This Friday, June 18th, Magic Arena will be bringing 100-Card Historic Brawl to the game! This is really exciting because this is 1 step closer to Commander on Arena. Not to mention, they’re even unbanning a couple of previously banned commanders in Golos, Tireless Pilgrim and Winota, Joiner of Forces! So of course, we had to do a Deck Tech of a Golos, Tireless Pilgrim Deck for the upcoming events this weekend. We will be doing a game play video article on Friday when the events open, so be sure to check back for that, but let’s get into this deck!
This is a hefty list, with a lot of pieces in there, but we can break this down into a few different categories of spells, but first let’s talk about our commander.
So there’s 2 components to Golos, first being a ramp type ability, and then a mana cheating ability. One thing to note about the activated ability is that Golos’s ability can be activated at instant speed, and the cards we hit are able to be cast throughout the whole turn, so if Golos were to be removed say during our upkeep, we can activate his ability in response and cast the spells during our main phase. We aim to take advantage of both of these in this deck, so lets dive into the different categories of cards in this deck.
Ramp
One of the main themes of the deck is ramping very quickly. We are using a host of mana rocks in Mind Stone, Arcane Signet, and Chromatic Lantern, ramp spells in Explore, Cultivate, Growth Spiral, and ramp creatures in Incubation Druid, Lotus Cobra, Elvish Rejuvenator, Dryad of the Ilysian Grove, Oracle of Mul Daya and Solemn Simulacrum. There are 2 other ramp spells in this list that act more as pay offs.
Our last 2 ramp spells, and pay offs for the deck are Hour of Promise and Scapeshift, with the pay off card in Field of the Dead. Since we’re in 5 colors, we’re going to be forced to play a ton of different named lands so Field of the Dead is the obvious pay off that gives us board pressure, and can get really out of hand very quickly. Field of the Dead is always generally going to be the first target for Golo’s enter the battlefield trigger, so we can guarantee we maximize it’s value. This card is a very big target for land destruction so to hedge against that and also to couple with Scapeshift, we are also playing Crucible of Worlds to allow us to play lands from our graveyard.
The other pay offs that take advantage of us ramping are Omnath, Locus of Creation, Tatyova, Benthic Druid, and Felidar Retreat. Each of these pay off cards give us some form of advantage, whether it’s life, cards or tokens. Normally these cards might not make the list of a normal 60 card brawl deck, but since we have 99 cards to work with here, it makes a ton of sense to include these.
Protection
The next category of spells that we will look at is protection spells. These spells help us to protect our life total, since we’re playing a 5 color deck, and not a ton of creatures. Swords to Plowshares, Teferi’s Protection, Chaos Warp, and Settle the Wreckage all help to deal with creatures in the early game that we may not be able to deal with, and we can even utilize these in the late game for larger threats.
Cheating on Mana
The next category of cards that we’ll talk about are the cards that we hope to spin into with Golos’s activated ability. Cards like Elesh Norn, Emergent Ultimatum, Omniscince, and Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger are all haymakers that can break a board state, and swing the game massively in our favor. There’s many more that are in the deck list, but these are some of the most powerful. While these are incredibly expensive spells, we ramp enough to be able to cast them from our hand if need be, but Golos also lets us cast them for free if we hit them.
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Top of the Library
One other theme that we push in the deck as well is top of the library matters. We’re essentially using Golos to cheat cards from the top of our library into play, but we look to take that a bit further with cards like Gonti, Lord of Luxury, Combustible Gearhulk, Twilight Prophet, and Sunbird’s Invocation. We also play The Prismatic Bridge as another way to spin into some powerful spells.
The Filler
The last segment of spells in the deck are all filler spells. Just because they’re filler, doesn’t meant they aren’t powerful in their own right. We have a host of planesalkers, some token creation pay offs for our Field of the dead, and some powerful enchantments to round everything out.
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The Lands
As I mentioned previously, our land base has to be rather complex because we’re playing 5 colors. While we do have cards like Dryad of the Ilysian Grove, Chromatic Lantern, and Chromatic Orrery to fix our mana, we can’t rely on finding 3 cards out of 100 to help with this. A few key utility lands we have include the The World Tree, Bojuka Bog, and Phyrexian Tower, and there are a few more in there as well. The big thing is that we have different land names for Field of the Dead.
I can’t wait to give this deck a spin in the Historic Brawl events this weekend! Friday is FNM at home, and then the event this weekend will be a limited time queue. Rewards for the event are the Japanese card styles for a few more Mystical Archive cards, and hopefully if all goes well, Wizards of the Coast will keep 100 card Historic Brawl around for good! Remember to check back here on Friday as we’ll be doing our playthrough of FNM at home with this very deck so you guys can see it action! Are you excited for the event this weekend? What decks are you planning to planning to try out? Let us know in the comments.
