Reanimator is a deck that crops up in Legacy every now and then. The strategy is enormously powerful; capable of cheating the likes of Griselbrand into play as early as turn one. Typically, these strategies are Blue-Black, allowing the deck to play efficient interaction like Spell Pierce and Force of Will, as well as powerful cantrips like Ponder and Brainstorm. The problem with this strategy is that you’re vulnerable to just about every type of hate in Legacy – graveyard hate, countermagic, spot removal, and discard can all wreak havoc on your plan, especially as the game goes longer. Medvedev has tried to solve this problem by building a reanimator deck that tries to be much faster and more disruptive than what we’re used to:

Black-Red Reanimator ? Legacy | Medvedev, 5-0 Legacy league

• Creatures (10)
• 1 Blazing Archon
• 1 Iona, Shield of Emeria
• 4 Griselbrand
• 4 Sire of Insanity

• Spells (36)
• 4 Animate Dead
• 4 Dark Ritual
• 4 Entomb
• 4 Exhume
• 4 Faithless Looting
• 4 Lotus Petal
• 4 Reanimate
• 4 Thoughtseize
• 4 Unmask

• Lands (14)
• 1 Swamp
• 1 Bayou
• 4 Badlands
• 4 Polluted Delta
• 4 Verdant Catacombs

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Tidespout Tyrant
• 2 Pithing Needle
• 4 Abrupt Decay
• 4 Faerie Macabre
• 4 Stronghold Gambit

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The big difference here is the inclusion of Dark Ritual. This allows you to do all manner of degenerate things. Dark Ritual lets you resolve Entomb into either Reanimate or Animate Dead on the first turn. You can even use an extra mana to cast Thoughtseize to clear the way if Reanimate is how you’re getting your monster into play. The difference between this deck is that the Blue-Black variant doesn’t need mana to force through your combo. You have Unmask to ensure that your reanimation spell will resolve even without spending mana.

But what is all of this leading into? It may shock you to know that Griselbrand is not the end goal for this deck, but rather a means to an end. If you can cheat a Griselbrand into play on turn one, you can draw seven once or twice to see how much disruption and free mana you can find. The goal, at that point, is to use Lotus Petals and Dark Rituals to get a Sire of Insanity into play.

The idea here is that, while turn one Griselbrand is hard to beat, turn one Sire of Insanity is all but impossible. Karakas backed by disruption and removal is a pretty hard answer to something like Griselbrand. Even if you draw an extra fourteen cards, you opponent could just have all the answers. Just think about this for a second: with Sire of Insanity, you can force your opponent to discard their entire hand before they’ve even had a turn! That forces your opponent to find both answers and the mana to cast them in very few draw steps; a tall order for just about every deck in the format.