Deckbuilder's Challenge XLV (Poll): Eights and Greats

When Companions were first released in May 15, 2020, several of them became infamous for breaking the format - Lurrus of the Dream-Den and Gyruda, Doom of Depths in particular were notable for taking over multiple formats. Gyruda's strategy specifically boiled down to the following - by flipping over appropriate cards such as Sakashima the Imposter, you could repeatedly trigger Gyruda over and over until you hit a card like Dragonlord Kolaghan to swing and win the game. Add the fact that something like Lion's Eye Diamond + Lotus Petal + City of Traitors can do this off an opening hand, and you can probably see how this deck was one of the few that took over Legacy - Gyruda in patricular aimed for fast 1st-turn wins via the aforementioned combo and the cards used to power it out.

Like the rest of its ilk, Gyruda suffered from the Companion nerf's mana tax that effectively killed most of the old strategies. While some companions like Lurrus, Obosh, the Preypiercer, and Jegantha, the Wellspring were generically good enough to remain staples of strategies that emulated their old playstyles (Zirda, the Dawnwaker was banned in Legacy and remains that way), Gyruda's old playstyle was completely killed by the nerf. The card itself went on to become a secondary win condition in Bomberman decks that could afford it off infinite mana generation, but the original glass cannon strategy was for all intents and purposes dead - if you wanted to play it again using the current rules of Magic, you were basically out of luck.

But what if, for some reason, we really wanted to recreate the look and feel of the deck? Consider what Gyaruda needs - while we can no longer power off the combo on 2 Lion's Eye Diamonds, we can, in theory, power it off 3 Black Lotus-type effects. There's only one problem with that - as far as "fair play rules" go, Black Lotus is restricted in Vintage, and spamming a bunch of ripoffs like Blacker Lotus and Mirorred Lotus just tastelessly tells your opponents you were looking for an excuse to run 4-12 Black Lotuses.

As a wise Australian sniper once said, "Professionals have standards!" - we're not just trying to make the combo work, we're trying to recreate in as fair a manner as possible how it fights to win a game. However, doing so means that we only have 5 "Lotus" effects, which isn't nearly enough for us to constantly mulligan over to get three cards that amount to 9 mana, and there aren't enough legal Moxen (+ 1 Mana Crypt) to make up the difference either - note that Simian Spirit Guide and Chancellor of the Tangle have odd mana value.

The answer lies in an innocuous silver border land that generally isn't used much for anything - R&D's Secret Lair. Because all current printings of Gyruda are written as if the Companion tax didn't exist, R&D's Secret Lair can be thought of as a Lotus that eats our land drop because it 'erases' the tax via its own effect. With 9 possible 'Lotus' effects our consistency gets a lot better and we can just barely use the rest of the legal free mana effects we have available to make a manabase that can emulate the original deck's desperate frenzy to mulligan/draw a winning hand.

There's one other reason I decided to make this deck - accessibility. Now, you might be looking at me like this 30,000 USD deck isn't "accessible", but I'd like you to consider the following: Is it easier to ask your playgroup to play as if a rules change didn't exist, or is it easier to ask them to tolerate a single 'weird' card printed by Wizards of the Coast? Sure, the Companion nerf might be easy to remember while its fresh on everyone's minds, but try saying the same for something like damage using the stack or mana burn - not only is it hard to find people at large that might be interested, it also changes up the flow of the game as a whole greatly because now people have to consider that cards won't work in ways they'll expect. Not only that, but having to explain it this way gives away the premise of your entire deck - there's no way you'll be able to surprise anyone with a vague familiarity with what the card was known for, and you'll have to ask every game session if the rule can be in effect especially if it affects how other players using Companions play.

R&D's Secret Lair cuts around all of this by being a single card people can ask you not to use if they don't like it, and negates the busywork of remembering big rules changes by instead asking players to just read their cards, so you can proxy this deck or bring it freely to places like Cockatrice and Tabletop Simulator as much as you'd like. This way, you can keep the deck in rotation 'normally' by asking if Silver Border cards are okay to play (presumably whoever you are playing with is okay with the high power part) without having to spoil your deck every session. Again, it's less about just making it work, and more about keeping the "spirit" of deck's ability to remain a deck you can regularly play without hindrance.

One other significant modification we make is to tune the deck so that as few "duplicate" Gyaruda effects as possible result in creatures dying off so that we can maximize the amount of power we have on the board when the combo succeeds. As such, we use a full four of Sakashima of a Thousand Faces and slightly more Felidar Guardians, cutting out the Progenitor Mimics entirely while swapping the Phantasmal Images for Phyrexian Metamorphs both to meet the challenge criteria and turn on Mox Opal or copy a Lotus in an emergency. We can't follow more traditional builds that run Thought-Knot Seer due to the lack of lands like Ancient Tomb, but we can ensure that when we successfully combo that we are getting as much damage as possible.