-delere-ian-imator)

The deck is focused around dumping a bunch of cards in your graveyard and then casting Ever After to reanimate whatever you want. It plays a bunch of 1-of bombs with fun ‘enter the battlefield’ abilities such as Ishkanah, Goblin Dark-Dwellers and Noxious Gearhulk so that once the majority of your deck is in your graveyard, you can pull out whatever would be most useful at the time. We get cards into our graveyard using a variety of sources such as Insolent Neonate and Cathartic Reunion to dump things from our hand and Mindwrack Demon and Perpetual Timepiece to ‘mill’ things from the top of our library.

Here’s the decklist:

REANIMATION TARGETS:

Goblin Dark-Dwellers - Playing Goblin Dark-Dwellers allows us to play very little removal in the mainboard (really just Nahiri’s Wrath!) and can refuel our hand in the late game using Cathartic Reunion/Tormenting Voice/Traverse the Ulvenwald. It is a very important card when it comes to sideboarding, which I’ll talk about later.

Ishkanah, Grafwidow - Because who doesn’t enjoy making like a bajillion spiders?!

Ulrich of the Krallenhorde - One of the worse cards in the deck, but still worth playing as he can help push the final bits of damage through to kill your opponent and can sometimes be a combat trick if you are able to reanimate him using a Demon of Dark Schemes at instant speed. If you have the money, it might be a good idea to replace him with Emrakul, but I’m trying to keep this list fairly budget.

Combustible Gearhulk - Either draws some cards (which is great), or mills 3 and probably deals a significant chunk of damage (which is also great!) It being both an Artifact AND a Creature helps us get Delirium online pretty quickly.

Demon of Dark Schemes - Wipes the board of tokens/weenies, and can be a Languish + wincon when both copies are targeted by Ever After. They go well with Ishkanah- just make sure you put the Demon’s triggers on the stack before Ishkanah’s if you want the spiders to die!

Noxious Gearhulk - Kills something (maybe even your own creatures if you want to use their ‘enter the battlefield’ triggers again or something?) and is a fat creature. It also dies to double Demon of Dark Schemes if you want to put it in your graveyard to reanimate again.

Omnath, Locus of Rage - A good card to reanimate if you have a hand full of land. Even if you only have 1 or 2 landfall triggers worth of cards in your hand, he can be worth considering seeing as that’s 10-15 power and even if they die you get to deal some damage.

 

DISCARD/MILL:

Insolent Neonate - Can get a little bit of damage in, but the main reason to play it is that it cycles a card and helps you with Delirium. It can also block, and then be sacrificed and the damage won’t go through (unless the attacker has trample) and you still get to draw a card!

Mindwrack Demon - Milling 4 is great, and a 4/5 with trample and flying for 4 is also great. Generally, you don’t want to be reanimating this, but if your graveyard is a bit small it is worth considering.

Cathartic Reunion - Can single-handedly give you Delirium by discarding a Land and an Artifact Creature. Drawing 3 cards is fantastic; it helps us find Ever After and other goodies.

Tormenting Voice - A slightly yet significantly different version of Cathartic Reunion; sometimes we won’t have 2 cards to discard and Cathartic Reunion is kind of useless. Often you’ll only have 1 card in hand after casting Ever After and if you want to draw cards, you can flash back a Tormenting Voice using Goblin Dark-Dwellers.

Nahiri’s Wrath - Great removal in this deck seeing as it helps us towards our goal using discard while slowing down our opponent by killing their creatures/planeswalkers with massive chunks of damage from us discarding creatures with converted mana costs of 5 or 6. It can also kill our own creatures if we want to reanimate them again.

Perpetual Timepiece - This is very useful in setting up a situation in which we can cycle Ever After. Seeing as Ever After is placed on the bottom of its owner’s library upon resolution, if our library is empty, we can keep casting it over and over again! Perpetual Timepiece both gets us towards that situation faster and can put the Ever Afters back into our library if they get milled.

 

OTHER THINGS:

Hedron Crawler - Mana ramps, but is mainly here to help along with Delirium. It can be a chump blocker if the opponent is threatening lethal before you get to Ever After.

