Reforging the Blade: Standard Lorehold Equipment

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

Introduction

Strixhaven’s Lorehold college majors in historical excavation and cares about cards leaving your graveyard, a rare graveyard-recursion route for red-white. That said, whether it’s looting or self-milling to fill the graveyard, the other three color pairs have always done it better than red-white. Can the new set’s Lorehold cards stand up to the other three? Let’s see my build.

Deck Analysis

Without further ado, here’s the decklist:

Decklist

Although Lorehold’s cards are specialized around discarding and exiling from the graveyard, they are still limited by the nature of red-white: filtering depth is limited, it’s hard to fill the graveyard in large amounts in a short time, and the effect from each trigger is small. So the question is how to trigger repeatedly and how to combine with an additional way to win. Here is an explanation of the deck’s card choices.

• Theme cards: Hardened Academic and Ark of Hunger
  
  These are the only two theme rares in this set’s Lorehold that care about “cards leaving the graveyard.” Hardened Academic pumps a target creature of yours whenever cards leave your graveyard, and is itself a two-mana flying, haste, lifelink beater and discard engine; Ark of Hunger is a self-mill resource engine that gives you the chance to play the top card of your library from the graveyard each turn and drains your opponent for one whenever cards leave the graveyard.

• Core components: Practiced Scrollsmith and Helping Hand
  
  This is the deck’s core engine for hopping between the battlefield and graveyard. Practiced Scrollsmith exiles a noncreature, nonland card from the graveyard when it enters, and you can play it until the end of your next turn, and you don’t have to exile it after using it. That is to say, you can use Helping Hand to bring Practiced Scrollsmith back to the battlefield, then when the Scrollsmith enters it exiles Helping Hand from the graveyard, letting you keep casting Helping Hand to dig up the next creature. Each loop triggers the leave-the-graveyard effect twice, you can bring every Practiced Scrollsmith in your graveyard back to the battlefield in a single turn, and in the end there is still one reanimation opportunity left to carry over to the next turn. As long as your opponent doesn’t target the graveyard, a single Helping Hand lets you rebuild the board with ease and trigger the leave-the-graveyard effects.

• Supporting Equipment: Cragflame, Dragonfire Blade, and Rocket-Powered Goblin Glider
  
  
  Equipment is the deck’s other theme. As mentioned, graveyard hopping alone is not very efficient, and with Hardened Academic’s emphasis on creature combat, this tells us we need to reinforce the offense. I chose to pair with Equipment. First is Mabel, Heir to Cragflame, the heir to… Cragflame, which you can dig up with Helping Hand, a legendary Equipment that gives +1/+1, haste, vigilance, and trample as soon as it enters. Add the +2/+0 flying, haste Rocket-Powered Goblin Glider, which comes with Mayhem so it can be cast from the graveyard, and every creature that enters becomes a god of war ready to charge in. As a way to protect against removal, I also added two Dragonfire Blade, which gives protection from monocolored, to ward off the common single-color spot removal.

• Looting creatures: Fear of Missing Out and Giott, King of the Dwarves
  
  For looting, I chose creatures that Helping Hand and Lorehold Charm can bring back to the battlefield: Fear of Missing Out, which with delirium can get an extra combat phase, and Giott, King of the Dwarves, which comes with double strike and suits being pumped, and can trigger the looting multiple times through Scrollsmith, also a Dwarf, and Equipment.

• Removal spells: Channeled Dragonfire, Get Lost, and Lorehold Charm
  
  For removal, I used the one-mana burn spell Channeled Dragonfire, which can be flashed back from the graveyard with Harmonize, the broad-range Get Lost, and Lorehold Charm, which combines artifact removal, team-wide pump, and instant-speed reanimation, as the main deck.

Gameplay Demo

Against opponents with no exile ability, the Practiced Scrollsmith and Helping Hand combo is very cheesy. Whether facing repeated spot removal or a sweeper, one Helping Hand can rebuild the board, and then the Equipment strengthens your creatures so that even a lone soldier can put out solid damage. In the mid to late game, Ark of Hunger’s damage and resource ability deals blows to your opponent, and milling a Channeled Dragonfire lets you deal six damage straight to the face. With multiple Arks or a Scrollsmith combo chain of digging, you can deal more damage than your opponent expects, which decides the game.

Conclusion

Unlike traditional graveyard-recursion decks, Lorehold focuses on “cards leaving the graveyard” triggered abilities, so if your opponent uses a single-target graveyard exile card like Ghost Vacuum to target you, you sometimes actually gain an advantage. But facing Rest in Peace there is truly no suspense, so your sideboard will need non-graveyard backup win conditions. My choice was to switch to a straightforward Equipment attack plan. If it were you, how do you think it should be prepared?