It’s time to also develop a second deck in Arena, and I’m interested in a Golgari build. In fact, it’s going to have similarities to my Dimir deck, but instead of surveil, it’s going to explore. I can port some cards over between decks, because surveil and explore are similar in ways; Both are scry-alike mechanics that are able to dump things in the graveyard. I can imagine things will converge from there, and I might even end up with a Sultai () deck, with at least a splash of for… Muldrotha, the Gravetide, maybe?

Also the Golgari has the best logo of all Guilds.

So, why explore? Well, there are a lot of aggressive decks, and red is getting more and more traction with decks around Runaway Steam-Kin and Experimental Frenzy, so I want to run some Wildgrowth Walkers to have an escalating threat, that also gains me life. And explore allows me to dump creatures from the top of my deck into the graveyard, almost as good as Surveil does, but I have more, or better recursion available to take advantage of that.

I also like Journey to Eternity a lot. Once set up, I quickly get full access to my graveyard, especially in unison with Golgari Findbroker. And there are other cool synergies to be found:

Stitcher’s Supplier and Plaguecrafter feel like a one-two (or one-three, if you look at CMC)  punch that fills the grave with cool stuff. Plaguecrafter also makes it easier to use Journey, and set up quite a bit of a string of sacrifice effects the Atzal.

Ideally, I’m looking for something to sacrifice my creatures to, to help activating Atzal, and to keep reusing enter the battlefield effects. So far, I have seen a lot that can help with that.

Doom Whisperer is a good way to set up Explores, as well as filling the graveyard. Since I use 2 in my Dimir deck, it’s an easy include.

At it’s core, it looks like something like this:

~ Golgari Reanimator ~

Exploration Suite (12) 4 Merfolk Branchwalker 4 Seekers’ Squire 4 Wildgrowth Walker Graveyard Filling (8) 4 Stitcher’s Supplier 4 Plaguecrafter Reanimation and Recursion (8) 2 Find // Finality 3 Golgari Findbroker 3 Journey to Eternity Reanimation Targets (4) 2 Doom Whisperer 2 Izoni, Thousand-Eyed Removal (4) 4 Ravenous Chupacabra

Lands (24) 6 Forest 2 Golgari Guildgate 4 Overgrown Tomb 8 Swamp 4 Woodland Cemetery

This is only the base of the deck, and from there things can be added. Maybe some incarnation of Vraska, or Assassin’s Trophy, or maybe a Lotleth Giant as a finisher. Once the base is there, I can test different variations and single cards and tweak the numbers. I do like decks that have card selection and snowballing synergies.