Enter The Guildhall

Whole Lotta Lands (Brawl)

18 Aug 2020 - 9 min read

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Ahhhh It’s been a while since I’ve been able to publish something and boy does it feel good! After a week and a half spent driving across the country and getting acclimated to the constant sunshine and mellow temperatures of Southern California, I can once again spend countless hours inside with the blinds closed playing Arena. We’re back…

…and with quite the spicy brew! This deck actually took me quite some time to tweak and get juuust right, but I have a feeling you’ll love the end product. For this fine installment of Enter the Guildhall we’ll be following Radha, Heart of Keld as she tears a path across Dominaria leading her army of lands to victory a la Blackblade Reforged .

This iteration of Radha is a departure from her “mana dork” roots, but what an explosive pump ability! And it can be repeated!! Ooooookay, huddle in and let’s talk strategy.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that this deck is going to be base-green. Considering the only thing kinda Red about Radha’s design is first strike (although I guess you could make an argument for massive pump being Gruul given things like Xenagos, God of Revels ), the bulk of Radha’s ability suite will come from playing lands of all shapes and sizes; very Green indeed.

Once we have a decent manabase online it’ll be time to swing in with Radha and a collection of Gruul allstars. Since we’re in Green we’ll include Questing Beast , Aggressive Mammoth , Nissa, Who Shakes the World , etc. but Red won’t be outdone. Now, I don’t want to give too much away in the intro but ahem BOY I sure am TERRIFIED of these PEAKS. More on that below.

After that comes some super secret Gruul sauce I’ve wanted to try out and a dash of removal to spice it up. Presto! One haymaker fresh out of the oven.

Lands, Ho!

Beanstalk Giant pulls double duty as both decent ramp and coming down as an absolute wrecking ball if we’ve been doing our ramp correctly. There are few more destructive forces we can have in the late game when our entire plan is to play all the lands.

Azusa, Lost but Seeking is exactly the kind of help we need to move through our deck once Radha is on the field. Given that we can play lands off the top of our library, dropping any potential dead draws straight onto the battlefield is a pretty freaking strong upside. We’re also including Dryad of the Ilysian Grove for exactly the same reason.

Solemn Simulacrum is… okay so it doesn’t really need a highlight. It’s Sad Robot. But at the same time SAD ROBOT MADE IT INTO BRAWL!!! Just like Cultivate , seeing EDH staples rubbing shoulders with our Brawl ruffians just hits the feels the right way, ya know?

And when that’s not enough, we’ve got Arboreal Grazer , Migration Path , and Migratory Greathorn as well as plenty of dorks like Incubation Druid and Paradise Druid making one final tour before rotation in a month-ish…I’ll really miss these guys, but I have high hopes for Zendikar!

Generals, Sir.

Elder Gargaroth is this year’s Questing Beast and I for one am here for it. Swapping Haste and Deathtouch for Reach and Trample as well as just a ridiculous swath of abilities make the Elder a auto-include, for better or for worse.

Nyxbloom Ancient is our best chance to get a multi-activation Radha going and while I never was able to put the two together I honestly might just keep playing this deck until I do. With a chance to be tripling the land benefit as well as all the other ridiculous stuff Green can do with three times the mana Nyxbloom’s troops will leave no opponent standing.

Terror of the Peaks is proof that there’s actually red in this deck. Terror is a uhh “Terror” on its own, but given Green’s propensity to be playing big creatures it’s a match made in heaven to systematically wipe your opponent’s board. And their face.

Gimme That Good Gruul

If you’ve been into Brawl since it’s return in Eldraine you know just how ridiculously strong Green is. I can say quite honestly it’s second to none and any decks I’ve schemed up with Green in them generally rely on it to do the heavy lifting. That being said, it would be wrong to completely ignore Radha’s Red tilt. We saw Terror of the Peaks above but there are some powerful pieces that make the perfect complement to Green’s rampant board domination.

Fires of Invention might be out of Standard’s good graces, but in a deck where lands are the name of the game? The synergies are priceless. More often than not I’d end up playing a beefy spell, followed by a ramp spell, each turn until mana became a concern of the past. Is this card a lil broken? Yes. Does it still feel good to drop a Cavalier of Thorns and an Aggressive Mammoth in a single turn? (And as Julian pointed out to me, it also leaves your mana open for activated abilities, Radha approves of this development.)

Rhythm of the Wild is one of Gruul’s best support pieces against the ridiculous number of people in Brawl’s queue who have the audacity to counter my spells. In the playtests I did to prepare for this article, three of the five games I played with this particular build were up against decks that played at LEAST seven counterspells each. I’m not about that, and Rhythm saved my butt many a time making sure we could play our big ugly monsters (and get Radha on the board which is usually quite difficult)

Fling

…is all I have to say about that.

The Results

So…I’m not lying when I say this deck has had the best record I’ve ever recorded with an Enter The Guildhall deck. When I finally put this list together after countless versions and tweaks I went 5-0, but I will concede two of those victories were due in part to opponent misplays. In one against Tamiyo, Collector of Tales - my opponent tried to Voracious Greatshark my Elder Gargaroth when Rhythm of the Wild was on the field which… didn’t go how they were expecting.

In another close game against Thryx, the Sudden Storm I swung for lethal with a Radha that had mutated with Migratory Greathorn on top meaning my Radha was now a four cmc 3/4 with all the rest of her abilities. This became quite important when my opponent activated their Blast Zone for three (Radha’s cmc) and was left wondering why it hadn’t worked.

In short, always read your opponents cards - even if you think you know what they do. They still could surprise you.

That’s not to say this isn’t a super strong deck, it is! Hitting someone for 21 is satisfying to such a core level my inner caveman was jumping up and down beating his chest. This deck does what Gruul does best. Smash.

Radha You waiting for

Closing Thoughts

The only thing that could make this deck better is if we had a lands-matter theme in an upcoming set haha ooooo boy can’t imagine we’d get that lucky though…

More Entries in Enter The Guildhall:

• 13 Jul 2020: The Godfather (Brawl)
• 12 Jun 2020: Call it What You Want (Brawl)
• 28 May 2020: Flight of the Navigator (Brawl)
• 28 May 2020: An Introduction to Brawl
• 14 May 2020: Siona and the Argonauts (Brawl)

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