Pilgrim’s Eye - This is mainly in the deck just because it is both an Artifact AND a Creature which makes it super easy to get Delirium but it can find land as well, so it can end up playing a similar role to Traverse the Ulvenwald.

Traverse the Ulvenwald - Finds whichever creature we want to play/discard and being able to find basic lands when you don’t have Delirium is very relevant as we only play 20 lands and it acts as great mana fixing.

Ever After - I think you can probably figure out why this is in the deck…

If you have the money, you might want to try out adding Prized Amalgam to the deck. If you were to do that, you’d probably want to add Haunted Dead as well, but then you’re just building a bad version of the B/R Zombie Madness deck.

 

MANABASE:

C:\Users\Joshua\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\Content.Word\Jundelireanimator_Manabase.png

 

This is a fairly simple and cheap manabase, but it works pretty well. It’s good to play a lot of basics as a bunch of them end up getting milled and if we were to run out then we can’t find more with Pilgrim’s Eye/Traverse the Ulvenwald/Evolving Wilds. It’s important to have a red source in the first 1 or 2 turns of the game for a bunch of our early spells like Insolent Neonate, Cathartic Reunion and Tormenting Voice, which then help us to find our other colours.

 

SIDEBOARD:

 

The sideboard works very nicely with Goblin Dark-Dwellers, so if you’re relying on any of the sideboard removal to help you through the games you probably want the Goblin Dark-Dwellers too.

Heir of Falkenrath, Appetite for the Unnatural and Lightning Axe are generally the best things to sideboard against a Smuggler’s Copter deck.

Lost Legacy is there for combo decks that rely on 1 or 2 cards to win, such as the Electrostatic Pummeler deck.

Thought Knot-Seer is something to use if you are worried about your opponent wiping the board with Fumigate or Descend upon the Sinful the turn after you resolve an Ever After or a similar problem. It is important to note that you’ll be getting this on turn 5-6 at the earliest seeing as you can’t hard cast it. If this is a problem in your meta, you may want to switch Thought Knot-Seer and a few other cards out for some copies of Transgress the Mind.

Ruinous Path and To the Slaughter are there to stop control decks from having their win conditions.

Blossoming Defense is a card that I tested for the sideboard, but I never found a way to make it work properly in the deck. Your hand ends up pretty much entirely in the graveyard, and even if you are able to keep it in your hand while still moving towards winning the game, your opponent will probably see another in your graveyard and play around it. If you are able to figure out how to make it work, then go for it.

 

TIPS AND TRICKS:

This deck is pretty straightforward, but sometimes it can be difficult to figure out how to order things. Make sure you think about what order you want to layer triggers, cast spells, play lands and so on. For example, when reanimating a Mindwrack Demon and a Combustible Gearhulk, you probably want to have Combustible Gearhulk’s trigger happen first if you want to draw cards and they have a rough idea of what’s in your library. Milling 4 from Mindwrack Demon and then having them make the decision could make them choose to have you mill 3 instead of draw 3 if they see that you have more of your large spells already in your graveyard because they are less likely to take large amounts of damage.

Perpetual Timepiece can be very useful during your upkeep. If you’re searching for an Ever After or something, you could mill 2 at your upkeep and then shuffle any Ever Afters that are in your graveyard back into your library using Perpetual Timepiece’s second ability. This can also move any copies of Ever After that have been put onto the bottom of your library into a different position.

SUMMARY:

Jundelireanimator is a fairly simple, fun deck that will be in standard until the set after Hour of Devastation comes out and is easily tweaked with any new cards that are coming. One of the best things about this deck is that almost all of the more expensive cards are 1-ofs, which makes it easy to buy/trade into and more likely that you already have a bunch of cards for the deck. It’s also easier to trade away if you don’t want to play it anymore.

I hope you enjoyed this article, see you at FNM!
 




 

Joshua


 

 





Joshua is a high school student who started playing Magic during M15 at the age of 12 and has been in love with it ever since.

 

 

 

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