Yarok's Reanimating Horrors

CAN YOU SMEEELLLLLLLLL... WHAT YAARRRRROK... IIIIS COOOOKING??? The People's Elemental is here to show all you Jabronis what you REALLY can do with a big spooky cauldron of revival. This deck revolves all around milling ourselves and bringing back powerful creatures that affect the board the moment they enter the field. Think this sounds familiar? IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT YOU THINK!

Alright folks, we're dipping back into the reanimation cauldron today, with Yarok, the Desecrated heading up our horrible hang of reanimating nightmares. This deck is attempting a slightly different take on bothe the Yarok and Reanimator shells, opting for enter the battlefield effects that mill us, and instead of just looking for the biggest creatures possible to reanimate, we are trying to find the most powerful and valuable ETBs to reuse from our graveyard. Let's (Ya)Rok!

The Ramp:

The People's Champion counts on the support of the masses to get his power on. Like Goku and his spirit bomb, these units are here to give Yarok their strength so he can bust out the truly busted plays as early as possible. All of our reanimation targets also start at 5 mana, so having the ability to simply play them out of hand can be quite useful in this deck. We run seven mana dorks, with Gilded Goose, Paradise Druid, Incubation Druid, and Leafkin Druid as the green ramp regulars. We also run both Simic droks in Maraleaf Pixie and Gyre Engineer, as blue and green are very important colors early on in the game. Leyline Prowler is another great-in-brawl card, giving us a decent blocker and mana ramp. Finally, we run a Risen Reef because this is a Yarok deck, and there are a few elementals that can trigger off it, including our commander. We also run one Arcane Signet because even though this is a reanimator deck, we have some very demanding colors and need the ability to produce all three as much as possible.

The Reanimation Targets:

It's this, by the way. This is what Yarok is cooking: big scary creatures with scary ETBs. We start off at 5 mana because that's where we get the vast majority of the interaction this deck has available. As you may have noticed, this deck runs very little in the way of direct removal or interaction, but we do have Cavalier of Night to kill one (or more with our commander) big threat upon entering the battlefield. In terms of 'board clears' we also run one: Massacre Girl, which is one of my favorite reanimation targets vs aggressive strategies. It can be a little hard to make use of her vs bigger creatures, but she really shines when up against swarming token decks. As more interaction further up the curve we run Dream Eater in the 6-drop slot, which does everything this deck wants with its ETB effect (bounce AND put our big creatures in the graveyard) and has flash. Our arguably most powerful ETBs in terms of dealing with the opponent come with Meteor Golem killing any nonland permanent and Agent of Treachery stealing any permanent, period. Both are amazing targets for sacrifice/reanimation as well as being absolutely busted with our commander. For extra value we have Izoni, Thousand-Eyed to give us tokens and card draw for the stuff in our graveyard, and Scholar of the Ages to bring back our reanimation spells to just keep looping our huge monsters endlessly. As a cheeky little finisher we do run one Lotleth Giant to nug our opponent in the face for 1 damage for each creature in our graveyard, it's really funny when Yarok is on the board to double it up.

Putting them in the graveyard:

Ok so we have some really quality creatures in the deck, but they're all really expensive. Our reanimation spells let us get them our for a little cheaper, but we need to get them in our graveyard first. Thankfully, there are a few ETBs in standard that can let us do an okay dredging impression, beginning with Wall of Lost Thoughts, which is a good blocker, and can mill us for a lot with our commander on the board. Glowspore Shaman is another one of those cards I was always super sad never worked in Standard, as it both dredges dor us and allows us to put a land on top to help fix our colors. Lazav, the Multifarious does double-duty in this deck, both surveiling for us and being able to be turned into one of our bigger creatures, such as the excellent Underrealm Lich, which is a reanimation target itself, and allows us to put 2 cards in our graveyard out of the top 3 every time we would draw a card. Another reanimation target that throws cards into our graveyard, ramps us, and allows us to put any important stuff we might've wanted back on top of the deck is Cavalier of Thorns, and boy this card does it all for this deck. As a way to keep the board from getting too crazy along with putting cards in our yard we run one Enter the God-Eternals and its second ability should always be targeting us. Continuing the 'dredging' plan we have Emry, Lurker of the Loch to get more cards in our graveyard, and as a way to reuse any important artifacts we might have put in our graveyard along the way (this includes giving us the ability to hard cast our Meteor Golem from graveyard, if necessary). Speaking of artifacts, we run Vivien's Arkbow as one of the cards in the other side of reanimation in our deck: the discard. We use our mana to ditch our big creatures in search of one that could help us at the moment, and with the amount of ETBs in our deck together with the ability to get them out at flash speed makes this card very useful in this deck. Our other way to discard reanimation targets for value in our deck is Tomebound Lich, which can also serve as a pretty good blocker and doubles up with our commander.

Bringing them Back:

Ok so we are putting a lot of stuff in our graveyard, how are we going to get them back? Being in Sultai gives us one more reanimation spell than we had when we tried our Izoni Reanimator deck in Connive // Concoct, which can also be used to steal a powerful early-game threat like Ayara, First of Locthwain or Chulane, Teller of Tales, though hopefully we can use it for its full power. Apart from that we run the classic black reanimators Blood for Bones, Bond of Revival, Cauldron's Gift, and the artifact The Cauldron of Eternity. For extra greed and haymaker potential we also have one Finale of Eternity and one Finale of Devastation to go really over the top of our opponents later in the game. What makes this deck really cool is that though it gave up some amount of interaction potential and creature consistency from our previous reanimator attempts, it can fight a longer, grindier game than other variants, by being able to continually recur its reanimation spells with Scholar of the Ages and Emry, Lurker of the Loch, having effectively infinite ways to keep bringing back these tremendous threats. We just tend to lose harder to more aggressive strategies, but the deck is stronger against Golos, Tireless Pilgrim, Korvold, Fae-Cursed King, and Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God matchups.

The Lands:

Did I mention that a) this deck has some SUPER demanding mana and b) this deck gets suuuper grindy? Well then, if you haven't experienced the joys of Yarok, the Desecrated together with Field of the Dead I'd suggest you go build a Yarok deck that revolves as much around getting lands on the field as possible, with 30 lands in it. It's glorious. Here, the card is more of a backup grind plan. We only run 26 lands, with 2 Islands, 3 Forests, and 3 Swamps as our basics, and every single dual-colored land in our color pair. This deck runs both Evolving Wilds and Fabled Passage for fixing and ability to make more zombies in one turn, and for colored utility lands we run Caslte Locthwain and Castle Vantress to help fix our draws in case we flood out. Luckily we also have two temples to help with that by scrying for us. Finally we run one Mobilized District to let us have a little bit more board control around the turn 4 mark since we don't actually have any 4-drops.

Hope you enjoy this one, have fun reanimating!