Heya. I’m currently playing my brews on the league - playing competitive weird decks is my jam.

I’ll be going with 1 brew each week until the end of the league - and if I get a chance, will take a strongest deck into top8 finals.

This is probably the slowest, most control variant of Gruul. The key idea was to have many boardwipes that don’t damage your stuff - while you ramp into high mana early to play big stuff & wipes. Some iterations of this deck happened and I tried to squeeze as much value as possible - transforming normal ramp spells into ones that also give you cards when you play them, and x4 both red and green 1 mana cyclers as lands.

Games

2-0 vs dredge: Boardwipes hit hard the deck that wants many small creatures to do the thing. Sure they can get into the lategame where they just play 3 creatures and do the Dread Return, but they’ve been pressured by Monarch + big creatures which also mostly have trample built in. Wasn’t impossible to lose, but this was favourable.

0-2 vs gardens: I’ve lost first game while having the monarch, and lost the second game while having monarch and initiative set up early. Playing only big creatures means that I play 1 creature/turn which they are comfortably removing, only starting playing 2 at the later turns when they can do rat boardwipes. Worst of all, my burn spells I was desperately craving for to finish the deal were milled by rumble.

0-2 vs monster tron: they do the same thing in the same colors, but take more time to ramp, but play bigger things afterwards. There is a thin margin at which I can still aggro and then I need to just burn. First game he went down to 3 after burn, but I didn’t draw another burn spell. Second game he countered my wildfire with crop rotation out of giants boulder mana.

Post-game thoughts

List: https://archidekt.com/decks/14464304/gruul_smash

If my local meta was more aggro, this might be able to shine. But it’s predominantly not aggro. I think this deck needs to go for more aggressive route, with 3cmc & boarding parties etc, the boring gruul aggro way, to be efficient against this. Might keep the Cannonade x2 mainboard though and go with land auras 1 drop -> 3 drop 3/3 curve so I don’t wipe the elves in my wipes.

Sulphurous Blast though, a card around which I’ve built the deck (the only straight 3 damage wipe), would have no place here unfortunately. It was hard to cast double red already, and 4cmc is bit too late vs aggro. I think I will try to build a monoR burn around it. Theorycrafted an idea already.