[Deck] Reanimator

[Rune]

Is Sheoldred that much better than Angel of Despair though?

Angel just stomps Show & Tell even if they drop Omniscience.

I forgot to respond to this, but basically Tidespout is better than Angel because

- it's blue (relevant because the blue count for FoW is fairly low)
- deals with multiple trouble permanents (very relevant if you face decks like Enchantress, 12Post, any Stax variant, etc. - Angel will rarely be able to cut it here)
- it's a much better stand-alone threat than Angel because it can keep the entire board under control if they have no removal. Angel can easily be raced even if she blows up a threat.

It's true that Angel is better against S&T -> Omniscience -> Emrakul, but this matchup is fairly easy to begin with, and that sequence of plays is fairly unlikely anyway. If they go S&T -> Omni -> Wish, then Tidespout is only worse than Angel if you don't have an instant to cast. If they have Emrakul instead of Wish, you'll need 2 instants, so here Angel is definitely better. But all of this is fairly irrelevant since Reanimator basically murders OmniTell before they can even try to pull any of that off.

I'm not sure what Sheoldred is supposed to do. It seems completely useless and redundant to me, but I do know that most Magic players value winning in spectacular fashion above everything else, so I'm guessing she's a shining star in that regard.



To the people who play Duress: Never ever add this card to your 75 before playing 4 Thoughtseize, and even then you'd probably never want it. Duress is actually almost unplayable in this deck.

[Dyvith]

Man, this thread is poppin'

[Kich867]

Man, this thread is poppin'

Yeah, I mean it helps that the deck is pretty solid as a general statement. I've since dropped Show and Tells from the list, since I can never find a reason to board them in that I don't just..handle already. I find it way easier to beat the hate than to try and shimmy around it with a Show and Tell. I also took a good look at your list and incorporated some of the ideas from it.

// Creatures: 7
4x Griselbrand
1x Iona
1x Elesh Norn
1x Tidespout Tyrant

// Reanimate Effects: 11
4x Exhume
4x Reanimate
3x Animate Dead

// Draw / Entombs: 17
3x Hapless Researcher
4x Brainstorm
4x Careful Study
2x Ponder
4x Entomb

// Protection: 7
4x Force of Will
3x Daze

// Lands: 18

// Sideboard: 15
2x Echoing Truth
2x Chain of Vapor
2x Engineered Explosives
2x Flusterstorm
1x Spell Pierce
3x Pithing Needle
1x Blazing Archon
1x Inkwell Leviathan
1x Angel of Despair

This is lighter on protection, but not by much, than your list, in favor of having super consistent turn 2-3 griselbrands. So far just gold fishing it for the past 40 minutes and an hour or so last night I'm getting more turn 2's than turn 3's and I've only mulled twice. Ponder is awesome.

[mike1987]

I tried playing reanimator in my casual legacy grp today and boy was it fun! To the reanimator veterans, what do you guys think of petal or daze, which is better in the deck. Petal gives us the necessay acceleration but daze is good in counter wars early in the game or even countering a drs or liliana seems good.

I playtested against miracles and that matchup was dismal. An early top/CB and its good game. Appreciate any advice on that matchup.

My sb looks like this currently:

2 Thoughtseize
2 City of Traitors
2 Show and tell
2 Jace the mind sculptor
3 Pithing needle
2 Echoing truth
1 Inkwell Leviathian
1 Flusterstorm

[Dyvith]

No Karakas?

[Dyvith]

Kich - I think you underestimate the power of Show and Tell. One of the things that makes a deck powerful is not just consistency, but rather the wide range of angles that it can attack from. This is why Jace is in the board - because if your opponent is keeping in cards for Jace, they are soft to dorks, meanwhile if they are bringing in tons of hate, they are soft to Show and Tell and Jace. Why bother fighting against graveyard hate when you can so easily sidestep it?

[Arsenal]

To the Lotus Petal supporters:

Have you tested Dark Ritual? It allows for beefy reanimating acceleration and it's less dead late game than Petal is as it can help hardcasting GBrand.

[Koby]

To the Lotus Petal supporters:

Have you tested Dark Ritual? It allows for beefy reanimating acceleration and it's less dead late game than Petal is as it can help hardcasting GBrand.

To be fair, Lotus Petal can cast Brainstorm or Careful Study too, which makes CS/Reanimate hands busted.

[Arsenal]

To be fair, Lotus Petal can cast Brainstorm or Careful Study too, which makes CS/Reanimate hands busted.

True. I get that Dark Ritual can't help out in casting the U spells, but at the same time, people are playing Lotus Petal for the accel, not color fixing, so in that respect, why not Dark Ritual? CS + Reanimate seems to be less likely (statistically speaking) then some permutation of Entromb + Exhume/Reanimate/Animate Dead. Also, being able to just flatout hardcast Griselbrand out of nowhere seems to be good.

[Dyvith]

Lotus Petal + Land lets you go entomb reanimate or careful study reanimate. If you have two petals, you can go Entomb or careful study into exhume or animate dead, or you can go thoughtsieze into careful study/entomb + reanimate. With Dark Ritual, you can only go Land -> Entomb -> Reanimate/Exhume/Animate Dead. Also, Petals allow you to hardcast Elesh and Iona, which does actually happen once in a while.

[Arsenal]

Lotus Petal + Land lets you go entomb reanimate or careful study reanimate. If you have two petals, you can go Entomb or careful study into exhume or animate dead, or you can go thoughtsieze into careful study/entomb + reanimate. With Dark Ritual, you can only go Land -> Entomb -> Reanimate/Exhume/Animate Dead. Also, Petals allow you to hardcast Elesh and Iona, which does actually happen once in a while.

