Card/Deck The Gruul Clans (RG)

[ravnic]

Gruul offers a lot to do in cube I think. When you support green aggro, Gruul becomes a great aggro pairing. When you support big red and Fireball effects, Gruul becomes a good ramp pairing. You can also do things like wildfire.dec and token strategies. But how do you capture this flexibility in your guild section?

What are you running in your Gruul sections? What themes/archetypes do you support? Did you have some surprising successes? What do you want the Gruul Clans to do?


________

My current choices are:


Guildmage is a sweet card, aggroplayable and elsewhere. Green ability makes combat a hell and the red ability wins more games than it should be allowed to.
Rampager is better as a 2-mana combat trick, but flexibility is key.
Dragonlair Spider is a nice ramp target with garuanteed value, works well in token strategies and lives through most red sweepers to repopulate afterwards.
Fires is best in ramp and midrange decks with beefy cc4+ creatures.


Hybrid aggro 1-drops are really great when they can actually and realistically be played in either color.



Release your inner wilderness and tell me what gruul cards you like to smash your foes with!

 

[Peter LaCara]

The best Gruul hybrid bar none. I love her more than is probably healthy. She helps aggro decks explode on turn 2. She can do stupid stuff with Nykthos or flicker effects. She can even fix your mana in some situations. There's a few infinite combos you can do with her (Angel of Glory's Rise + Fiend Hunter + a sac outlet is my favorite). She's just cool.

I'm still rejiggering my Gruul section because trying to reconcile what red (the most aggressive color in my cube) with green (the most controlling color in my cube... more than blue actually) is challenging. But Burning-Tree Emissary will always have a place.

 

[sigh]

Now that is a good green "agro" card. Saw standard play, sees modern play. Really a green style of increasing pressure: exploiting the mana system to advance the game ahead of schedule. Definitely recommend this card. I used to run it, but have switched to another gruul card that coincidently can exploit the mana system in true green fashion, even if that mode is less used than the others:

This card would be perfect with the tokens strategy you are pushing (very) hard in RG, ravnic. I'd be taking out the fires for it, probably, and moving that effect into mono-color.

 

[Peter LaCara]

Hammer of Purphoros is my favorite Fires of Yavimaya. That's a card that does cool stuff with Life from the Loam and Ramunap Excavator.

 

[Peter LaCara]

Also, I just want everyone to take a moment to appreciate Burning-Tree Emissary's flavor text. It should be a guiding principle in designing Gruul sections.

 

[inscho]

My set of three are:



Kird Ape is clutch for Zoo, which functions as the fun police in my cube, insuring that people don't venture to deep into durdletown.
Clan Defiance could be something else. It lingers from when I had Pyromancer's Goggles. I've been debating whether I want to bring in Chandra, the Firebrand which would almost certainly warrant its spot in the guild. I run mana doublers in green in the form of Heartbeat of Spring and Regal Behemoth.
Borborygmos is there for Oath, Sneak Attack, Reanimator, and Ramp/Lands support. He's a looooot of fun.

I used to run Stormbind, but Hazoret the Fervent has easily taken that slot. Ghor-Clan Rampager is close to making the list, and would probably take the place of Clan Defiance.

 

[ahadabans]

I run ape and Bobo for reasons Inscho stated. I think zoo is a cool archetype and it is hard to draft because of the land demands. I dig that aspect of zoo. It's not easy mode drafting like many aggro decks can be in some cubes.

 

[ravnic]

Burning-Tree Emmissary is a really good card. Would you really consider it a true hybrid (playable in either color) or actually more a gold card?

Atarka's Command sounds good too, I'd imagine damage+pump ends a lot of games. But if I would include it, my cut would probably be Ghor-Clan Rampager.

The reason I do like Fires over something like Hammer of Purphoros is, that these effects are bester in big green decks and played early. So double red really hurts the hammer. If I could find a red slot though, I would try it for it's token producing ability alone. A half year ago, I actually wanted to cut Fires, but my best buddy with whom I'm managing this cube, veto'd for it. Them I forced myself to try it in big G/r/x decks and learned to love it, especially after I attacked an opponent at 20 life for leathal with a hasty Wolfbriar Elemental.

