Krark, the Thumbless // Ghost of Ramirez DePietro - Win or Lose, you Win
Approximate Total Cost:
This deck has a very specific game plan and it's pretty hard to stop.
Krark, the Thumbless give you Value Town
The driving force is to get crazy value off Krark, the Thumbless.
Now of course it is a 50/50 chance of either doubling up on the spell or it getting returned to your hand for "no value".
There are 54 instant and sorcery all up, so over half the deck, and with Krark in mind 37 of these cost one mana. Most of them draw you a card with some other element as well.
If you are casting more expensive cards and they get returned to your hand, then recasting them becomes quite mana intensive.
However casting one mana spells is far more likely to be successful by casting multiple times.
With so many cantrips in the deck you can really filter through your deck to get to key cards.
Your initial thoughts might be that the success of games is going to come down to literally coin flips, and part of this is true.
You can think of your spells as statistically needing to cast them twice in order to be successful, but then you get twice the effect.
So if you are mentally prepared to think in terms of your one mana spells costing two mana then you'll have a better feel for how the deck works.
For example think of Preordain more in these terms below, when planning turns in the early game.
Preordain
Scry 2, then draw a card.
Scry 2, then draw a card.
Now of course you can get lucky and just string off winning flips in a row, but you will probably have that evened off and have a bad streak at some other time.
If you look at two mana spells, then on average they could cost four mana before they are successful. This is why the deck has so very few instant or sorcery over one mana, as they are a little too risky when it comes to mana efficiency.
Krark's Thumb is one of the best cards in the deck and will better enable you to carry out exactly the sequences you'd prefer.
Given how much it can do for you in the game there are a number of tutors that can help you find it.
The main idea is that you are going to have a Brain Freeze into Underworld Breach combo turn.
It's important to note that the mechanic "storm" counts the number of spells that are "cast" in a turn and so if you cast spells and they are returned to your hand then they will still count towards storm.
You can get a pretty decent storm count for Brain Freeze and with Ghost of Ramirez DePietro you then have access to those cards that got milled.
You in fact want Underworld Breach to be milled most times so that you can get it with Ghost of Ramirez DePietro.
There are a number of spells that can be cast for free; Mental Misstep, Gitaxian Probe, Gut Shot, Mogg Salvage, Fierce Guardianship, Deflecting Swat, Submerge, Pact of Negation, Force of Will, Force of Negation.
What in fact you want to do is keep casting these and losing the flip so that it returns to your hand so that you can recast it.
Here is where Krark's Thumb can be just as important about ignoring any winning flips.
You can literally do unintuitive things like go to counter your own spells say using Mental Misstep and look to just get a number of more casts to get your storm count up.
You will be surprised at how high a storm count you can get without spending much mana at all.
You can easily get storm counts that will mill half your deck with Brain Freeze and then you'll have access to one of these with Ghost of Ramirez DePietro.
Force of Negation and Force of Will require exiling a blue card from your hand so it is unlikely that you would use these too many times like this as storm counts however.
There are other storm cards in the deck in Mind's Desire, Grapeshot, Flusterstorm.
The neat thing with all these cards is that if you lose the flip then they return to your hand but you still get all the copies on the stack.
It is easy to machine gun the entire board of creatures with a Grapeshot after using the free spell tricks.
Mind's Desire going to cast a ton of the deck.
Flusterstorm returning to your hand just means that you have a repeatable counterspell.
Thousand-Year Storm is the only other card in the deck that copies spells outside of Krark.
It doesn't matter what happens with Krark flips you'll still get to copy the spells. In fact here is another example where you probably prefer spell to return to hand so that you can recast them again.
This is another way to abuse the free spells as well and hoping to lose the flips to get additional value.
Proactive and not Reactive
There isn't a lot of counterspells in the deck as Krark, the Thumbless ability can make it hard to actually stop opponents in a timely manner.
I play a Kalamax, the Stormsire that has more of a control role because you can definitively counter spells with the double up.
However with Krark you are just not sure what will happen with the flips.
With this in mind, the deck is much more proactive rather than reactive deck, with spells not necessary being that important to actually resolve.
However Fierce Guardianship is of course going to be a guaranteed counterspell as you can just keep casting it till you win the flip.
Same with Mogg Salvage, Deflecting Swat, Submerge are all guaranteed disruption.
