Dread Wanderer

Hi Everyone,

Christmas is just around the corner and I’d like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. As we wind down the year and begin to relax and take time to be with family and friends, I hope you also find time to brew new deck ideas with some Theros Beyond Death spoilers you’re seeing on the internet!

As for me, I’m ending the year somewhere in Platinum rank with this list right here! This was suggested to me by a good friend of mine, Gabe, that he saw an opponent play in Arena.

Basically, it’s The Wanderer + Command the Dreadhorde Combo deck. The Wanderer’s job is to negate the damage that Command the Dreadhorde deals to you after you reanimate a bunch of things from everyone’s graveyard. While we try to get to 10 mana, we want to control the board as best we can.

We feature a wide spectrum of removal from hand disruption (Thought Erasure), sweepers (Kaya’s Wrath + Time Wipe), bounce effects (Teferi), damage-based removal (Oath of Kaya), sacrifice abilities (Liliana) and exile effects (The Wanderer).

I also found that The Wanderer is actually quite useful around the Gold 2 to Platinum 4 meta. She’s able to exile Bonecrusher Giant, Questing Beast, Spawn of Mayhem, Rotting Regisaur, Cavaliers, Krasis, and Gods. Her passive ability also does a nifty job of preventing Mono-Red decks from targeting you with their Shocks and Slaying Fire.

The deck’s primary weakness is decks that can play threat after threat using high powered cards like Questing Beast in multiple succession. We want the opponent to commit more to the board so that our sweepers give us higher ROI but the opponent will always play around this for sure.

The sideboard is a transformative list that turns the combo deck into a Midrange deck inspired by Alexander Hayne’s Citadel list in the MPL. Here’s the swap I usually do if I want to surprise the opponent who will be putting more noncreature hate.

Side-Out:

• 2 Chemister’s Insight
• 4 Kaya’s Wrath
• 2 Command the Dreadhorde
• 1 Liliana, Dreadhorde General
• 3 The Wanderer
• 3 Narset

I really like the deck because our game 1 win condition is almost guaranteed if we get to resolve it. While our transformative sideboard allows us to win the next games from a different angle that could possibly negate the aura-based removal and planeswalker-removal package our opponent might bring in.

The core pieces of our sideboard are Kenrith and Bolas’s Citadel. Similar to how Fires of Invention decks play, we want to use our life total to play as many spells from the top of our library and then use Kenrith’s ability to regain 5 life with the mana our untapped lands can produce.

After siding our Hero of Precinct One and the rest of the sideboard, the deck would have 19 gold cards that can trigger Hero’s token ability which I think is a good balanced number (1/3 of the deck) to still reap the rewards of playing HoPo.

Take the deck for a spin if you have the wildcards for it, and take a screenshot of how small the card avatars in your Arena client can be once you get to clutter your board with your reanimated walkers and your opponent’s creatures!

Till then, happy holidays!
Vanson