The card listed here that really peeks my interest is Stormbind though. I never saw it in action. In which decks and situations does it shine?

 

[ahadabans]

BTE is as much a gold card as Elves of Deep Shadow. I can see people classifying it there for convenience or an OCD impulse, but it's much more flexible than that in actual play. What if the ETB trigger was "add 1R" instead? That's what it does in a mono red deck and it's every bit as powerful.


EDIT:
Stormbind goes in any deck that wants to convert cards into damage. It's super powerful. Random discard feels like it would be bad (and clearly it's worse than nonrandom), but you can play important cards before you use the ability or you can use it with a land in hand before your draw step, etc. Card is very very good.

 

[Peter LaCara]

Burning-Tree Emmissary is a really good card. Would you really consider it a true hybrid (playable in either color) or actually more a gold card?

It's absolutely a hybrid. Moreso than Tattermunge Maniac, I would argue. Red decks like it because playing an extra 2/2 on turn 2 speeds up their clock by a good margin. Green decks like it because they can abuse its mana properties better than any other color (infinite ETB triggers with Temur Sabertooth, for example). Take a look at some Modern Green Devotion decks for some of the stupid stuff BTE can do in just a green deck. Tattermunge is mostly a red card, because most green decks simply don't want a 2/1 that can't block most of the time.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Plus a custom sorcery for with "Target land you control becomes a 5/5 Elemental creature with trample and haste until end of turn. It's still a land. It must be blocked this turn if able." and basic landcycling for .

 

[Chris Taylor]

I'd like to add that Reggie has been great

 

[Onderzeeboot]

My favorites out of my RG section are, in no particular order...

Bloodbraid Elf is the classic cascade card that gives Gruul decks some much needed card advantage as well while maintaining pressure. It plays like a charm and is a legit draw into the color combination.

Regisaur Alpha is everything I want as a Gruul player, period. It's just awesome. It's a DINOSAUR! Seriously though, I really love how this card performs, and I'm hoping for a few more playable dinosaurs in the next set to make the rider a bit more relevant. Even without any other dinosaurs though, Reggie is awesome. As for its power level, it's right where I want it to be. Gruul wants to apply pressure, but I've found Wolfir Silverheart and Verdurous Gearhulk to be a bit too much. Reggie strikes a nice balance, both because it actually requires two colors, and because it doesn't have a horizontal mode, where it just creates one unstoppable "deal with me or die" monster.

Ruric Thar is a big monster that actually manages to punish control decks for dealing with it. It's a perfect top end card that requires some serious manoeuvering on your opponent's part to deal with it without losing to much resources. Top notch.

Domri Rade is the planeswalker I eventually settled on, and I already like it much better than Xenagos and Arlinn Kord. Every ability on him feels on point and costed correctly, and the fight ability is (un)surprisingly sweet with the new (very playable) enrage raptors in green.

Stormbind. Oh Stormbind. You janky card you, stealing games like nobody's business! It looks so bad at first sight, but every once in a while it beats the snot out of someone and you're left wondering how they managed to make discarding cards at random worth it. When it showed up in a recent winning decklist it made me smile

 

[xyz]

Offering up a couple that haven't been mentioned:


Burning-Tree Shaman still has a reasonable size and combined with the ability exerts a solid amount of pressure. I like it especially for my cube which has a lot of fiddly engine building stuff going on.

Mina and Denn, Wildborn is more a theoretical card. It's currently in my list, but I haven't had much experience with it. It feels like it should fit into a variety of RG decks well. Aggro-midrange decks benefit from the trample and the body, especially if you've got a lot of smaller ETBs going on. In ramp, the body is a decent stop gap and the extra land ability plays well with Courser of Kruphix /Oracle of Mul Daya and Life from the Loam. And speaking of Life from the Loam, Mina and Denn, Wildborn's third pick up a land ability seems good to have as another fuel source for Seismic Assault in the RG lands type decks.