Hello everyone, and welcome back to Scrap Savant! I hope you've had a happy holiday season so far, seeing Star Wars, eating copious amounts of food, and most of all enjoying time with loved ones. In the meantime, we've put together a Holiday Edition of Scrap Savant featuring Sire of Stagnation!

In our last meeting we reviewed the polls and the decklist; I ended up not changing anything from that list. In case you missed it due to being in a holiday frenzy, here's the Grixis Stagnation deck:

At the time of uploading this to MTGGoldfish, the deck costs a grand total of 4.08 tix, or $26.96 in paper.

Let's get right to it, shall we? As is frequently the case, I was excited to try out the list, and I just love how this series forces us to come up with these wacky decks. I think we have a successful one here in terms of the series parameters. As always, I'll discuss how to spend additional funds later in the article.

As is, I think the deck is viable enough to take to local tournaments. This is the epitome of what Scrap Savant can offer players looking to utilize excess cards and enjoy Magic: The Gathering without breaking the bank. Grixis Stagnation as a deck really does this well, and in that regard I'm very content.

Let me make one note to everyone before you watch the videos. I do implore you to bear with me sometimes. Just when I think I'm familiar with MTGO, it throws some wicked curve balls in my direction.

I apologize for any egregious mistakes, and those are entirely my fault. For the most part I think my play is solid, but I will admit there are some subtle things in the program that I miss. Some other things are out of my control---for example there seemed to be some kind of bug that prevented me from blocking Butcher of the Horde with Ulamog's Nullifier in one match.

Games

Thoughts

The deck has a lot of play to it. It might not have favorable match-ups across the board, but we're using impactful cards and creating some interesting synergies.

Ulamog's Nullifier is a strong Magic card. I'm having a hard time envisioning a Standard after April where this card sees no play whatsoever. The requirements to turn it on just aren't that hard to meet, and it can add a lot of value to a decklist.

I was also impressed by Herald of Kozilek, and I think adding the third color was worth it. We're still in the early stages of Oath of the Gatewatch spoilers (or leaks, at any rate) but I'm still hoping for some more colorless spells to play alongside Herald. It's a strong card that can open up new lines of play.

That leads me to Sire of Stagnation. My thoughts are while it's a strong card, I don't know if it's worth building around. More likely than not Sire just doesn't have a profound enough impact on the game. In the context of Standard Constructed, I think there are just better cards to cast on six.

Maybe the landscape will change, and maybe we won't run into so many Aristrocrats lists on MTGO, but it's just a straight-up dead draw in certain matchups. Perhaps rotation will change things enough for Sire of Stagnation to make its mark.

Additional Upgrades

As always, I'll provide some additional suggestions for upgrades permitted by a larger budget. I do think the decklist is quite powerful despite only costing $25, but there's plenty of room for improvement.

I'd like to recommend any (or all) of the following:

Additionally you can add these to the manabase:

There are some other worthy candidates, like Dig Through Time, but I wanted to mostly recommend cards players don't have to worry about replacing for quite some time. The few upgrades above would make a huge difference to the lines of play available to the deck. They would also allow you to drop the underperforming cards that only made the cut because of the building parameters.

Shambling Vent may offer some incentive to splash additional white sources for access to interesting sideboard cards like Surge of Righteousness.

Here's what an upgraded list might look like:

Normally this would be the spot where I post the new polls. This upcoming Scrap Savant will be a little different. I really liked one of the prospects that came up (but didn't win), so I've decided to base the upcoming deck on this card:

Let's see where it takes us. See you all soon!