Mettle Aggro

Hello Alchemist,

When the knights of Dominaria came into the picture, I always wanted to build them and use one of Ixalan’s quirky flip-chantments, Path of Mettle. For a time it was tried by some of the pros and found its use to be limited and narrow. This card went into hibernation and I think it’s about time to wake it up.

Path of Mettle is another build-around card. You need creatures that have the abilities to dodge the 1 damage it deals. You need enough creatures to make it flip. Simply put, you need it in an aggressive shell.

First Strikers

Knight of Grace may be small and we may not have the black permanent to boost its power but it still keeps a lot of 2-toughness creatures at bay. It cannot be targeted by Cast Down, Fatal Push, Vraska’s Contempt or Unlicensed Disintegration. Kari Zev on the the other hand dodges a lot of blockers early in the game and Ragavan never seems to tire at dealing those 2 damage.

Vigilantes

One of my favorite Sagas from Dominaria, History of Benalia gives you 2 bodies and pumps them including your Knight of Grace. What I like about this is being able to chain one after another which really pressures the opponent to find an answer to your 2/2s or to the Saga itself.

Hasters

I like how they line-up perfectly on curve. Bomat for the usual draws late game, Earthshaker to save your 2/2 knights from getting blocked. Ahn-Crop does a great job negating your opponent’s plan to go on defense. Hazoret to crash in and draw the attention away from your smaller dudes. Glorybringer needs no explanation.

As for spells, we will play a playset of Lightning Strike to deal those last few points of damage. Insult // Injury is to pay respect to Nexus decks but more importantly, it makes the deck super dangerous. Once a History of Benalia pops and your creatures are still alive, casting Insult means your knights will deal 8 damage instead of 4, among others who are swinging with them. This can surprise your opponent and ruin their math thinking they will still have another turn to draw a sweeper or win with the swing back.

We hate these guys. Green Stompy is one of the foreseen bad match-ups because our creatures are small and will never win in combat.

Thopter Arrest makes short work of these monsters but these decks run Thrashing Brontodon so Dusk // Dawn helps us make sure the creatures on the board are just as small as us.

Ixalan’s Binding comes in against pesky Planeswalkers or artifacts like GPG. It costs a lot but against Grixis or colors that don’t have ways to remove enchantments, landing this on a Nicol Bolas, or Rekindling Phoenix feels awesome.

Rekindling Phoenix comes in against attrition based decks that run a lot of removal. After they have fired off their removal on our early creatures, landing a Phoenix mid game will spell trouble for them as they try to find a 2-for-1 deal to get rid of this bird for good.

Against control and to further improve our position against Nexus decks, Banefire comes in to make sure we can close the game before the opponent gets to play his game.

That’s it for today, I hope to find more time to keep writing. If you have a deck idea, let me know so we can both work on it for the next article.

I’m still playing around an idea sent to be on a Jodah deck. Wait for it!

Vanson