Huh? With Dark Ritual, you can do Thoughtseize + Entomb + Reanimate too, that line of play isn't exclusive to Lotus Petals. Again, I get that you can't do anything with Careful Study if you're running Dark Ritual, but I think it's far more likely to open with Land + Dark Ritual -> any black spells that result in GBrand in a single turn than getting TWO Lotus Petals + Animate Dead/Exhume + Entomb/Careful Study. Also, I think it's more likely you'd hardcast GBrand with Dark Ritual than it is Elesh/Iona with Lotus Petals.

[sheoldred]

Before we're talking about hardcasting any of the fatties... Lotus Petal gives you a ton of options if drawn with Griselbrand which Dark Ritual only offers if you've still got an available black mana source. Lotus Petal is just far more flexible than Dark Ritual, both to enable the reanimation as well as to follow it up.
However, whichever one plays, they compete with Cantrips and Protection spells for slots... and they tend to lose that competition in my view

edit: well actually it's not true that Lotus Petal is more flexible than Dark Ritual when it comes to enabling a reanimation provided you play as many Thoughtseizes as Careful Studies. Nonetheless if I had the choice, I'd prefer Careful Study as discard outlet. Last but not least, Dark Ritual enables a Thoughtseize-protected T1 reanimation, though you might otherwise just draw a Daze/FoW instead of the Thoughtseize and have a similar result.
I guess you can argue about Lotus Petal and Dark Ritual as long as you play Thoughtseize as a playset... if you play any less, more and more arguments for Dark Ritual break away

[Arsenal]

I argue for neither, but I was curious as to why the Lotus Petal players chose Petal over Ritual when they seem to have the same number of pros/cons as each other.

[Rune]

Some of this has already been mentioned, but to sum up why Petal > Ritual in this deck:

- You can cast them after drawing with Gris and then Thoughtseize them, keep open Spell Pierce/Flusterstorm or use the Petals to dig for FoW with cantrips. You can't do anything with Rituals unless you have mana available already.

- You can keep psychotic hands like 2x Petal + Gris + Reanimate + Careful Study/Thoughtseize

- Allows you to keep up more mana on the opponent's turn if you're tapped out. This one is also pretty huge for me. For example, I would have lost in the semis of the MOCS if I didn't have a Petal up for my BUG opponent's Daze when he tried to Hymn me.


Ritual is better than Petal in a few situations, but overall it's much worse.


Btw, since it seems like no one is ever going to write a primer for Reanimator, I've started writing a very comprehensive piece on it that I can have done fairly quickly. If it's not possible to put it up as the primer, I'll try to release it as an article somewhere, if anyone's interested

[Kich867]

Btw, since it seems like no one is ever going to write a primer for Reanimator, I've started writing a very comprehensive piece on it that I can have done fairly quickly. If it's not possible to put it up as the primer, I'll try to release it as an article somewhere, if anyone's interested

I'd be super interested in that.

[spector14]

I'd be super interested in that.

Me too!!!

in theory was already doing it Alsan but disappeared for weeks ..

[Rune]

Aight, I'll put it up soon then. Have 7 pages in Word at the moment.

[BlackFlameAshura]

When me and my friend really got into Legacy I started with Affinity and to a lesser degree High Tide but moved to Maverick. He, on the other hand, built Reanimator and stuck with it, topping multiple times. Now we're running his build (albeit with some minor changes) in a joint venture of sorts on MTGO, given it was a far cheaper deck to build than most of my other decks especially with how cheap Graveborn became after it got passed out for free during MTGO's anniversary last year.

I've been trying to run it and figured I'd toss it up here for the chopping block. He's performed really well with this general build at our LGS' weekly events, having topped in about 75% of the events he's gone to. We're 2-2 when it comes to topping on MTGO now, though, and both of us feel like the list needs some work in some place or another.

Here's the current online build:

x1 Angel of Despair
x1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
x2 Griselbrand
x4 Hapless Researcher
x1 Iona, Shield of Emeria
x2 Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur
x1 Sheoldred, Whispering One

x4 Animate Dead
x4 Careful Study
x4 Daze
x4 Entomb
x4 Exhume
x4 Foil
x4 Ponder
x4 Reanimate

x4 Polluted Delta
x1 Underground Sea
x4 Watery Grave
x4 Island
x3 Swamp

///Sideboard

x1 Angel of Despair
x2 Blazing Archon
x4 Echoing Truth
x1 Kederekt Leviathan
x4 Pithing Needle
x3 Surgical Extraction

The offline build runs a singleton FoW and he sometimes borrows the remaining three from me as I usually play Maverick, but I don't really have the budget to afford them on MTGO for the time being. It's kind of the card we're trying to get to by doing well with what we have here. Even then Foil is still good but debateable. He remains steadfast in keeping it and that's fine for his offline version but online I can't help but wonder if it's better to do something else that isn't named Force of Will.

Aside from Force of Will, the remaining three Underground Seas, and Show and Tells, pretty much anything's game with this build. I've got most reanimator targets at my disposal and a couple other cards that should be in here or otherwise might be up for consideration to be run (Urborg, Leyline + Helm, Shizo, Brainstorm, Personal Tutor, etc.).

Any sort of advice would definitely be appreciated.

[Esper3k]

Again, just wanting to ask - why do people play Sheoldred? I'm curious what she's there for that isn't answered by Griselbrand, Elesh Norn, Iona, or Tidespout?

[Kich867]

Again, just wanting to ask - why do people play Sheoldred? I'm curious what she's there for that isn't answered by Griselbrand, Elesh Norn, Iona, or Tidespout?

I've since dropped her. She won me a game once in tournament play, but it really came down to "she wasn't griselbrand, and I didn't have entomb."

Maxing out on Griselbrands is just a better call. I now run 4.

The only creature I'd like back is Empyreal Archangel, she provides excellent defense against Esperblade.