Eldrazis in a Barrel: Fun & Jank Episode 89

Hello, hello! Plum here and welcome back to Fun & Jank!

The Hobbit set just released on MTG Arena, and you know what that means. Brand-spankin’-new brews! I’ve been doing a lot of work off stream in preparation for this set because I had so many ideas bouncing around my head. We have a lot of new decks to talk about but let’s start with the one I played on stream first.

Today, we’re diving into a pair of lists built around one of the coolest cheat-into-play artifacts from the new set: Getaway Barrel.

At four mana, Getaway Barrel is an artifact with a very straightforward trigger: when it’s put into a graveyard from the battlefield, you reveal the top 13 cards of your library and put a random creature card from among them directly onto the battlefield. Digging 13 cards deep in a deck structured with high-density payoff threats makes the hit rate almost guaranteed. However, like I said, the creature we get is random from among those 13. This provides a fun and unique deck building challenge because it means we want to mitigate “non-hits” to make sure we always hit a game-ending threat.

When I first laid eyes on this card, my immediate thought was to build a classic Trash for Treasure reanimator/artifacts shell, using cheap ways to loot, pitch the Barrel, and swap it out for giant threats. Trash for Treasure acted as redundancy for a creature suite containing stuff like Darksteel Colossus, Wurmcoil Engine, and Platinum Angel. But as I was browsing the Arena card pool for cheap sacrifice enablers for Barrel like Torch the Tower (via Bargain) and Demand Answers, I stumbled across a card from Alchemy: Edge of Eternities that completely shifted the direction of the deck: Kavaron Consumed (don’t worry there’s a trash for treasure build coming in the future).

Kavaron Consumed acts a lot like a Through the Breach on a creature, with one massive advantage: it works with artifacts as well! For five mana, Kavaron lets you sneak an artifact or creature out of your hand onto the field, gives it haste as a 4/4, and then forces you to sacrifice it at the end step. This has already seen play in the past in the UR Eldrazi shells during the pre-temple-ban era, but fell off because it lost a lot of speed. They usually paired it with Emrakul, and fortunately for us we could do the same.

That interaction with Getaway Barrel is super sweet though:

1.) Sneak Getaway Barrel into play with Kavaron as a 4/4 creature with haste.

2.) Attack for 4.

3.) At the end of the turn, Kavaron’s delayed trigger forces you to sacrifice the Barrel.

4.) Getaway Barrel triggers, digging 13 cards deep to pull out a game-ending creature like Emrakul, the Aeons Torn or Ulamog straight onto the field.

Even better, Kavaron doubles as a backup engine for those exact same payoffs. Dropping an Emrakul or Ulamog as a 4/4 with haste lets us swing immediately to trigger Annihilator, wiping out the opponent’s board state before they even get a proper turn to respond. That card single-handedly transformed the list from a standard artifact-sacrifice deck into an explosive Through the Breach style list.

So let me show you our initial draft:

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Version #1

Once Kavaron Consumed flipped the switch on how the deck wanted to operate, the first iteration I put together was this Mono-Red list.

The core concept behind this setup was bridging the gap between Kavaron Consumed combo turns and manual sacrifice plays. Since Kavaron gives us four copies of our primary cheat engine, we needed reliable backup ways to get Getaway Barrel into the graveyard when we had to cast it for its full four-mana cost.

That’s where Torch the Tower and Demand Answers came in. Torch allowed us to use Bargain to sac the Barrel while giving us cheap interaction against fast creature decks, while Demand Answers provided instant-speed card selection while binning the Barrel to spin the wheel.

The rest of the shell was still leaning on some other Eldrazi spells to take advantage of Ugin’s Labyrinth. We rounded out the deck with things like Thought-Knot Seer and Kozilek’s Command.

Now obviously Thought-Knot Seer is not the greatest thing to hit off of a Barrel Trigger, but I thought that would be ok for the time being. I played a couple addition pieces of interaction in the form of Consumed History and Dismember and hopped onto the ladder to play a few game and see how this draft felt.

While the deck looked great on paper, actual testing exposed a few noticeable pain points. Without Kavaron Consumed, hard-casting Getaway Barrel and needing a second specific card (like Torch or Demand Answers) to crack it felt slow and clunky. If the opponent held up interaction or pressure, spending two cards and five-plus mana to get a single Barrel trigger left us vulnerable. On top of that, outside of hit-or-miss setups with Ugin’s Labyrinth, the deck lacked reliable, proactive ramp. If we didn’t hit our exact combo pieces early, we were just sitting back and passing turns without advancing a board state.

