With Oathbreaker becoming an official format of Magic the Gathering its time to show everyone some fun and powerful decks for the format. In today’s Deck Tech, I will be showing you a homebrew I have made that has a lot of potential and has won me a lot of games. I present to you: Ashiok Reanimator!
For my Oathbreaker, I have chosen Ashiok, Dream Render from War of Spark and Exhume from Urza’s Saga as the Signature Spell. The entire point of this deck is to mill yourself to put bigger creatures from your deck into the graveyard and bring them out with various reanimation ways but, because of Ashiok’s ability, you will be the only one bringing creatures back.
Big Creatures
As you can see, we have some high mana cost creatures like Keiga, the Tide Star, Kokusho, the Evening Star, Nezahal, Primal Tide, Sheoldred, Whispering One, and Toxrill, the Corrosive. These will be the big things that will end the game or protect us from the game being ended on us. They can finish a game quick if we get the right pieces out, which we will cover later in this article. We want to get these creatures into our graveyard as quickly as possible and bring them back to the battlefield utilizing our reanimation spells.
Reanimation Spells
For our reanimation spells, we have our Signature Spell Exhume that allows you and the other players at your table can bring back a creature from your graveyard to the battlefield. As stated earlier, we are going to be using Ashiok’s ability to exile your opponent’s graveyard before they can do that. In addition to Exhume, we also use spells like Animate Dead, Living Death, and Victimize to bring back our creatures when we need alternative methods when Ashioke and Exhume become too expensive due to Commander Tax.
Self-Mill Help
We know our Oathbreaker can help mill our library into our graveyard but, we need more sources to do that. To help with this, I added cards like Stitcher’s Supplier, Otherworldly Gaze, and Perpetual Timepiece to mill ourselves. In addition, I have also added Golgari Thug and Stinkweed Imp in order to use their Dredge ability to mill our library down instead of drawing a card. These cards will help bring the big creatures into the graveyard fast.
Graveyard Tutors
When milling cards into the graveyard is not enough, we also use cards like Buried Alive, Entomb, and Final Parting to bring the cards we want directly from our library into the graveyard. I like to use these spells as for sure ways to bring the creatures I want out at that time either to defend myself and Ashiok or to finish the game.
Draw Engines
The deck also has ways to draw us into our deck a bit more and can help us discard the big creatures when we draw them by accident. Fact or Fiction, Forbidden Alchemy, Frantic Search, and Windfall help tremendously in this regard. These let us look at our deck and draw from our deck while getting rid of the big creatures from our deck and hand as well. Just as a quick note, if you have Dredge cards in your graveyard, make sure you utilize them with your draw spells. It’s one card per Dredge card so, for example, if you use Windfall and you are drawing seven cards and you have Stinkweed Imp in your graveyard, you can use one of the seven cards you are drawing to Dredge Stinkweed Imp back from your graveyard and still draw the other six cards.
Counter Magic
Finally, the deck has some counter magic to help with triggers and with spells that will disrupt our play. We utilize both Counterspell and Wash Away for other Oathbreaker and Signature Spell cards and things like Stifle and Tale’s End to stop triggers like Bojuka Bog from getting rid of our graveyard. There isn’t too much in the realm of counter magic and removal because we want to go fast and get our big creatures into the graveyard as fast as possible. It makes the deck a little bit of a glass cannon but, the payoff is worth it.
Ashiok Reanimator is a fun deck for Oathbreaker and can cause a lot of chaos. I have had past iterations of it that has really messed with people’s heads when they see my board state fill with big creatures, and they have nothing. I hope you enjoyed this Deck Tech and keep a look out for more Oathbreaker Deck Techs!