Now Pact of Negation is a guaranteed counterspell, however it will be copied when you do get to resolve it, meaning you'd need to pay in your next upkeep. Not exactly appealing, so it is very unlikely that you'd use it to counter a spell in an opponents turn. Rather it is used to push through spell(s) in your combo turn when are you are looking to win the game.
But there are ways to get rid of permanents with Repeal, Chain of Vapor, Cyclonic Rift, Snap, Pongify.
Muddle the Mixture is a counterspell, but often you could use it for the transmute cost to get Krark's Thumb.
How do you finish opponents?
There are actually a lot of ways to kill your opponents. Brain Freeze into Underworld Breach is the main engine and if you've had any experience with these cards then you know you can just mill opponents out with recasting the Brain Freeze targeting them.
I've already mentioned Grapeshot and you'd be surprised that you can literally look to deal lethal damage to opponents. Remember with Krark's Thumb you have a great chance of returning it to your hand so you can keep recasting it. It has to be in an all out combo turn but it is a possibility.
Thousand-Year Storm is the same in that you can build up so much of a storm count and do things like recast even Lightning Bolt a number times to stack lethal amounts of damage.
Having alternative ways to win is nice because if your opponents have graveyard hate for example you can work around it by using these other methods.
The coin flip can determine if you are able to go head long into a big turn, but the reward is incredible.
Once you've got Underworld Breach going then there are some ways to generate more mana.
Lion's Eye Diamond is the cheapest way.
If you combine Frantic Search with High Tide then you can filter for even more cards and generate a lot of mana, especially if you stack even more casting of High Tide into the turn.
Intuition can be a sort of substitute for Brain Freeze. If you copy it with Krark then you get to look for 6 cards. Then Ghost of Ramirez DePietro gives you access to one of those so let's just say one of those is Underworld Breach and you can go ham from there.
It also worth mentioning that because so much of the deck is around one mana you filter through a lot of your deck, so you build up a graveyard naturally. You can combo with Underworld Breach realistically in some games without other enablers if you've managed to cast a lot of spells in the game already.
There are only 7 creatures in the deck but there are a select few gems.
Ghost of Ramirez DePietro although can be used as a super enabler for the Brain Freeze/Underworld Breach combo, he also just represents good value over the course of the game.
There are 11 cards in the deck that either discard or mill so you can look to get a card back each turn this way.
An example is say you Gamble and it gets copied with Krark, the Thumbless allowing you to search for 2 cards. There is a higher chance you'll discard at least one of them randomly and now Ghost of Ramirez DePietro will be able to get it back with combat damage.
There are cards that make Ramirez able to get through damage more easily as well with Cloak of Feathers, Crash Through, Leap, Shadow Rift, Slip Through Space giving evasion of various sorts.
You can also give him haste with Expedite, Crimson Wisps so you can hold off on casting him until you have a combo turn potentially if the game lines up that way.
Search for Azcanta goes from library to graveyard so you can use Ghost of Ramirez DePietro to get those cards for pure card advantage.
The neat thing is that it only gets exiled if the spell goes to graveyard, so if you lose the flip then it ends up back in your hand.
Goblin Engineer actually puts the card into your graveyard from the library so you can get that card with Ramirez if you deal combat damage the same turn.
What's not in the deck?
Why not play Dramatic Reversal and Isochron Scepter combo?
Well the problem is that even though you copy the Dramatic Reversal it still needs to be cast, which means that you could lose the flip and it could fizzle.
Where are all the big draw cards like Wheel of Fortune, Timetwister, Windfall, Time Spiral?
Well you need to understand the dynamics with Krark, the Thumbless. Investing 3 mana into a spell and it fails is a big deal. That is why the deck is so focused on one mana spell so that you can statistically play them for advantages with less risk.
Say statistically you need to spend two mana for the one mana spells on average for them to be successful.
If you have to spend 6 mana on average to make the Wheel type spell successful then this is a major drawback.
Then also copying these spell if they are successful isn't necessarily beneficially either.
Then finally this deck is all about card advantages. You will have a full hand of cards to cast every turn thanks to the mana efficiency of cantrips and Krark giving value. So cards in hand is not an issue for this deck.
If you are more of a gambler and want to play a much more high risk higher reward type game then you could look at getting a massive payoff with say Time Spiral combined with High Tide for sure. But let's say you cast High Tide and then you fire off the Time Spiral and it fails twice. Now you just have to end the turn and you've wasted a High Tide and an entire turn.
It has of course a potential huge upside in that it might succeed and now it fires off twice meaning you can tap/untap those Islands for incredible amounts of mana in between the draws.
Zacama