We did get to do some super fun things during the first few games, but it was obvious I needed to change it up. It was clear that Getaway Barrel and Kavaron Consumed were a real engine, but the supporting shell needed to be far more proactive.

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I mentioned earlier that Kavaron Consumed is quite similar to Through the Breach. So I actually ended up going back and looking at old Modern tournament results for assorted Through the Breach decks to see if we could find some ideas for a new shell. I also went back to the drawing board for other enablers to reliably sacrifice Barrel.

This is how we got to the next version of the deck, splashing green to make things a bit more consistent.

This version of the deck improves on the original in a variety of ways, but there’s two that stand out the most.

Castle Doom is the (almost) perfect enabler for Getaway Barrel that happens to have a low opportunity cost to play. It allows us to completely eliminate the need to clog our deck with situational spells like Torch the Tower just to crack a Barrel. Now, simply hard-casting a Getaway Barrel on turn 4 meant we could use our land on turn 5 to crack it and hit something big.

The only caveat is that you can only activate castle at Sorcery Speed. Which leaves us open to assorted board wipes or edicts. But those are for nerds anyways, so who cares?

Splashing Green opened us up to a much stronger (quicker) early game. Utopia Sprawl and Talisman gave us some much needed ramp that also avoided the problem of being creatures that could be hit off of Barrel, so we didn’t dilute our chance of hitting something actually strong.

On top of that I also opted into playing Mycospawn to help bridge the gap to our combo turns. Not only does it ramp us toward hard-casting our Eldrazi, but its cast trigger lets us search up utility lands, meaning it can directly fetch Castle Doom to set up a Barrel crack, or grab Ugin’s Labyrinth to push us even further ahead. We could also play other utility lands like Bojuka Bog in the sideboard as some extra value.

Besides that we ended up swapping old cranky Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre, for Ulamog, the Defiler since it usually had a much higher annihilator trigger which played better with Kavaron. You’ll also notice I’m still playing Demand Answer so we had some form of card advantage outside of K-Command that could also sacrifice Barrel at instant speed.

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Gameplay

As per usual we took this deck to the ladder for 5 matches on the ranked Best-of-3 ladder.

The absolute highlight of these games is watching the core engine pop off, using Kavaron Consumed to sneak Getaway Barrel into play as a 4/4 creature with haste, swinging for four damage, and then watching it automatically sacrifice itself at the end of turn to dig 13 cards deep and spin straight into Emrakul, the Aeons Torn.

Sowing Mycospawn also overperformed, but I will say that it still feels bad when you end up wheeling into one with Barrel. I’m not sure we have a great replacement for that kind of utility so for now we’ll have to live with it. Pros outweigh the cons so-to-speak.

Castle Doom also felt great, although I did misplay because I don’t know how to read and realized it was a sorcery speed ability a little too late. Magic players and reading cards, amirite?

However, the stream also exposed some clear pain points when running into the top tiers of the Historic meta. The deck struggled heavily against proactive Dimir and Jund midrange decks packing heavy hand disruption like Thoughtseize or Go Blank. Getting stripped of our key enablers left clunky, high-mana Eldrazi stranded uselessly in hand. Similarly, playing against Dimir Frog highlighted our vulnerability to counter spells (Counterspell, Drown in the Loch, Force of Negation), where having a crucial four-mana spell shut down while facing down an early Psychic Frog or Tamiyo proved brutal without maindeck removal.

Deck was still so much fun to play though!

Closing Thoughts

The next iteration needs a few targeted tweaks. Adding Delighted Halfling would provide a proactive turn-one play off a Forest while speeding up Sowing Mycospawns and Kozilek’s Commands. Only problem is that it’s abysmal to find with Barrel.
I’m also interested re-introducing some sort of removal that can easily deal with Frog or other relevant cards. I’m thinking Null Elemental Blast, maybe?

We’ll definitely have to do some restructuring for the sideboard with cards like Chalice of the Void, Defense Grid, or Hexing Squelcher to hopefully give us some more game against interaction.

Overall I think this deck could actually be decent, and feels like a lateral movement to the popular Fight Rigging decks. There’s no way we’ll ever be better than Fight Rigging, but we this deck offers some a wider range of utility and sideboard options which may give it an edge in certain areas.

Thanks for reading!

As always, feel free to comment and leave any questions you have below. And make sure to come back next week for even more Fun & Jank!

If you’re interested in more fun content, check out Altheriax’s article on brand new Historic decks built with The Hobbit! The MTG Hero is also jamming new cards in Standard and you can check out his thoughts on them here!

If you want to help me brew, come hang out with me on stream where we test, refine, and have a ton of fun together.

Happy Brewin’!