One of the major features of my Twitch stream is doing deck-building streams. Getting together with the Magic community to put our heads together is an extremely fun time. There are plenty of good ideas out there, and I’m back to share one of those ideas that is fun to play and that makes use of two Magic 2015 cards as its centerpieces!

Return to the Ranks and Necromancer's Stockpile were two of the most attention-grabbing cards for me from the M15. They are the type of cards that requires other cards to be good or even playable. Not everyone enjoys that type of card, but they are right up my alley. I am more of a synergistic deck-builder, and that means my decks thrive on synergies rather than on individual cards that are powerful by themselves. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy powerful cards in my decks, but connecting the dots between cards is a fun challenge in deck-building.

Without further ado, here is Junk (B/G/W) “Pile and Return”:

Pile and Return ? Magic 2015 Standard | Michael Yee

• Creatures (25)
• 3 Blood Scrivener
• 3 Dreg Mangler
• 3 Lifebane Zombie
• 4 Lotleth Troll
• 4 Pack Rat
• 4 Returned Reveler
• 4 Spiteful Returned

• Spells (13)
• 1 Golgari Charm
• 2 Abrupt Decay
• 2 Ultimate Price
• 3 Return to the Ranks
• 4 Necromancer's Stockpile
• 1 Hall of Triumph

• Lands (22)
• 1 Plains
• 1 Swamp
• 2 Mutavault
• 2 Temple Garden
• 3 Godless Shrine
• 4 Caves of Koilos
• 4 Llanowar Wastes
• 4 Overgrown Tomb
• 1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth

Buy This Deck

At its core, this is an aggressive Junk deck. However, what I enjoy most about this deck is that it has multiple ways to be aggressive and overall is more resilient to removal than other aggro decks are. There are multiple ways to win with the deck, and depending on your opening hand and your first draw, you can start writing up a game plan:

• Just flood the board with 2-drops and use cards such as Hall of Triumph to beat down our opponent within a couple of turns. With our 3-drops having haste or pseudo-evasion, we can push quite a bit of damage through. Additionally, we can just discard a whole bunch of our 2-drops to Necromancer's Stockpile and return them with Return to the Ranks. Alongside Hall of Triumph, we can have a pretty hefty board state with our Zombie tokens and creatures.
• Pack Rat by itself is a game-winning plan. Making use of the discarded cards with Return to the Ranks can be considered an upgrade to that plan.
• Lotleth Troll’s trample and regenerate make it a resilient target that can become quite large so it can win in a few turns. Discarding all of our creatures only to bring them back a few turns later gives us some insurance in putting all of our eggs in one basket in case we run into a sacrifice effect or Lotleth’s caught without regeneration mana up.

As you can see, there is a definite discard theme to our deck, so let’s take a moment to look at the main two cards in the deck that make it possible:

Return to the Ranks is a fairly linear card. There are a number of ways you can use it, but its ability is obviously built for aggressive decks due to the fact that it only brings back creatures of converted mana cost 2 or less. It’s a nice way to reduce the effectiveness of board-wipe spells such as Drown in Sorrow, Supreme Verdict, Mizzium Mortars, and the like, and it even makes single-target removal worse the longer the game goes on.

Being an X-mana card with convoke means it is not difficult to be able to return every single creature card from you graveyard, and considering the deck is almost entirely based on 2-mana creatures, there is the potential to bring back enough creatures to alpha-strike our opponent the following turn. Against decks like Mono-Black Devotion, even bringing back three or four of your creatures makes it harder for the opponent to use his or her single-target removal—not to mention that it gives you fodder for tapping down Desecration Demon to squeeze in that last bit of damage if you need it. The convoke also works well with Pack Rat discards since we’re creating tokens we can use to tap for virtual mana to bring back those creatures we just discarded a couple turns ago.

Deciding on which creatures to use took quite a bit of consideration. My viewers and I wanted to get the most out of Necromancer's Stockpile while still having the ability to win through aggression. For example, cards like Voice of Resurgence, Daring Skyjek, Imposing Sovereign, and the like are all good, aggressive cards, but I want to take advantage of Necromancer's Stockpile as much as possible and make plenty of 2/2 Zombie tokens to make it worthwhile. If we’re returning enough creatures, it won’t matter too much how large they are. Combined with our army of Zombies, we’ll have plenty of power to swarm our opponent.

I’ll briefly go over each creature and why we choose it:

Spiteful Returned – I’ve played many black-based aggressive decks with this card, and I’m a big fan of it. Spiteful Returned allows us to push through damage, and it also stays relevant in the late game (thanks to bestow), which other small creatures sometimes have trouble with. When our game plan is to bring back our board with Return to the Ranks, we can usually just keep attacking with it and still push damage through even if it ends up being killed in combat.

Returned Reveler – We are an aggressive deck, but at the same time, we don’t mind playing a game past turn four or five since we still have a mid- to late-game plan. Reveler is a good early blocker, and especially with decks like Rabble Red coming up, it can kill off 1-toughness creatures and usually force a pump spell to avoid trading creatures. It can put some more creatures into our graveyard that we can bring back later, and it is also is another Zombie for Necromancer's Stockpile.

Lotleth Troll – This is one of our win conditions; when we’re playing a deck with a large number of creatures, we can make it quite large on turn two—or on turn three with regeneration mana up. Thanks to trample, it can end the game quite quickly, and thanks to Return to the Ranks, if it is killed, we aren’t set back as far.

Pack Rat – Another win condition, if we have Pack Rat in our opening hand, we probably move to that game plan. This is furthered if we end up with one of our two Mutavaults as well. It’s a card that forces our opponent to have the right answers at the right time—or have the ability to race us. Similar to Lotleth Troll, even if the opponent does have those answers, we can bring back our discarded creatures.

Lifebane Zombie – This is the other 3-drop in the deck. If we can be matched up against a green- or white-based creature deck, its effectiveness is much higher. However, even if we can’t, it is a way to gain some information from our opponent and keep up pressure.

As for noncreature spells, there weren’t many slots to fill in. Since we’re discarding cards and since Necromancer's Stockpile and Lotleth Troll use creature cards, it was imperative we have plenty of creatures to use. Even though we have multiple game plans, all of them are linear and straightforward.

Abrupt Decay can help get rid of problematic cards such as Banishing Light or deal with early blockers such as Courser of Kruphix or Brimaz, King of Oreskos. This helps keep cards such as Necromancer's Stockpile on board or lets us push more damage through. For larger creatures, such as Polukranos, World Eater, we have a couple of Ultimate Prices to help race.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with the deck. If I were to switch out cards, Blood Scrivener and Returned Reveler seem the weakest of all of our creatures, but other than that, the deck feels good. Even with those two cards being the weakest, they still are relevant to the deck and make Necromancer's Stockpile better. It’s an aggressive deck that can win with your typical play-creatures-and-turn-them-sideways plan, but it also has other lines of play that give the deck more mid- to late-game resilience, and our different plans need different answers to combat.

Feel free to check out my stream sometime here to join in on more MTG fun!