Hello everybody and welcome back to another article of brawl haul! I hope you all enjoyed last week’s giveaway, as well as the birthday celebration as a whole. I loved reading all the comments about what people like to play, whether it be for Brawl or Commander.

Overview

There are two main parts of this deck, one that focuses on locking down what the opponent and eventually either push for lethal with our humans or burst the opponent with Kaya, Orzhov Usurper.

What does General Kudro do for us?

General Kudro of Drannith serves several purposes for our deck, with each of his abilities being relevant for our deck. His anthem effect is very strong as almost every one of our creatures is a human or makes humans. This often lets us overwhelm the opponents early on and helps us with closing out the game later on. Kudro’s second ability is very strong graveyard hate, which is hit or miss for a lot of matchups. A lot of the time it only helps make Kaya’s ultimate more threatening but in matchups against graveyard reliant decks, it puts in a lot of work. Kudro’s final ability is a great removal tool as often we have humans lying around and being able to chump two things then get rid of a third large creature is an amazing tool for helping us stall out the game and keeping the opponent in check.

Humans

Generating enough humans is one of the most important steps for our deck as a lot of the cards require us to have humans to work. While a lot of our creatures are humans, the best cards to establish a board are the ones that flood the board quickly with tokens, such as Reverent Hoplite, Harmonious Archon, and Elspeth, Sun’s Nemesis.

Reverent Hoplite is easily the best way we have of flooding the board with humans as a lot of the time our devotion is hovering between 5 and 6. It can be a bit awkward as we often do not have the mana to activate abilities in the same turn, but going shields down for a turn to set up future ones is well worth the risk. Harmonious Archon is another great tool as it turns all our humans into threats and since we have several anthem effects, this lets us get the upper hand in combat as it becomes significantly harder for the opponent to block our humans. Elspeth, Sun’s Nemesis is another powerful card as she can constantly pump out humans at a good rate and since the deck does not have much graveyard interaction, we can recur her very easily. 

Keeping the Board Clean

One of the most important things for our deck is to make sure the opponent cannot develop any threats and if they can, we need to lock them down. The best tools for this are Sanctuary Lockdown, Doom Foretold, and Dire Tactics.

At first, Sanctuary Lockdown’s ability looks hard to activate, but the deck is able to use it very consistently. On top of this, the anthem effect is quite strong and dissuades the opponent from attacking into us. Doom Foretold is another great tool as more often than not we are able to get the knight. Even if we are not able to have its second part trigger, the smokestack effect is still very strong and helps slow down the opponent. Finally, Dire Tactics is a great removal spell as a vast majority of the time it has no downside.

Finishing off the Opponent

Once we have slowed the game down enough, we can focus on finally closing out the game, which there are two main ways. The first being through combat damage, which we have our anthem effects and Ethereal Absolution to help push for damage, while the other main win condition is through draining, through cards like Kaya, Orzhov Usurper, and Bastion of Remembrance.

More often than not we win through just slugging the opponent with an army of humans. Ethereal Absolution is an absurdly good card for this as it just makes blocking a pain, sometimes impossible, for the opponent. The other win condition is a great way to close out the game after we have already gotten in with some damage. Kaya, Orzhov Usurper is great as we can often use her ultimate to blow up the opponent for 20-25 damage. She can be used for some life gain or removal, but the only reason why she is ran is for the ultimate. Bastion of Remembrance is another useful tool for just slowly draining the opponent out over the course of the game.

Other Notable Cards

There were a few other cards that performed well enough to deserve an honorable mention, despite not filling the other categories. The cards that performed the best were Davriel, Rogue Shadowmage, Sorin, Vengeful Bloodlord, and Silverwing Squadron,

Davriel, Rogue Shadowmage is an overall great tool for slowing down the opponent as well as getting in for some damage. Being able to deny the opponent two cards as well sometimes getting some chip damage is very strong. Sorin, Vengeful Bloodlord’s passive ability lets us pad our life total a ton while his downtick is a great tool to bring back our different humans several times. Silverwing Squadron is just a massive beat stick, not much else to say about it aside from that it closes out the game very quickly if not dealt with.

Strengths and Weaknesses

This deck does a very good job against aggressive decks as we are able to flood the board quickly and have a fair amount of life gain to help us stabilize. The deck also works very well against ramp decks as we can just stall the opponents’ big threats by destroying them, tapping them down, or just chumping them until the end of time.

The deck starts to fall apart against other control decks as most of them will have stack interaction, which is something the deck cannot deal with at all. A lot of control decks I faced also did not rely on any creatures which defeats one of the main purposes of this deck.

The Decklist

If you want to check out the decklist featured in the article, here’s a link to it!

Wrap Up

Before diving into General Kudro, I was skeptical about how well he would perform. However, after tinkering around with it I feel like I came up with a fairly fun deck that utilizes all of his abilities. It was also fun to take a swing at a tribal deck since those are some of my favorite styles of decks.

There is not much else I can say about the deck. I had a good time playing it and would recommend it for sure. The spoilers for this Core Set 21 have been absurd, there are so many cards I want to play around with, as well as some great reprints like Massacre Wurm. I am already on the working on theory-crafting some new brawl decks for when the set comes out. Anyway, that is all for this week’s article, I hope you enjoyed it and until next time, good luck brewing!