Welcome to the hipster food deck. Because sure, we could run Mayhem Devil and Korvald, Fae-Cursed King, but that's just so mainstream.

Instead, we're all in on Garruk, Cursed Huntsman, and specifically our goal is to get his emblem as quickly and consistently as possible. Our main plan is to just sacrifice his wolves to Witch's Oven, but then we dip into white for a couple powerful backup options. Namely, Ajani, the Greathearted, and Tolsimir, Friend to Wolves.

Ajani, the Greathearted can minus to put Loyalty counters on all our other planeswalkers, which means if we have Ajani on the board, we can get Garruk's emblem the turn we play him.

Tolsimir, Friend to Wolves on the other hand means that when Garruk creates his wolf tokens, they immediately fight any creature we don't control and gain us three life. In addition to being pretty solid removal for small creatures, this will often kill off the wolf tokens, again giving Garruk the extra counter we need for his emblem.

Now, Garruk's emblem is obviously pretty powerful, but you'll note it doesn't win us the game instantly. So what's our plan post emblem? Well mostly, Caldron Familiar becomes a 4/4 (big enough to create two food with Witch's Oven) with trample, while Gilded Goose becomes a 3/5 flyer, so we can often just beat our opponent to death with our one mana creatures.

If that doesn't work out, we also have 3 Castle Ardenvale to make sure that no matter how badly we draw from that point on we can always make a 4/4 trampler every turn.

But our biggest power play is probably just putting down another Garruk. Either from our hand, because we play 4 of him, or out of the graveyard with Kethis, the Hidden Hand. If you thought he was scary when he created two 2/2 creatures per turn, well with an emblem in effect those wolves become 5/5 tramplers.

The Land Count

One thing you may have noticed from the deck overview is that we don't seem to be running enough lands. We have 7 six-drops in the deck, so how can we possibly justify only 23 lands?

Well it's because of Bond of Flourishing. Trail of Crumbs already incentivizes us to run nothing but permanent cards, so Bond can grab any card in our deck (besides a second Bond of Flourishing), obviously including those extra lands we probably need.

Now normally there are steep downsides to replacing lands with search effects. Casting those search effects in the early game loses you tempo. The fact that you usually won't have enough lands means you can't often use your search effects for anything but lands anyways. They can be countered or discarded, and are therefore less reliable. There are lots of reasons this is typically a bad idea.

In this deck though, I think we can navigate these problems effectively.

First, because we have so many strong 1-mana plays, we can typically afford an extra two mana to dig for a land while still setting up our engine with Witch's Oven, Cauldron Familiar, and, Gilded Goose.

Second, one of the key cards we're hoping to grab with Bond of Flourishing is Trail of Crumbs. And the nice thing about Trail of Crumbs is that it can also get us that extra land we need. Therfore, even if we're a bit short on land we can still make good use of our search effect by grabbing Trail of Crumbs or a key piece to combo with it.

We do still run into a problem if our Bond of Flourishing is countered or discarded, but I think the increased odds of assembling our engine in the early game coupled with the improved odds of drawing non-land cards in the late game make this a worthwhile risk.

You might very reasonably disagree. If so, just cut two bond of flourishing for two lands of your choice.

Why Only 3 Cats?

This is another questionable decision on my part, by personally I don't think Cauldron Familiar is good in multiples. The amount of times you can sacrifice it is limited by the number of Witch's Oven you have, and we don't have any other reliable method of putting them in the graveyard, so whether we have 1 cat or 4, the number of times we can use it is still the same.

I also don't think the cat is an essential part of our strategy. It's certainly nice to have, but we have other ways to get food, and other things to sacrifice to the oven (mostly Garruk, Cursed Huntsman's wolves or Liliana, Dreadhorde General's zombies). So all-in-all, I'd like to draw exactly one of these over the course of the game.

With three in the deck, we can expect to have picked one up by the time we've considered 20 cards. Between Bond of Flourishing and Trail of Crumbs, we'll get there around turn 5-6, which is plenty fast enough for me.

