How They Brew It - Necrobloom's Astral Slide Adventures

The Necrobloom

by Ivan Shavrin

Home, Sweet Home

Welcome to Realtor Real Tour. I'm your host, Michael Celani, and as a house hunter, I have over one thousand confirmed kills.

Meet the Stanton family. John Stanton is a junior placement specialist at Edible Arrangements with a Bachelor's degree in strawberries. His partner, John Stanton, works in a factory mixing red and yellow pigments to make orange. John and John are looking for a quiet, twenty-three hundred square acre log-cabin high rise close to their jobs, the beach, downtown, and the country. Their budget is five easy installments of $19.99 and a coupon valued at 1/100^th of a cent. To find a cozy condo for this charming couple, I'm going to have to dig deep with an expert in the area.

Nobody is better at dredging up desirable pieces of land than The Necrobloom

House Flipping

Just like a holding company gobbling up affordable housing so they can artificially inflate the cost of homes in an area, we're don't intend to actually use our lands for more than an ever-increasing store of value. That's because The Necrobloom

The obvious winners here are the Channel lands, which we're unequivocally treating as spells. I'd only drop them onto the field if doing so meant I could save my firstborn child, and even then I'd hesitate until he stops messing around in class and learns his fractions, Jimmy. Eiganjo

Common fetch lands are here, too. Though we're not focusing on it, The Necrobloom

But it turns out that there's a sizable chunk of land cards that have built-in cycling. The play pattern is simple: with The Necrobloom

Sprucing up the Place

Buying or building a home is expensive, especially when your homeowner's association demands five grand a month and has outlawed the color puce. When you have to pay , , , , , , , , or even to cycle your lands, you're going need lots of mana. Getting an illicit amount of energy for cycling used to be something only Lance Armstrong had to worry about, but luckily The Necrobloom

Every time we play a land, we're getting at least a single Plant

With cards like Cryptolith Rite

And for those of you out there that are less into plants and more into nuclear weapons, don't worry. Fluctuator

A Strong Foundation

The Necrobloom

A downside to dredging your entire library into your graveyard is that you're going to get called a cheater likely to dredge away your actual reanimation spells, but there's a few ways around that hurdle. Dread Return

The benefit of being in specifically is that there's so many creatures that reanimate when they enter, too. Bring back a Karmic Guide

Our end-game targets don't really matter. I've included the three above, but go ahead and decorate the top end of your deck with whatever creatures you want. You can include Craterhoof Behemoth, Ashen Rider, Reya Dawnbringer, Avacyn, Angel of Hope, or even Wood Elemental. Be creative!

Astral Projection

As an expert house hunter, I've seen a few things in my time, like that inexplicable stairs toilet. One thing's for certain: my current plan is way too straightforward. Self-milling so that you can reanimate creatures? Any commander could do that. But The Necrobloom's affinity for cycling lands in particular lets us include two very important pieces which change everything.

Yes, the deck for them has finally arrived: both Astral Slide and Astral Drift turn all of our infinitely recurrable cycling lands into instants that blink creatures. Not only does this render all your dudes practically immune to removal, it also makes every reanimation target significantly stronger.

As an example, notice how a lot of our reanimation spells are actually creatures? When we cycle a land into Astral Slide, we can target our reanimator creatures and use that to do more reanimation. And since every time we dredge a land back into our hand, we're putting two more cards into the graveyard, so there's always an abundance of targets.

Some of our removal spells are creatures, too. If we can repeatedly blink Reclamation Sage, Skyclave Apparition, or even Ravenous Chupacabra, you can selectively take out opposing threats as they come up.

It's important to note that the Astral pair are both slow blinks, so any removal you're banking on won't happen immediately. The silver lining here is you can use the threat of removal as a way to make a deal. As an example, if an opponent plays a Rhystic Study, you can blink your Reclamation Sage in response, then threaten to remove it when it returns unless that player acquiesces to your demands. This is known in the business as "extortion," and it's a great way to get people to do what you want.

The most fun thing to do with this, though, is to blink your lands to get an absurd amount of Plants. Dryad Arbor is naturally both a creature and a plant, but if you want to really go crazy,  Life // Death turns all your lands into creatures. If you find your Fluctuator, you can blink all of your lands and create tons of tokens. It probably won't win you the game, but it's pretty funny!

Closing the Deal

Faced with a few different options from the esteemed Super Property Bros, John and John decided to choose option number π, the beach-side bungalo in Siberia, Russia. They put in an offer and closed on the house for $10,000 less than asking price, as they were holding the agent at gunpoint during negotiations. John and John have been living there with their family of fifty ghosts for three years and are getting married next fall. Another happy customer! Until next time, I'm Michael Celani, and this has been Realtor Real Tour.

If you liked this How They Brew It, come check out our Discord, where you can chat with likeminded brewers, suggest ideas for the column, and vote on which you want to see next! You can also check out my other projects on my website. See you around!

View this decklist on Moxfield