M:tG Precon Decon - Guildpact Part 2: Gruul Wilding

Nostalgic ramblings about preconstructed theme decks from Magic: the Gathering's history. In this video, I look at Gruul Wilding from the 2006 Guildpact expansion. #mtg #MagictheGathering

Card images courtesy of Gatherer, I do not own or claim to own any of the art assets used in this video. Decklist format courtesy of TappedOut.

[Zarbon]

People can have and keep their Borderless, retro foil, anime art, and supplemental sets. This is Magic for me. Sweet theme decks with cards from a certain set/block. Magic today has lost it’s flavor, its heart. This is soo much wonderful flavor 🎉

[Zarbon]

Gruul is my favorite guild! It all started here! Love this series!

[ReubenAotearoa.]

Bloodthirst feels more Rakdos, both in flavour and because I feel it'd be better on smaller more aggressive creatures. And the mana costs are too big here, and I don't think the payoff is there. Even for the standards of the time.

I do dig how there are a few Ogres scattered through this block to support the Kamigawa tribe. And demons to come in the next set too, I'd imagine.

Bramble Elemental is a Selesnya card. In fact "enchantment matters" just seems way more Selesnya too. But there was a bit of an enchantment subtheme in Return to Ravnica too, which I guess came because of the enchantment subtheme in the OG Ravnica I guess? In such a jam packed multicolour set with all the guild keywords anyway did they really need an enchantment subtheme in either block?

Deck is a bit of a miss for me. It's just quite boring and disjointed. Note how most of my comment here focuses on another green and another red based guild rather than the guild it was supposed to be themed on!

[adriangutierrez]

Agree with all the points mentioned. Even against other theme decks, this played very ubderwhelming. Mostly had big creatured that you could not bloodthirst and was very slow.
I made some minor changes to make it stand against the other theme decks of the block . Mostly towards adding evasive and smaller creatures to trigger bloodthirst

[Shadow]

I do like how Bloodthisrt is a bit of a trainer mechanic that helps teach new players to use their second main phase more often. Also i love how you started saying what I was typing as I was typing it hah!

I do like Skybreaker's in built fling ability. This deck probably could have used less big guys and more bloodthrist creatures I think to really play up the mechanic. Also taking out the weird enchantment subtheme, that should have totally been the Selesnya subtheme. I guess the reasoning is they started makign more enchantment focused green creatures so that's why they didn't do it for the Orzhov or Azorius decks.

[Hetapapa]

Bloodthirst: I like the ability on paper, but in reality it didn't play out well, but that's probably the fault of the cards themselves as you mentioned. Especially in the early game it was hard to trigger, you needed cheap creatures on the board and cheap bloodthirst creatures on the hand. It was a struggle and quite frustrating with too many bloodthirst creatures: Which one to play without the bonus? The sparkmage was a joke, you needed 2 mana to play him, making the bloodthirst creature fall behind the curve again.

My brother had the deck and faced that struggle by triming down the bloodthirst and focusing on the auras. And boy, they were scary! As you said, with only 2 of them out, the creatures get +3/+3 and first strike when being blocked, almost impossible to deal with in combat.

[tserrofz]

A gruul, my favorite guild and probably the worst. Borb was fun but not good. THe first thing this deck needed was more Wild Cantors. The WarPlow would have been much better because more trample. I think this is the deck id strip down the most. and also needed the most rare support. Slum, Solifuge and Burning Tree Shaman are all excellent agressive creatures. ScabClan is good but the Wild cantors were NEEDED to get agressive mana ramp. its a shame Gruul didnt get more tims to trigger BloodThirst.

Petrified Wood Kin and Skargan Firebird coud have been good rares. I hate the wurm enchantment. Gruul IMO needs more High value agressive creatures and not care about aura and equipment.

Magemarks play WAY better than they read though. They scale SO fast because they stack on each other.

If you had to ask though, I think Skarg is the best Guildhall of the whole super cycle.

seems like we had alot of similar ideas right off the rip. Love gruul but might be the weakest deck imo

I wanted to add on that Wild Cantor was arguably my favorite card in the block. give me 4X

[ethanchapman]

Honestly I love blood thirst but the only way to make it worth it is double its power afterwards

[bumbuyman]

I agree on the teaching aspect, and there is even more to that with this deck. Since you need to be consistently getting through to trigger bloodthirst, it teaches you about the difference between solid cards and win more cards. It also incentivizes trading on the part of your opponent, as they know what you need to be doing, and often times newer players dislike trading, because they are attached to their cards and don't want to lose them. Incidentally, that makes this deck a better lesson for your opponents than for you. All together, this deck doesn't quite work after beating somebody with it once. Or going second with a slower start. Likely one of the worst performing ravnica precons, if they were all pitted against each other in a round robin.

Speaking of piting precons against each other, a series of same set (or block) mini round robin tournaments sounds like a treat to watch, if you're looking for inspiration for a new series!

I feel like Bloodthirst had more potential, but they botched the execution in this block. Given that Spectical is basically Bloodthirst 2.0 I think they finally found their footing with it. I'd like to see it return, regardless.