Every workday while the set is new, Insight is taking a quick look at another deck featuring cards from Innistrad: Midnight Hunt. Werewolves may hog the spotlight storywise, but a less tribalistic red-green build might be the best deck in current Standard: time for the good stuff!
My colleague Gianluca has already done a great job covering Werewolves in the midst of the spoiler season, so today I get to talk about a different breed of Gruul. That's a privilege because purebred tribal decks rarely cut it these days—it's more about individually powerful cards. Well, , the strongest red creature in Standard, is still on the loose, and so is .
Just a handful of sets are legal right now, but this deck manages to take the best cards from all of them. In addition to the headliners above, Kaldheim gives us and . Adventures in the Forgotten Realms adds , , and . The cards that Midnight Hunt introduce deserve a bit more coverage, of course.
has already become a mainstay in this deck and many others. While not a ramp deck per se, Gruul Midrange can both accelerate into Wrenn and benefit from all of the planeswalker's abilities, including the first and second. The and creature land are great targets for both, and they become easier to animate too. All this ramping also improves and make it easier to reach 's final level.
Only two new creatures see consistent play in this archetype for now, and . In the worst case, the latter is a hasty 3/3 that's even better at night. Other times, it will give haste to Wrenn's Treefolk or to Esika's Chariot—and that's just brutal!
Here are two very similar Gruul lists. Likely not a collaboration but parallel evolution, their similarity lends extra credibility to the design.
| fingers1991's Gruul Midrange, 8th at Standard Challenge |
|---|
| Main Deck | Sideboard |
|---|
| | |
| BLJ's Gruul Midrange, 6th at Standard Challenge |
|---|
| Main Deck | Sideboard |
|---|
| | |
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily Cardmarket.
