Making Copies with Krothuss

Okay, I know it's been a while since I wrote anything. I've been busy okay?!?

Anyways, I have been a little disappointed with Standard since they banned The Meathook Massacre. Black's only real mass removal spell is missed without a doubt in the casual Standard realm. Ever since I found out about the synergy with Mirror Box, I was having some fun building around legendaries.

While I was doing that (and experimenting with Vesuvan Duplimancy), I happened to stumble onto another interesting card that caught my eye -- Runo Stromkirk (AKA Krothuss, Lord of the Deep). This guy seems rather unassuming at first, but it, Duplimancy, and the Tolarian Terror make a great team. The deck was a bit clunky at first, but when I got used to playing Runo with some insta-cover via Slip Out the Back and Shore Up, it got easier to regularly pull this silliness off. There is a little bit of removal in the deck, but overall, it is a 'guard-the-king' approach until the combo goes off. Making ward-2 serpents or multiple Hullbreakers is pretty beast. My best victory came against a Jetmir (Naya) token deck in the form of two Krothuss (thanks to Vesuvan Duplimancy) copying each other - twice! Swinging for (effectively) twelve (the legendary copies die, but the nonlegendary ones keep swinging!). PS my opponent wouldn't have lost right away, they were at 16, but it would still have been a very bad spot with a follow-on Tolarian Terror after combat. Too bad there isn't an Esika's Chariot around to copy the copies...

The way it works is pretty simple. Get a fat Serpent or Kraken in your graveyard (probably with Kaito or Tainted Indulgence), then get a Runo out. Everything else is pretty much gravy. Once the fatty is back on top of your library, Runo becomes Krothuss, the fatty gets onto the battlefield (via casting), and then you run over your opponent with Xerox fatties. A single tapped Tolarian Terror can be pretty awesome with Duplimancy and Shore Up when an opponent wants to attack and lose a bunch of attackers suddenly but that's a pretty rare sitch.

Now that I've found the sweet spot with this deck it has become one of my regular deck rotation, along with Rakdos (RAKDOS! - to be screeched at one's opponents) sacrifice, Jund control, and a Jund-ish discard reanimator deck (it has blue, but no islands), I intersperse these with an Azorius control deck (sometimes I just want to burn the world with a Farewell...). Black is as strong as they say, but the decks I see most are the tokens and Boros/RDW haste decks. Man, are those annoying. Tokens and enchantments aren't so bad, but speed kills, yo. Without The Meathook Massacre, there seems no stopping them. I might try to experiment with The Phasing of Zhalfir as a board wipe, but I don't dig the tokens so far. It would have worked great with a certain legendary enchantment, though (*wistfully gazing at his copies of The Meathook Massacre*)...smh. Strangely, of late, I haven't seen a lot of the annoying mono-blue Delver/Djinn decks. Possibly because they are an auto-scoop opponent. Maybe because they are out-classed by black, who knows? Permission decks just aren't fun.

Here's the Runo decklist if you want to try it out, there's no sideboard, because I only play one-and-done (BO1) matches:

x1 Fading Hope

x3 Shore Up

x3 Slip Out the Back

x1 Fake Your Own Death

x4 Infernal Grasp

x4 Tainted Indulgence

x2 Kaito Shizuki

x4 Runo Stromkirk

x2 Vesuvan Duplimancy

x2 Rot-Tide Gargantuan

x4 Hullbreaker Horror

x4 Tolarian Terror

x8 Island

x8 Swamp

x2 Shipwreck Marsh

x4 Waterfront District

x2 Maestros Theater

x2 Obscura Storefront

I was thinking about adding Reservoir Kraken, but it costs me rare wildcards and I don't wanna burn them on this singular-use card, when I obviously still need rare lands. I only have six rare wilds left but I only have 3/40 pain-lands and 11/20 Standard triomes. I did better with the buddy-lands (26/40), but I still need a butt-pile of wild rares. Hey WOTC, maybe a little help?

PS - I've only had this happen once, but I had to use an Infernal Grasp on Krothuss once in order to make a copy of him with the Duplimancy as a result of being targeted by an opponent's Touch the Spirit Realm. It didn't help me win, as the game was already lost due to poor management, but it spoke to the strange interactions of this deck...