OTJ First Look: How to Be Gay and Do Crimes

04/03/2024

OTJ spoilers are almost fully up, and it's looking like it might be a banger! It's a Dave Humpherys set, of course, with one of the classic properties that make his sets so fun: common dual lands! And just like the snow lands in KHM, these even play into one of the set's mechanics: crime.

Specifically, these deserts all trigger "when you commit a crime" when they ETB, which can translate to quite a lot of value in this set! There's quite a lot of payoffs in the set, including 5 at common and 13 at uncommon.

So let's talk about what I think you can do with this deck, and why I think it should also be very gay (multicolored) to do lots of crime!

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Part 1: Crime is Slow

This might be counterintuitive, as one of the crime colors is red, which is probably one of the fastest colors in this set, and the lands that commit crimes do so by pinging your opponent.

But implicitly, the thing that most commonly commits crimes in limited is simply pointing removal spells at your opponents' creatures! So naturally, if you want to consistently be committing crimes, you're going to want to be interacting with your opponent a lot - and you're not as likely to just want a bunch of creatures that just attack.

In addition, there's not that many ways to repeatedly commit crimes in the set! And the ones that do exist - cards like

Deadeye Duelist and Sterling Keykeeper - don't tend to be that aggressively statted, as they instead have power dedicated to their activated abilities.

So if you want to get value from repeatedly committing crimes, you want the game to go longer, as you want to draw more cards that commit more crimes! And nowhere do we see this better than the payoffs.

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Part 2: The Payoffs

The payoffs for committing crime are largely in Grixis - especially with the two uncommon enchantments

Intimidation Campaign and At Knifepoint. And notably, as fits with the above, these are both slow value cards! Campaign very obviously, as you're literally never affecting the board with it, but At Knifepoint also doesn't get good until you've generated 3+ mercenaries with it, at which point the game has to have gone on for quite a bit.

Crime Gives Green

While Grixis is largely where the crime payoffs are, I do think that there are two very real reasons to branch out in colors:

Hardbristle Bandit and Bandit's Haul. And because you're likely to want to be a slow deck anyways, I think it's perfectly reasonable to splash!

Both of these provide fixing that lets you play more colors, notably not only letting you splash for payoffs like Knifepoint and Campaign, but also letting you splash into more colors for good removal. And on top of that, splashing also ties well into playing more deserts too.

So yeah, I'm quite interested in both Bandit and Haul as powerful accelerants for this kind of deck - they give you more mana to work with to repeatedly recast your Intimidation Campaigns, Haul especially is quite interesting as a card that plays extremely well in a more controlling plan, where you play a pile of removal and use the Haul itself to refuel and keep the crime coming.

The Crime Mill

Another card that looks quite interesting to me is the crime mill card -

Deepmuck Desperado. You realistically only need to trigger this 7-9 times to mill your opponent out, and it's not that hard to trigger it on both your and your opponent's turns, with sequences like playing a desert on your turn and a removal spell on theirs.

So this of course also naturally fits into a controlling deck - instant speed removal is quite important here, and a mill plan naturally wants the game to go on pretty long. And of course, a 3 mana 2/4 isn't particularly aggressive, but can actually be quite solid defensively.

Minor Payoffs

There's quite a few minor payoffs, but a lot of them also look quite good to me.

Seize the Secrets looks like a pretty good divination once you can consistently double spell to get a 2 mana draw 2.

Raven of Fell Omens can both help both stabilize your life total and pressure your opponent's while you're committing crimes.

And

Slickshot Vault-Buster is an extremely strong offensive and defensive body if you can actually consistently make it a 3/4 vigilance.

None of these will carry the deck on their own, but they are nice small value additions while you go off with your main payoffs.

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Part 3: The Enablers

The stars of the show, of course, are the deserts. Getting anything free off of your manabase is huge in limited, and these also provide some nice mana fixing to help you commit a wide variety of crimes for fun and profit.

And of course there are the obvious payoffs: removal spells. There's quite a lot of these, especially splashable ones! A great example of this is

Desert's Due, which aligns pretty well with incentives you already have. But there's also many others, like Explosive Derailment, Thunder Salvo, and Throw from the Saddle

Finally, there's a scant few repeated crime enablers. I'm not going to list them here, but look out for cards that say "target opponent" or "target creature" for cheap. Notably Mercenary tokens don't count, as they only target your own things, but a card like

Spring Splasher does.

Not all of these will be good - I'm fairly skeptical of Splasher, for example - but some of them might be key to actually making the deck work. How many of these effects you want will definitely be one of the things to figure out as we explore the format, as it's pretty hard to know exactly from just speculation.

I think the most important thing to keep in mind, though, is that I think triggering crime on both turns will be quite important. That's part of why I really like the deserts - they're low cost, which lets you "double spell" easily with a desert on your turn and a piece of interaction on their turn.

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Part 4: An Example Deck

Sealeddeck.tech is unfortunately not quite up to task for building archetype skeletons, but I went and assembled something anyways.

My main worry here is honestly not enough card flow - I feel like I want more things that can impact the board while also giving me card advantage, and I just wasn't seeing too much of that while looking through the card file.

There were some raw card draw effects - like the divination and a draw 3 - and of course there is the Campaign. I suspect this deck will definitely work if you get 2 copies of Campaign, but I didn't want to rely on that.

So, my theory is that maybe

Loan Shark can actually be a good tool here. The thought is that, with the crime-matters mana dork and mana rock, we can have access to more mana than usual and use that to double spell with a cheap removal spell and Shark. If you can remove the need to plot the card, then it starts to seem quite strong!

So that can maybe serve as a way to keep cards and crimes flowing, in addition to a couple raw card draw effects as well. I almost certainly don't quite have a good balance of things - it's both hard to tell before playing the set at all and also hard to build without moving cards around - but I think this shows some promise.

And of course, I didn't include any rares in this deck. But morally it should be able to have access to and cast any rare that might come its way - and there's plenty of very strong ones, especially multicolored ones, in this set! All the more reasons to be colorful and gay :D

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Conclusion

This is all very early speculation, so it could be wrong. But I'm definitely going to be looking out for this kind of archetype going into the set, and I'm potentially quite optimistic about building a deck to be gay and do crime!