Hoard Overflow: Standard Gruul Raccoons

Note: This article was translated from Chinese by AI and may contain errors. Read the original Chinese version.

Before We Start

It’s the turn of the raccoons among Bloomburrow’s ten animal tribes! Among the red-green tribes, which have always focused on aggression, raccoons are quite an interesting presence. Middling bodies, creature-based mana acceleration, and Expend abilities that only trigger once you’ve spent a certain amount of mana… how should they be put together?

Card Analysis

As usual, let’s first look at the legend:

Muerra, Trash Tactician
Legendary Creature — Raccoon Warrior
At the beginning of your first main phase, add {R} or {G} for each Raccoon you control.
Whenever you expend 4, you gain 3 life. (You expend 4 as you spend your fourth total mana to cast spells during a turn.)
Whenever you expend 8, exile the top two cards of your library. Until the end of your next turn, you may play those cards.

At first glance, Muerra, Trash Tactician is a ramp engine aimed at the mid to late game. Working together with early-game mana raccoons, she also has an expend 4 life gain and an expend 8 impulse draw as follow-up effects. In fact, we can find online decklists that ramp into big creatures with raccoons, but the flaws of that approach are obvious too: once you draw the wrong half or the mana creatures get swept, the whole thing easily stalls. So how should you build it if you want to go tribal? Here is my example:

Decklist

The most interesting thing about raccoons is that the good creatures are concentrated at two to three mana, while the basic expend threshold is 4, meaning you can’t trigger expend with a single raccoon alone, and raccoons costing four or more don’t look like much. So the best choice is Roaming Throne, which not only fills in the four-mana creature slot but also doubles the value by making the abilities it grants trigger an extra time.

With Roaming Throne helping, Muerra can produce double the mana, gain double the life, and double the impulse draw, Brazen Collector produces one extra mana when attacking, and Wandertale Mentor and Brambleguard Veteran grow by +2 at a time, so the explosive power is quite astonishing.

Of course, relying on four Roaming Throne alone to trigger expend is definitely not enough. Not only can you never reach the expend 8 cap, but triggering expend by chaining two plays together burns through your hand quickly, and you’ll soon stall out with an empty hand. Packing too many expensive cards runs into the wrong-half problem mentioned earlier, so the best solution is naturally X spells that can be used cheaply and, even better, replenish resources. Here I chose Tyvar’s Stand and Green Sun’s Twilight. Tyvar’s Stand can be used as a one-mana protection spell, and once you have more mana it has the chance to punch a hole in the sky in one blow; Green Sun’s Twilight refills your hand, and since the number of cards it looks at is X + 1, when you’re stuck on two lands early you can use it for two mana to look at two cards and see whether there is a land, and then you will feel the malice of MTGA (?).

For removal, I again chose our good red friends Torch the Tower, Lightning Strike, and Nahiri’s Warcrafting. Worth mentioning is that Nahiri’s Warcrafting impulse draws based on excess damage, so while removing a creature it also has a chance to reach the expend threshold.

For lands I used the usual Copperline Gorge, Karplusan Forest, Restless Ridgeline, Rockface Village, and Oakhollow Village.

Gameplay Demo

First up was red-white Mice. The opponent seemed to have drawn only cheap cards, and their bodies were suppressed by turn-three Muerra and turn-four Roaming Throne. After that, the opponent looked like they were holding Monstrous Rage, hoping to trade off my creatures with combat tricks, but I simply ignored it. Soon I got the key to victory: with doubled mana I cast Green Sun’s Twilight, triggering expend 8 in one go to gain 6 life and impulse draw four cards, exiling two Roaming Throne. The next turn I did expend 8 again for an impulse draw of six, then two Brazen Collector attacked and spat out 8 mana, and I ended the game with a sky-punching Tyvar’s Stand.

This match against red-white token control was not smooth sailing all the way like the last one. First I ran into a missed land drop on turn three, but luckily Green Sun’s Twilight found a land and solved the crisis. Then I landed the combination of Muerra and Roaming Throne, but the opponent was no pushover and removed them one after another to stop my big plays. Unfortunately for them, with the help of a second Roaming Throne, Wandertale Mentor and Brambleguard Veteran displayed outstanding combat power, and in the end the opponent conceded because they never drew a sweeper.

Conclusion

In some ways, the design of raccoons looks a lot like Elves snowballing: they ramp mana to build up a big play and trigger expend to deal a head-on blow to the opponent, and the weakness to sweepers is similar. But raccoons have a certain amount of combat power themselves, so after a sweeper, with the help of lands and burn, there is still some room to struggle. The new set Duskmourn: House of Horror is about to be released, so please look forward to new Standard articles.