Bad Brews: Dragonlord Ojutai

Hello and welcome back to Bad Brews!

For those of you who are new to this game, let's take a minute to go over the rules. A Bad Brew is when we crack open a pack of something out of Standard and brew a deck around the rare in the pack. As an additional challenge, we also have to use as many cards out of the pack as possible to make the deck extra bad. This week we cracked open a pack of Dragons of Tarkir, the last set in the Khans block. Notably, unlike its brothers in the block, this set will not be rotating out when we get Shadows Over Innistrad next month. Instead, it will rotate out with Magic Origins when the block after that starts.

Like every week let's start out our bad brews by taking a quick look at what we got in the pack.

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A wonderful pack so far, filled with a few cards that would be first pickable in a draft. Before we get ahead of ourselves, let's take a look at the rare in this pack.

Just wow! This mythic limited bomb translates well into many a Standard deck and it's already starting to see some Modern play as well. A 5/4 Flying for five mana is already a good card on its own, it's the extra abilities on the card that make it exceptional. As long as your Dragonlord is untapped it has Hexproof, which keeps it from being the target of burn spells until you attack with it. You do get a bonus for attacking with it as well, which is basically Anticipate on a creature, allowing to take the top three cards from your library and put one into your hand. This all said, this is an exciting card to be putting in our deck this week.

Up next we will throw in a couple of copies of Student of Ojutai. A 2/4 creature for four mana isn’t the greatest, but allowing us to gain life every time we cast a non-creature spell is a nice little trade off. Obviously we are going to want to play a few non-creature spells in this deck.

Speaking of non-creature spells, we have Ojutai’s Summons. A creature engine, giving us two 2/2 Djinn Monk tokens for five mana, the real work horse part of this card is the Rebound effect. With Rebound we get to cast the spell again at the beginning of our next upkeep without paying the card’s mana cost. Meaning we get two more flying bears for nothing. Four creatures for five mana is nothing to scoff at, and getting not one but two triggers for Student of Ojutai is even better. This card gets an auto include for that reason alone.

Misthoof Kirin is a creature spell, which means no trigger for Student of Ojutai, however it is a three drop which rounds out the lower end of our mana curve a little better than some of the more expensive cards we are going to play. Flying and Vigilance make it a force to be reckoned with. Add in its Megamorph ability we get a 3/2 for very little mana, and can surprise your opponent with a flyer if need be.

Zephyr Scribe is also coming along in this deck. Being able to cycle out dead cards, cards that have no immediate use in our hand, for only one mana is a fairly good trick to have up your sleeve, especially when you are trying to cast non-creature spells as part of the express goal of this deck.

Lastly, from this pack we have Spidersilk Net. Adding +0/+2 to your creature is great. Giving it Reach in a format infested with Flyers is even better. Being able to play a non-creature spell for nothing is just beastly. Free life thanks to Student of Ojutai, I think that is going into our deck for sure.

As for cards we might add from outside of the pack. Let's take a look at some of these.

Brave the Sands is a two drop that gives all our creatures Vigilance. This is especially good with our Dragonlord Ojutai keeping it well out of the way of burn and removal spells. Allowing us to swing in with impunity, and block up to one more creature each turn during combat.

Adding in four copies of Anticipate allows us to tutor for a card that we might need, and triggers Student of Ojutai for added effect. All things considered, a pretty beefy trick.

Glaring Aegis beefs up our smaller creatures, giving us an advantage in combat, and also allows us to tap down a creature for a turn, allowing us to swing in at our opponent with impunity especially early game.

Claustrophobia will keep our opponent out of the game by tapping down one of their creatures until it is removed from the game. While enchantment removal is easy to come by, not many players run it, so this can keep us in the game long enough to cast our Dragonlord Ojutai.

Lastly we have Faerie Miscreant, a card that allows us to draw a card if we have another one on the board. This will be incredibly advantageous later in the game when we want to draw a lot of cards to hit a good spell to cast. Also as a one drop it allows us to have some creatures to chump block with if need be in the early game, stopping us from getting run over until we can hit the Dragonlord.