Golos on a Budget: Gates Edition

It's hard to come up with something exciting to do with the all-mighty Golos, Tireless Pilgrim that hasn't been explored to exhaustion already. So today we're trying to figure out what is the best budget-conscious way to build a Golos brawl deck. This deck only has 3 rares if you're playing on Arena, and in paper it costs $37.80, half of which is taken up by Field of the Dead and Arcane Signet. Either way, it shouldn't cost you too much to build this out of cards you probably already have in your collection.

The strategy is to make the most out of our gates payoffs while drawing a bunch of cards and using efficient removal to keep our opponent from threatening us too much. Because a lot of our payoffs in the deck draw us cards, we run Improbable Alliance as a way to keep pressure up on our opponent as we assemble our field of zombies. With plenty of ramp on top of these delicious goodies, this deck aims to beat all those greedy Mythic-filled decks with good old fashioned value and flexible cards that can eek out an advantage while we beat them with Rams and Colossi.

The Gates Package:

The gates package has some surprisingly strong cards. Glaive of the Guildpact and Garrison Sergeant are not those, but they're in the deck anyways as a funny way to threaten a lot of damage with the 11 gates we run in our deck. The real power cards are Guild Summit, which lets us draw a card whenever we play a gate, and Gates Ablaze, the only board clear we run in this deck. We really want to see that Summit in our opening hand, as it will guarantee the game will run much smoother from then on. With it in play, Open the Gates and District Guide go from ok cards, fetching us a land from our deck to our hands, to essentially draw spells. We have a few more creatures that can wield the Glaive and synergize off our gates, with Gatebreaker Ram, Gate Colossus, and even Gatekeeper Gargoyle as possible very threatening beaters. our more value-oriented gate payoff creatures are Gateway Sneak drawing us a card whenever it attacks and Archway Angel gaining us 2 life for every gate in play, a huge swing against aggro decks.

If looking to upgrade the deck this is where I'd make the first cuts. Glaive of the Guildpact, Garrison Sergeant, and even Gatekeeper Gargoyle are pretty underwhelming payoffs, and I'd replace them with any big bombs you have in your collection. A huge "I win" style planeswalker, a big cavalier, a Fires of Invention... Go nuts with it, choose the big bomb of your choice that you'd like to cast for free with Golos and have fun!

The Ramp:

Golos encourages us to ramp fast and be proactive, so we're running a ton of ways to get our lands in play and add mana of multiple colors. We run Arboreal Grazer to get the ball rolling on our ramp, and Arcane Signet because even though its a $10 common, it's worth it. Growth Spiral ramps us while drawing cards, and Paradise Druid and Leyline Prowler both give us access to mana of any color at uncommon. We run Circuitous Route to get more of those gates in play and Mana Geode to give us access to more multicolor mana.

If you're looking to upgrade the deck, replace the Geode with a Chromatic Lantern, it will be a HUGE difference.

Card Draw:

Because Guild Summit can potentially draw us a lot of cards and we are limites as to how many bombs we can run by budget, a draw 2 package doesn't feel too silly to be running in this deck. We run both egg-style cards in Golden Egg and Guild Globe to keep us drawing consistently and help us fix our mana. We run Improbable Alliance as a payoff for all the cards we'll be drawing, and Chemister's Insight to help us activate it on our opponent's turn while getting more card advantage. We run one Discovery // Dispersal for its flexibility, as this deck doesn't run the most efficient possible cards.

If you're looking to upgrade this deck, I'd cut this package altogether while keeping Chemister's Insight and Guild Summit. Replace both eggs for a Gilded Goose and an Incubation Druid, replace Discovery // Dispersal with Drawn from Dreams and Improbable Alliance with a Escape to the Wilds.

Removal:

We're doing our best here in terms of removal, and while we do have quite a good amount of it, it's not the most efficient. We run Price of Fame as efficient creature removal and Deathsprout as a way to keep us ahead on lands while interacting with the opponent. Mortify and Status // Statue are two good ways to deal with permanents that are not planeswalkers, while Angrath's Rampage lets us deal with planeswalkers, artifacts, or an early creature giving us trouble. We run Vraska, Swarm's Eminence as a budget way to keep pressure on our opponent's planeswalkers and life, and Meteor Golem to just nuke any nonland permanent. Together with Gates Ablaze, this deck runs plenty of removal to deal with most creature decks.

If upgrading this deck, you'll notive it's quite soft to planeswalkers. This is where a lot of the rares and mythics could help out a lot, as there are a lot of good planeswalkers that can work as removal. I'd recommend replacing Vraska, Swarm's Eminence with a stronger planeswalker like Ugin, the Ineffable, Chandra, Awakened Inferno, or Liliana, Dreadhorde General. Status // Statue could be replaced by Casualties of War and Meteor Golem is replaced by an Agent of Treachery. I'd cut Deathsprout for another board clear, just to give the deck more protection versus big stompy strategies that have creatures bigger than our Gates Ablaze can kill.

The Lands:

We run 28 lands in this deck, and two of them are the other rares in our deck that are not our commmander. They are Field of the Dead (still fetching a pricy $11, even after bans) and the much cheaper Plaza of Harmony, not essential but extremely helpful for our mana base consistency. The plaza works spectacularly in a deck like ours that runs all 11 gates available to us in standard. Unfortunately, due to the amount of gates, and the lifegain lands pictured above, that means we have a total of 19 lands that come into play tapped in this deck, making it play a bit slower than you'd normally expect in the early turns. However, with our commander fetching Field of the Dead and our ramp we are likely to get the zombie army activation quite often, helping us claw back into the game.

This would be the most expensive part of the deck to upgrade if you were to do it. It's not terribly complicated, however, as it would simply be the case of replacing Evolving Wilds with Fabled Passage and every lifegin land with its corresponding shock land. If you're adding Fires of Invention to the deck while upgrading you could stand to use scry temples as well, or even replace two basic lands with the rare dual land of your choice if you're replacing Deathsprout for a board clear as recommended earlier.

And that's it, the Golos Gates Budget Brawl deck! This one goes out for anyone looking for a challenge, or anyone whose collection doesn't include all of the hugest planeswalkers. Feel free to modify it at your discretion, changing it to your playsyle and adding in any rares you'd like to play with.