Korvold, Fae-Cursed King - Self-Sustained Sacrifice
Throne of Eldraine was one of the most flavourful sets we've seen in MtG in many a year. It puts me in mind of one of my favourite sets, Lorwyn - laden with depth of theme, as well as beautiful art, strong cards and lore steeped in cultural lodestones from our own corner of the world. In this case, Eldraine drew heavily from Arthurian lore and Grimm fairy tales, the latter in a way that's far more realistic than anything Disney has ever put out (seriously, the original stories are brutal - Cinderella's step sisters cut their toes off to fit the Crystal Slipper in the original!).
Korvold was probably the one commander from the set that spoke to me. Partly because he's obviously strong without being immediately broken (Chulane, Teller of Tales, looking at you), partly because I've never really built a Jund deck, but also because he plays into areas that I enjoy, namely sacrifice and recursion. Also, I have this perception of him in my head as a remorseful king cursed by his own hubris, living in some secluded, 'haunted' corner of the world where the natural laws of society have been subverted to work around his curse, and that just kind of calls to me from a thematic perspective.
As a commander, Korvold covers a lot of the same area as his fellow Jund dragon, Prossh, Skyraider of Kher. Now, on building this deck I wanted to go in with a premise of how I wanted to build. Knowing how busted Prossh can be with things like Food Chain, edicts like Grave Pact and aristocrats like Blood Artist, I wanted to set myself some limitations. Some of them are my usual limitations, based on what I like to play:
- The deck should be fun to play and play against
- The deck should include no intentional 'win the game' combos
- The deck should be able to take various avenues towards victory
- The deck should be built within my financial means
The above is implicit in all of my builds. Alongside these, to help guide me in terms of direction for building a relatively wide open commander, I added the following:
- No Food Chain (as if I could afford it).
- No Edicts - when I sacrifice, it should be for my benefit primarily, not to anyone else's (immediate) detriment.
- No Aristocrats - This one is more because I've used it a lot lately, and it seems relatively surplus to requirements.
- No Altars - Ashnod's Altar and Phyrexian Altar, sorry about it. They break too easily. (Altar of Dementia gets a pass for now)
- No Prossh, Skyraider of Kher - not for power reasons, this one is more thematic. I just can't see Korvold sharing the limelight with another legendary dragon, so he's out.
So I've built with these in mind, which might seem quite restrictive, but I was surprised myself to see how much scope I still had. This deck is very much a work in progress, but nonetheless, it's been remarkably resilient and explosively strong. Once you've got some early synergies going it's remarkably easy to have quite expansive turns and power a lot of land into play and a lot of card advantage into hand.
Strategy and Mechanics
The strategy here is relatively simple - early turns you're looking for ramp options, and an engine. Something like Goblin Welder, Ramunap Excavator, The Gitrog Monster, Orcish Lumberjack or what have you. A reason to blow your own stuff up. There's enough here you should be able to find one or two. Then you want the means to do so - again, there are several ways to do so - for creatures, there are plenty, for lands there are some, and most of the artifacts in the deck are capable of blowing themselves up (thank you very much), or can be popped on a different vector (artifact creatures).
Once you have a value train going you should be more than capable of vomiting plenty of land into play, casting your commander, and gathering yourself a pretty insurmountable boardstate, possibly even with some commander damage. From here, you really just want to keep doing what you're doing - draw and generate mana by sacrificing your own things, and possibly help your creatures get largely in the process. It really should not take you long whatsoever to create quite a potent board state.
The thing is, once you have this going it's going to be pretty obvious that you must be stopped. Now, with some of my self-imposed restrictions, there are less tools in the belt to fight back with - not none, but less. There's a couple of ways to manage this - instant speed sacrifices to get more value for yourself instead of losing everything (Greater Good, say), or bounce back with a haymaker, something like Living Death or Wave of Vitriol.
There are also a couple of relatively strong unintentionally included combo angles here:
- The Gitrog Monster and Life from the Loam and other dredge variants (theoretically) could draw most of the cards in your deck. I say theoretically purely because there are not as many lands as there are non land cards in the deck, so eventually you will flop on triggering the frog; realistically, your best chance is drawing something like 40% of the deck and having a lot of lands in your graveyard. I was aware of the synergy putting both of these cards in the deck and it's why I haven't included any other dredge cards - i've played against these sort of decks before and honestly, they're not a lot of fun in my opinion. They slow the game to a crawl while you play solitaire, and that's not something I like.
- Mazirek, Kraul Death Priest and Altar of Dementia - with enough of a board presence in creatures, treasures, lands, there is every chance with these two pieces on the field you could have enough to mill the table into oblivion. You'd start by sacrificing your treasures to trigger Mazirek and make your creatures enormous, do the same with lands if possible, then finally sacrifice your enormous creatures to shred libraries. I guess I was aware of this possibility in including both of the cards in the list, but there's enough jankiness to doing this that it wouldn't necessarily be easy - you'd need to be well on the gravy train, and you'd need these two pieces in play plus a huge board. So, there's every chance you're about to win anyway. In this respect, it probably doesn't matter overly, and besides, Altar of Dementia is potentially a cut from the list at some point (see below).
Further Developments
There's plenty to add to, here. I really like the idea of having a fairly complete set of recursion tools for artifacts, creatures and lands, but we will see how that goes into the future. A lot of what's needed to optimise (even within my own self-imposed limits) is very expensive. Nevertheless, here's the eventual buylist:
- Sylvan Safekeeper
- Scapeshift
- Wooded Foothills et al
- Stomping Ground et al
- Need for Speed
- Squandered Resources
- Grim Feast
Thanks!
Toc