Welcome, everyone, to the Holiday Edition of Scrap Savant! The videos and commentary will be presented soon---in the meantime I wanted to make sure to discuss the polling results and decklist beforehand. That way before I head into the videos you'll have a general idea of my thoughts and we can focus on winning games!

First let's review the polling:

The verdict is in: Sire of Stagnation was the clear winner. I did, however, decide to veer away from the poll results concerning the number of colors. Thus I built a three-color deck, even though the votes were for two colors. I'll explain why further down.

Building with Bulk

Sire of Stagnation is a really interesting card. It's akin to community favorite Consecrated Sphinx, but obviously there are glaring differences. This card is a great mythic to use with this series, and I think we can build around it in a variety of different ways.

I decided to go Grixis colors instead of two colors mainly in order to utilize these three cards:

I really wanted to include Herald of Kozilek because it synergizes nicely with all the colorless spells we're playing. And I felt building in these colors gave us a good chance to stay competitive with other decklists.

I understand it's not the most creative deckbuilding, but even traditional decks are a challenge to build with our restrictive parameters. Some weeks we'll definitely go for more out-of-the-box thinking, but this time let's see how competitive we can make a Grixis Devoid deck without breaking the bank.

So let's look at the preliminary list for our Holiday Edition of Scrap Savant.

I think we have something promising here. We have access to some great synergy with Herald making key cards like Ulamog's Nullifier, Complete Disregard, and of course Sire of Stagnation cheaper and more efficient.

We also get to see Brutal Expulsion, which we tried in an earlier installment of Scrap Savant, in a new context. It will be interesting to see how it fares.

I may make some final tweaks and modifications before recording and posting the videos. But I'm feeling more confident this time around with the initial build and the card pool we've given ourselves access to.

The key to this deck is to answer early plays from our opponent and try to keep tempo with the tier-one Standard decks. If we can do that, we should be able to reap the benefits of Sire's ability drawing us into more answers. Late-game we'll close with the Sire himself (5/7 is pretty large as Standard threats go these days) in addition to our awaken spells like Scatter to the Winds.

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Well, that’s it for this update. Stay tuned for the YouTube videos later in the week. We’ll see how the deck fares on MTGO.

As always I’m looking forward to everyone’s input. I really enjoy doing this series and I hope it helps everyone out there. If you haven’t before, please keep hitting the polls, and take the time to subscribe/comment/etc., either here on QS or on the YouTube channel.

See you all soon!

-Chaz @ChazVMTG