Throne of Eldraine is coming to Standard this week! The new Standard format will be shaped by how the best cards in the format interact with everything. How much does your deck care if your turn three play gets bounced by Teferi, Time Raveler or turned into a 3/3 by Oko? Does your creature die to Bonecrusher Giant's adventure, Stomp? All of these questions and more will help shape what decks have what it takes to win a tournament.
One of the cards I'm most interested in exploring is Karn, the Great Creator.
I've played with Karn a fair amount in Standard as a card advantage engine in ramp decks that could find powerful answers to what my opponent was doing.
Mono-Green Ramp is one of my favorite decks I've ever built. The two main things it had to contend with were aggressive decks with a lot of ground creatures, which were largely handled by Wildgrowth Walker and Ripjaw Raptor, and slower midrange decks with zero to one basics that had a difficult time beating Llanowar Elves into Field of Ruin, or the Field-Crucible lock on turn five.
Wildgrowth Walker and Field of Ruin are gone, so that plan isn't completely replicable, but the use of Karn as a card advantage engine in a ramp deck might be. In War of the Spark Standard, opposing artifacts were mostly limited to the occasional Mox Amber in Jeskai Superfriends.
Going back to how interactions shape a format, there are a lot of artifact-centric cards in Throne of Eldraine, and this time around Karn might play a greater role in shutting down what people are doing.
The base-level interaction here is that Karn can blow up Food tokens. While some of the uses for Food get around Karn because they involve making a Food then immediately sacrificing it to something without activating it, I am interested in doing something like playing Karn the turn after my opponent plays Oko, Thief of Crowns to prevent them from doing whatever they wanted to do with the Food (like turning it into a creature to attack me or protect Oko).
Jonathan Blank has been having a lot of success in testing with this deck centered around Feasting Troll King, also known as FoodGaak or Trash Man.
To get Feasting Troll King into play, you need to make three Food tokens somehow. Karn deals with this in two ways: by shutting off FoodGaak's primary Food engine in Witch's Oven, and by activating on opposing Food tokens to turn them into 0/0s. The way Karn interacts with Witch's Oven when he comes into play is nice, since if the opponent activates Oven and sacrifices a 0/4 in response, Karn can +1 on one of the tokens to decrease the chance that the opponent gets a Troll King.
Karn is also nice against Oko, Thief of Crowns, as he can eat Oko's Food tokens to prevent the opponent from doing anything broken with them, like turning them into 3/3s and attacking Karn. At some point, Karn can just grab Sorcerous Spyglass to shut off Oko and win that battle for good.
Karn's ability to eat Food and shut off artifacts could be what pushes him over the top, but he's still a solid turn-four play against most decks thanks to his ability to grab multiple artifacts from the sideboard to deal with whatever. Hero of Precinct One giving you a hard time? Get Scalding Cauldron and take care of it. Don't want Teferi, Time Raveler to bounce your creatures or Narset, Parter of Veils to draw into a way to kill Karn? Get Sorcerous Spyglass (I like having two Spyglass in my sideboard so I can play Karn, -2, get a Spyglass, -2 again, get the second Spyglass, and name two of their planeswalkers to pull ahead on board). God-Pharaoh's Statue is good against UR Phoenix, which looks like it'll remain a contender with Opt reprint and a replacement for Tormenting Voice. Meteor Golem is another key reprint from M20 that helped Mono-Green Ramp deal with big, problematic permanents.
The question is whether there's a similarly good shell around Karn. Losing Llanowar Elves and Wildgrowth Walker hurts, but in a deck that can maximize Gilded Goose and early blockers, he should be able to hit the board early and well-protected and power through games.
I actually like the idea of playing Karn in FoodGaak. Merfolk Secretkeeper and Wall of Lost Thoughts are high-toughness creatures that give Karn some of the same protection he had in Mono-Green Ramp with Wildgrowth Walker, ensuring that he gets to activate multiple times and that the opponent can't just ignore Karn and kill you. Curving Gilded Goose into Karn helps mitigate the damage Karn will take from losing Llanowar Elves. Meteor Golem and God-Pharaoh's Statue are a bit harder to cast without Llanowar Elves and a smooth manabase, but giving Gilded Goose a steady supply of Food helps that problem, as does having Oko as another way to deal with big fliers.
Replacing Tamiyo and Golden Egg with Karn and Paradise Druid is a relatively painless change to make. Golden Egg is pretty mediocre. Tamiyo helps get Feasting Troll King in play, but not before turn four, so I like using that slot to interact with my opponent. I played with some numbers on Karn, Paradise Druid, Golden Egg, Merfolk Secretkeeper, and Emry, and decided that I want to start with 4 Paradise Druid/3 Karn (incidentally the same numbers as the slots they replaced). The one change I made to support this was replacing the fourth Emry with the fourth Merfolk Secretkeeper. Karn needs to be protected more than Tamiyo did and planning to leverage Karn in the midgame means there's less of a need to draw a ton of cards with Emry and Golden Egg.
Here's the list I'm starting with:
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