The Year of Brew

Week 7: A Rising Tide Sinks All Ships with Araumi

Julian Leal

21 Feb 2021 - 5 min read

It’s week 7 here in Year of Brew Land and we’re headed to the (least) happiest place on Earth (at least for our opponents): Dimir! But Dimir is easy, comfortable territory for a control mage like myself, so let’s mix it up by handicapping our cardpool; let’s make it a pauper deck. Can we exert dominance over our opponents’ hands, librarys, and hearts with Araumi of the Dead Tide ? I think so.

Deck 7: Dimir

On the surface, Araumi lends herself to a very value based and recursive deck. Play creatures with good enter-the-battlefield effects, and then reanimate them for (usually) triple the value later in the game. Simple and effective. However, we’re taking a much more… devious option.

Araumi wants creatures in our graveyard, so what better way to churn through our deck with loot effects like Compulsive Research , Frantic Search , and Thirst for Meaning . We can keep the lands and spells we need now and ditch everything else to roll in with the dead tide.

But, if we want to be discarding cards, why should our opponents get to have any? The secondary aim of this deck is to absolutely deprive our opponents of any resources. Heaters like Delirium Skeins and Mind Rake serve double duty by having us discard too, but Tasigur’s Cruelty and Unnerve are there strictly to be dastardly.

We also have plenty of creatures like Burglar Rat , Liliana’s Specter , and Elvish Doomsayer that can hit our opponents hands in life and in death (aka by being encored). The less cards our opponents have, the less they can do to fight against the ripcurrent.

We can continue to disrupt our opponents with tempo kings like Aether Adept and Academy Journeymage , and Purple-Crystal Crab and Filigree Familiar will keep our hand full of gas. But to win the game, we have to reach across the color pie to red, for some good ol’ fashioned BURN.

Yes. Burn in dimir. Caustic Hound , Soulcage Fiend , and their ilk are ticking time bombs once they hit the field. We can attack them freely as whether they hit, trade, or even need to chump, we’re whittling away at our opponents. Then, when we get to wash them back onto the battlefield, they triple up their damage and pop on their own.

This deck is incredibly dependent on its commander to function at peek degeneracy, but we’ve packed plenty of protection, so get out there and live your inner villian!

Commander

Araumi of the Dead Tide

Creatures

Academy Journeymage
Aether Adept
Archaeomancer
Ashen-Skin Zubera
Aven Surveyor
Blistergrub
Bog Witch
Burglar Rat
Caustic Hound
Cephalid Sage
Chillbringer
Cloudkin Seer
Cloudkin Seer
Deranged Assistant
Dreamscape Artist
Elvish Doomsayer
Filigree Familiar
Fleshbag Marauder
Floating-Dream Zubera
Frost Lynx
Gray Merchant of Asphodel
Liliana's Specter
Miasmic Mummy
Mnemonic Wall
Nocturnal Feeder
Palace Familiar
Purple-Crystal Crab
Rotting Rats
Separatist Voidmage
Serrated Scorpion
Soulcage Fiend
Stinkweed Imp
Tattered Mummy
Trove Tracker