Nikya's Big Beef Steakhouse

"Where's the beef?", no one asked. You're looking right at it! Welcome to Nikya's Steakhouse, where only the beefiest of beefs are served. Gruul gets BIG in today's deck, full of powerful creatures to use our HUGE amounts of mana with and beat face on whoever dares cross our turf! Show them the Old Ways of casting big fuckoff creatures!

This deck was once again inspired by Noxious' stream in which he playe Nikya. While I do agree that the commander is woefully underpowered when compared to a lot of the powerful paneswalkers out there, I do really love that big mana stuff so I had to give this a shot. The aim here was to smooth out some of the issues with card draw and land ramp, trying to get us to more consistently do the broken things the commander was made to do.

Getting the Mana:

This is a heavy, meaty deck and these cards should help the meal go down smoother. We need to ramp up fast to make Nikya snowball early, and in this deck we especially need lands. For the regular creature ramp we have green all-starts Gilded Goose, Incubation Druid, Leafkin Druid, and Paradise Druid. In order to get our lands, we run District Guide as well as Beanstalk Giant and Circuitous Route, and Cavalier of Thorns will later on help us get even more lands in play. Why is it so important to get lands? Apart from Nikya, we also run a Fires of Invention, as it can truly shine in being able to sink all of our immense mana pool into our creatures' activated abilities.

Drawing our Threats:

Wise men say you can never have enough card draw, and it can get a bit tough in red and green. We have a pretty interesting rummaging package to make use of our mana in Bag of Holding, Glint-Horn Buccaneer, and Merchant of the Vale. Vivien's Arkbow also lets us discard any useless cards to dig deep into our deck and find out threats. Neheb, Dreadhorde Champion and Cavalier of Flame allow us to rummage away any number of cards in our hand, in case we end up with useless cards in hand. Beast Whisperer and Guardian Project will provide us more value for our creature cards, and finally Escape to the Wilds allows us to dig deeper and accelerate on our land count in play.

Big Mana Payoffs:

Drakuseth, Maw of Flame

We are jumping through a lot of hoops and giving ourselves a lot of limitations in this deck, and these cards are here to reward us for our hard work. Wildborn Preserver can become an enormous creature quite fast in this deck, as we are likely to end up with mana left over to spend. Shifting Ceratops is a great 4 drop that can get in fast and hard as well as dodging blue interaction. Skarrgan Hellkite, Biogenic Ooze, and Wakeroot Elemental are the best mana sinks in these colors and will be able to give us crazy amounts of board advantage and threat potential. We run Drakuseth, Maw of Flame because it's the biggest, hottest steak sizzling off the grill, and Ilharg, the Raze-Boar will let us cheat out our bigger creatures on to the field on attack. For the big, meaty finish, we run God-Eternal Rhonas and End-Raze Forerunners to just hurt our opponents really hard.

Interacting with the Opponent:

Dude, those hydras are going to be HUUUUUGE! And they should help us deal with some board threats, just don't make the mistake of casting them for free with Fires of Invention and you should have them be quite huge. I got to attack with a 28/29 Voracious Hydra and let me tell you, it felt fantastic. For a bit more interaction we run Bonecrusher Giant as a shock and a threat, Questing Beast to deal with planeswalkers, Thorn Mammoth to deal with the opponent's board, and Ravager Wurm to do the same as well as kill threatening lands like the Castles or Mobilized District. As methods of soft interaction or punishment we run Immolation Shaman who can also be an ok mana sink and Rhythm of the Wild to make our creatures hasty and uncounterable.

Lands:

The original of this deck that inspired me had a Field of the Dead, and though I think it's a powerful card I found it a little ambitious in this deck, as we want to get a lot of lands on the field and most cards that fetch for lands look for basics. We play six of each for that reason, and for utility lands we run the castles to let us get aggressive early, as well as Blast Zone and Mobilized Districts as later-game mana sinks. We also run a Karn's Bastion which works okay with some of the cards in this deck, but it could well be another basic if I'm being honest.

Enjoy your meal!