It’s Blue, Red, Green, and it’s pretty angry. I saw this decklist twice over at Hareruya, but was never bothered to write about it until I played the deck on MTG Arena. This is Temur Stompy!
The Boar God Sends His Regards
I am a huge fan of stompy decks, even though I can’t play Aggro decks to save my life. But after playing Temur Elementals for more than 50 games in the past 3 weeks, I kind of figured out how these kinds of deck work.
The Decklist
The author of the decklist is Sueyoshi Hirokazu. He managed to score 3-0 in their Holiday Standard Tournament on August 3, 2019.
Creatures
Spells
Planeswalkers
Lands
3 Forest
1 Mountain
Sideboard
2 Fry
4 Negate
2 Shock
The Playstyle
To be honest, the deck feels a bit like playing Temur Elementals because you’re ramping up towards big creatures with bigger payoffs.
You have access to generic Mana dorks such as Llanowar Elves and Drover of the Mighty to help you secure mana in the early parts of the game and then you also have Domri, Anarch of Bolas to make sure that your creatures don’t get countered. This is useful playing against decks such as Simic Flash and Mono Blue.
Basically the deck just requires you to hit hard, hit frequently till you pressure them to trade their creatures off.
Your creatures also have enough Toughness to survive one blow from Marauding Raptor.
Ilharg, the Boar God Rules The Deck And The Board!
Let’s address the elephant, or rather, the boar in the room.
At the heart of the Temur Stompy deck is a way to cheat in your creatures during combat and getting them back into your hand without spending a single mana. And all of that is thanks to Ilharg, the Raze-Boar.
It’s a 5-mana 6/6 creature with Trample that lets you put a creature card from your hand and into the battlefield tapped and attacking. Then it returns to your hand at the beginning of the next end step.
To make matters worse, when Ilharg, the Raze-Boar dies or is put into exile, you may put it into your library third from the top.
So, it cheats a creature into the battlefield and then cheats death itself. Everything about this boar just screams trouble.
In my playtesting sessions in Arena, I found it quite handy when it cheats out an Agent of Treachery or Burning Son’s Avatar into the battlefield.
Both are effective at removing creatures and being inconvenient towards the opponent.
I mean, there’s nothing better than cheating in an Agent of Treachery and stealing their Planeswalkers or heavy hitters just for fun.
Speaking of Heavy Hitters
The deck does a good job at scaling from early to late game thanks to the presence of Marauding Raptor, which basically gets you Ilharg as early as turn 3 (if you have Llanowar Elves and Drover of the Mighty on the board).
Marauding Raptor also delivers strong early aggression because of its ability. It gets +2/+0 when it deals damage to a Dinosaur. Dinosaurs make up 10 out of the 28 creatures on the deck, so it’s easy to get those bonus damage.
Ripjaw Raptor also combos quite decently with Marauding Raptor due to its Enrage ability, which draws you a card when Ripjaw Raptor is damaged. This includes damage from Marauding Raptor when the former ETB’s.
The Verdict
The deck has quite some potential but like its Gruul counterparts, it does weaken when it misses a turn of churning out creatures. It also has a hard time dealing against decks that run a lot of removals and board wipes, so you really have to grind them down to less than 10 life by turn 5.
Otherwise, the deck’s decent enough to take you up the Ladder and I think I might switch around between Temur Elementals and this deck this season.