This week on Episode 5 of Fun & Jank we’re going to take a look at Body Double Reanimator for Historic Bo1. A simple all-in reanimation strategy concocted by your host (me) Plum!
Now if you’ve been playing the coin toss of a format known as Timeless recently, I’m sure you’ve seen all sorts of Reanimate shenanigans. Decks are powering out potent creatures like Vein Ripper or Atraxa, Grand Unifier as early as turn 1 or 2. The format is defined by it’s powerful early game plays. But Historic? Not so much. Historic is a bit slower and the limited card pool means explosive early turns are harder to come by. Reanimator lists, especially ones that can crank out creatures of that caliber so early, don’t really exist. Sure we have Victimize or even Priest of Fell Rites, but those really only get going by turn 3 or later.
Turn 3 was too slow for me and I wanted to bring Timeless level speed to the Historic format.
So let’s talk about how I ended up with a very simple “all-in” reanimator build that can put Ulamog, The Ceaseless Hunger into play on turn 2.
The Idea
I started by just looking at the reanimation options available in the Historic card pool. Unburial Rites, Late to Dinner, and Priest of Fell Rites were my original contenders, but gosh are they slow. Turn 4 means we’re most likely already dead to some weenie playing white weenie. So I kept looking, and wouldn’t ya know it, I found a cute little elemental named Vesperlark.
This little ball of sunshine could give us the speed I was looking for. With it’s evoke cost we can return a big baddie from our graveyard to the field on turn 2, not having to worry about sacrificing other creatures (like Victimize) or summoning sickness (Priest of Fell Rites). We just needed a creature in the bin, and a Vesperlark in hand.
The Brewing
The restriction in Lark’s text box was something that really rustled my jimmies though. Our reanimation targets could only have a power of 1 or less which didn’t leave me with a lot of strong options.
So back to Arena I went. I filtered out creatures by power and got a few decent hits such as Teysa of the Ghost Council, Trostani Discordant, and Marionette Master. All three were okay choices, with an Esper Teysa list being promising at the start. But none of these options were anywhere close to Ulamog or Atraxa in terms of power. Even with the possibility of a Trostani hitting the field on turn 2, it was only 5 power across 3 bodies. In Historic that’s really nothing special.
Back the drawing board.
So I kept on searching for creatures with power 1 or less (emphasis on the “or less” this time) and that’s when I found a niche card that happened to be exactly what I was looking for.
With this discovery I figured the best course of action was to go all-in on the speedy reanimation game plan. We already had our “Magical Christmas Land” sequence spelled out for us from the start.
In our ideal world, I wanted our first two turns to look like this:
Turn 2: White Source -> Evoke Vesperlark to bring back Body Double copying aforementioned Big ol’ Beater
See the visual aid below:
Now with only 4 copies of Vespelark we had to aggressively mulligan to pull off a turn 2 reanimation like that. So I started looking for other ways to make it more consistent. And for those of you that haven’t been paying attention because you’re dilly-dallying on your rubber-cased ipad, you might have already noticed Body Double is not legendary.
That’s when my train of thought immediately went to one of the best reanimation spells Historic has access to. Persist
Between this and Vesperlark we now had the consistency that I was looking for. Unfortunately, there isn’t anything I could find that could be Body Double copies 5-8, but since we’d obviously be playing cards like Faithless Looting it’d be much easier to find one if we aren’t able to mulligan for it in our opener.
Vesperlark, Persist, and Faithless Looting put us into 3 colors, and I didn’t really want to go beyond that to make sure our mana was consistent enough for a turn 2 reanimation. However, I did think it would be worthwhile to be able to hard-cast Body Double after some testing so I added 2 Mana Confluence so we could produce blue.
I finished by tying everything together with other cheap ways to bin our combo cards such as Supplier and Thrilling Discovery and some additional synergistic removal like Bone Shards.
Body Double Reanimator is what I would call an “easy brew.” I had a very clear goal in mind about what the deck was going to do. I wanted to reanimate something that can win the game on turn 2. That’s it. With reanimator being a common archetype, there were already so many tried and true cards to test. Rather than trying to come up with a whole new idea and putting all that time in to finding obscure cards and synergies, I just had to pick and choose from a proven list of cards that already worked well in my shell. In my opinion, brewing a list like this is much more shallow in terms of the effort required to get something cohesive together. With our game plan clear from the start we just had to match it with the right cards, rather than the other way around. The deck is designed to do one thing only, and do it well. Simple as that.
I like to put brewing into two main categories. There’s “Top Down”, where we have a plan and need to find the cards to make it work, and then there’s “Bottom Up”, where we have already have cards in mind that just need help finding a cohesive game plan to fit into. One is obviously much easier to do than the other, but both provide their own set of challenges. Especially when it comes to brewing jank! If you’re like me (which I hope you are if you’re reading this) then you want to go against what everyone else is doing. You want to take some ham sandwich of a deck you made up in your basement and win a few games at your local LGS. Just like me, you find it thrilling to see your own creation do well. I absolutely love trying to take my brews to Mythic each season. And while many will clearly never be winners, when a list is successful it’s like watching your child graduate college in a sense. You put in countless hours tuning, learning, and re-tuning and finally have something to show for it. That feeling is what keeps my love for the game alive. It’s just so much fun to see your brews do well, whether they’re simple like this reanimator list, or complex with tons of moving parts. It’s your brew. It doesn’t matter how you came up with the idea, or how easy it was to create it. It’s still a brew!
I hope you found my short explanation about building straightforward lists like this interesting. I’ll be talking more about the concepts of brewing in future articles, but for now I hope your creative juices are flowing and you’re already brainstorming your next deck.
Thanks for reading.
As always feel free to comment and leave any questions you have below! Make sure to come back next week for even more Fun & Jank!
Happy Brewing!
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Plum is the creator of the Jank Tank.
He started playing at the ripe old age of 12 and immediately fell in love with the infinite possibilities that deck building could lead to.
He truly understands that jank is a mindset, and spends most of his free time brewing and concocting new and exciting deck lists to help inspire and promote creativity within the MTG community.
