My first rough sketch of a Standard deck post-ONE. Lots of things about this are very penciled in, from the mana base to the removal to Bitter Reunion (I have also tried Fauna Shaman, which didn't seem great as this deck has a relatively low concentration of creatures). Tenacious Underdog is also possibly not the correct thing to be playing in that slot.
There were Jund reanimator decks floating around before, but ONE brings two huge upgrades for the archetype.
Tyvar acts as the glue between the midrange and reanimator game plans; he's a value engine when bringing back Harvesters or Mutts, but he's also milling Atraxas into the graveyard as he does it. He also combines with Fable to turn Fable into a game-ending threat; not only does a flipped fable get to activate one turn earlier under Tyvar, it gets to activate twice. This takes a flipped Fable from a threat that will eventually take over the game, to one that's potentially winning right away.
The other upgrade is Atraxa. Earlier builds played Titan of Industry; Titan may be better because it's in theory castable, but this version of the deck is much more all-in on the reanimation plan, and putting an Atraxa into play is just much closer to actually 100% winning the game than Titan. Atraxa can bring you back from being at almost no life against the aggressive decks; against midrange and control, she draws you a bunch of cards for you to win the game with after your opponent casts Depopulate or Farewell. 40% of the time she finds you another Cruelty of Gix, so you can bring her back again if she dies. This is not really relevant all that often but it is incredibly annoying.
Tweaks I am considering:
- Playing a split of Titans and Atraxas
- Playing Sheoldred, probably over Liliana
- Playing Cankerbloom over Tenacious Underdog; this deck rarely needs to grind for card advantage with underdog, and Cankerbloom has interesting interactions with both Tyvar and Sagas.
- Playing Fauna Shaman
- Playing Llanowar Loamspeaker
- Playing Diregraf Rebirth in place of Cruelty of Gix, or some mix of both. Cruelty is interesting because it's practically a one-card combo; if you don't have an Atraxa in the yard you can use it to tutor whatever you need. But Diregraf Rebirth has an interaction with Bloodtithe Harvester that makes turn-4 Atraxa easier to pull off, and the flashback mode means that you can mill it as well as draw it.