Tips & Tricks

Note that if you play Garrick, Cursed Huntsman with Witch's Oven on the board you can sacrifice one of Garrick's wolves the turn you play Garrick, and the other the turn after giving him enough loyalty counters to survive his ultimate.

Don't forget that Ajani, the Greathearted gives your creatures vigilance.

If you haven't got a Garruk emblem yet, Massacre Girl synergises really well with Cauldron Familiar. On Arena, you'll have to use full control mode to make this trick work, but when Massacre Girl kills off your cat you can reanimate it in response to her next -1/-1 trigger going on the stack. The cat then dies again, you get another Massacre Girl trigger, and you can repeat this as many times as you need until you run out of food, allowing you to clear even very large creatures.

If you do have a Garruk emblem, the cat isn't quite as good at enabling Massacre Girl, but Witch's Oven still works. If you sacrifice a creature any time after the first Massacre Girl trigger, you will get another trigger.

If you have a Caldron Familiar in your graveyard, you can sacrifice multiple food tokens to it. As with the Massacre Girl shenanigans, on Arena this requires going into full control so you can respond to your first activation of Caldron Familiar's ability with a second activation. This trick has less application in this deck than it does with Korvold, Fae-Cursed King or Mayhem Devil on the board, but it can still sometimes be useful to get an extra trigger from Trail of Crumbs.

Sideboarding

This sideboard is very typical for a food deck, with the main change being that we can include Tithe Taker because we're in White.

2 Deathless Knight to provide a persistent threat against control, flash, or discard decks. If we can assemble a cat and an oven, then our opponent has to exile deathless Knight to remove him, and if we use our oven correctly they won't really be able to do that either.

1 extra Massacre Girl to help against creature based decks.

1 extra Tolsimir, Friend to Wolves for similar reasons to Massacre Girl really. He's indispensable against creature based decks, and we'd like to draw him more often in those matchups.

3 Thrashing Brontodon to deal with artifacts and enchantments because there are a lot of powerful ones running around at the moment. We use Brontodon over Nature's Claim because it's a permanent, meaning we can grab it with Trail of Crumbs and Bond of Flourishing. The 3/4 body also makes this a reasonable blocker in aggro matchups, and the ability to destroy Embercleave makes this a strong inclusion there as well.

4 Tithe Taker to shut down flash decks.

4 Duress for slower decks in general, and to strengthen our plan against flash decks even further.

Sideboarding with this deck is always a little difficult because we have so many cards at the core of our strategy that we never really want to cut. Cauldron Familiar, Gilded Goose, Witch's Oven, Trail of Crumbs, and Bond of Flourishing all stay in regardless of matchup, which really only leaves the top half of our curve open for adjustments.

Against aggro decks the first thing you're going to want to do is lighten you curve. Start by cutting Liliana, Dreadhoarde General and work your way down. Maybe trim 1 Garruk, Cursed Huntsman if you really need the extra space.

Against slower decks Tolsimir, Friend to Wolves and Massacre Girl can go.

Against flash decks, be prepared to cut almost the entire top end to make room for Tithe Taker and Duress.

Remember that in any matchup if you end up cutting a lot of legendary cards that weakens Kethis, the Hidden Hand, so you should maybe consider cutting him instead.

Known Issues

Casualties of War absolutely destroys this deck, and there's not a lot we can do about it. The only answer we have for it is the Duress in our sideboard, and that obviously isn't enough to beat it. Really our best bet is to just hope we can get Garruk's emblem before they play it.

Final Thoughts

If you're completely burnt out on Witch's Oven, this deck probably won't change that. The early game is very similar to other oven decks, the Jund variant in particular, and the basic engine remains unchanged.

Personally though, I love Jund Sacrifice. My favorite decks are high on synergy, card draw, and full of complex moving parts. Jund Sacrifice has all of these things, and this is the first time I've seen a deck like that can actually be competitive at the top levels. So I've been playing it a lot.

And after playing it so much, this deck is exactly the twist I needed to keep the archetype fresh and fun to play.