Blue’s Brews: Gruul Pummeler!

Hello internet, my name is Blue, and it’s time for another edition of Blue’s Brews! This time, I’m going to Pioneer to play an old standard deck from a few years ago that I personally had a lot of success with at the time. When Kaladesh first came out, it brought along one of the most broken and unbalanced mechanics to hit Standard in quite some time with Energy and that’s what this deck is built on. There’s an asterisk on it though, because this isn’t the typical energy decks of the time that were mostly Temur or Sultai trying to grind to the late game. This was a mix of a combo and aggro deck that could win the game as early as turn four. Can the deck still keep up in 2020 and in an expanded format like Pioneer? Let’s find out! Before we get into the deck and video matches though, a friendly reminder that if you enjoy what we do here at MTG Oracle, go ahead and subscribe to our YouTube to get notified when a new video goes live. Let’s get into the games!

Gruul Pummeler

Creatures (20) 4 Longtusk Cub 4 Servant of the Conduit 4 Voltaic Brawler 4 Electrostatic Pummeler 4 Bristling Hydra Spells (16) 4 Attune with Aether 4 Blossoming Defense 4 Harnessed Lightning 4 Collision // Colossus Artifacts/Enchantments (2) 2 Rhythm of the Wild

Lands (22) 6 Forest 2 Mountain 2 Rootbound Crag 4 Aether Hub 4 Game Trail 4 Stomping Ground Sideboard (15) 1 Klothys, God of Destiny 2 Cindervines 2 Scavenging Ooze 3 Pithing Needle 2 Abrade 3 Fry 2 Lava Coil

The Combo

So the easiest way to break down this deck is to go over the most important things first and go from there, starting with our two-card combo that can win the game as early as turn four. It’s really straightforward, but I’m gonna go over it anyway.

Electrostatic Pummeler is basically the entire reason to play this deck, because every other creature in the deck has a better, stronger counterpart that doesn’t require jumping through the Energy hoops, so it only makes sense we try to win the game with it. If you don’t know what it does, basically we can pay three energy to give it +X/+X, where X is its power. Normally, Pummeler starts as a 1/1, then is doubled to a 2/2, then a 4/4, and so on and so forth, but that’s really slow and not going to kill our opponent that reliably. So we need to cheat a little and grow Pummeler organically to make its own ability more lethal. That’s where Colossus comes in. During this deck’s time in Standard, Colossus didn’t exist so I used Larger than Life to the same affect. They’re almost the same card for the purposes of what we’re doing, except Larger than Life is just worse so there’s no reaon to play it anymore. The point is, these pump spells both give Pummeler an additional 4 power, up to 5. Which means activating Pummeler twice doubles it up to a 10/X, then a 20/X with Trample to get through chump blockers. Pummeler gives us three energy when it enters, so we just need to get three more over the first two turns or on turn four with the mana we aren’t using on Colossus. Given that most of our deck makes energy, this should be relatively easy to pull off. So what are we using to create that energy?

Support Pieces

To clarify, these aren’t the only ways we have to create energy, but they’re the only ones that’s primary purpose is to make energy, so they’re the only ones I’ll talk about here. I’ll go over the rest in a moment. That being said, they both do different things even though they mostly just make energy. Attune with Aether can go get a land out of our deck and can help mitigate the risk of keeping one-land hands while also getting energy to go along with our other stuff. Servant of the Conduit is similar in making energy while also being a mana dork so we can get above the curve or hold up protection for Pummeler on turn three. These cards are almost solely here for support because it’s almost always incorrect to not play Llanowar Elves and Elvish Mystic in these slots if you’re in green, but they’re so important to our gameplan that it’s worth the weakened efficiency. So as I mentioned earlier, we have other ways to make energy and these cards all serve double-duty as a backup way to win the game when we don’t have our combo.

The Back-Up Plan

As I said, these all serve double duty. All three of them can create energy to fuel themselves, each other, and our Pummeler and they’re all really solid threats. First, Longtusk Cub is probably the weakest of the three since it only generates energy when it hits our opponent and no other time, but it has the added upside of being an amazing top deck in the late game. If we have enough energy accumulated, we can play this and immediately pump it up to a 4/4, 5/5, or even 6/6 the turn it comes down. Next is Voltaic Brawler. This is the most aggressive of the three so we’d rather see it early and not late, but it makes energy immediately and is almost always a 4/3 with Trample, so it can rack up a lot of damage early. Lastly, but certainly not least, is Bristling Hydra. This card is absurd to the point that I originally didn’t play it to use Jegantha, the Wellspring as a companion, but quickly realized that not having it brought my percentage points way down compared to the extra card provided by Jegantha. I lost multiple games to my opponent’s having a LOT of removal, but then I had others where my opponent scooped to Bristles hitting the board. A 4/3 for isn’t that exciting, but one that grows consistently and can also be given hexproof to protect itself is definitely worth not using a companion!

Other Stuff

There are three more cards I played that I was really happy with throughout the games. Blossoming Defense was a great protection spell, being able to give our threats hexproof to protect against targetted removal as well as being another pump spell to go with Pummeler. We need to activate it three times instead of two for lethal with Defense, but it gets the job done all the same. Harnessed Lightning was a solid removal spell that sometimes netted us energy if we killed something small, but had the ability to kill something big if we needed it to. We also had several occasions where we used it as a weird ritual for energy by targeting something but pay no energy just to make three. This line won us multiple games seen in the video matches and I was really impressed. Finally, Rhythm of the Wilds was a last-minute addition to the deck before recording and it blew me away how good it was. The ability to give our creatures Haste as well as make them uncounterable was incredibly strong and as you saw in I believe match 4, giving a Pummeler Haste is the main reason we won that game. If we had to play it and wait a turn, our opponent could’ve had more removal and we would’ve been stuck top-decking and most likely unable to win the game.

Lands

There’s nothing too exciting in the lands, but I should still cover it so we’ve gone over everything. This is mostly your typical Gruul Pioneer mana base with a small twist. Since we’re playing a lot of energy cards, we’re also playing Aether Hub as a consistent untapped land that has minimal downside in our deck. Otherwise, we’ve got Stomping Grounds, Game Trails, and Rootbound Crags for duals, then a bunch of basics.

Sideboard

The sideboard I played in the video was really solid in my opinion, but anyone who knows me knows I don’t play a lot of aggro so I probably could’ve done better with it. I mostly just grabbed a bunch of cards that either directly hated on tier decks, like Pithing Needle for Mono-Green Superfriends, or were generically good cards for the colors, like Abrade. If you decide to pick up the deck, don’t be afraid to change it up because I am nowhere close to being an expert on aggro sideboards.

That being said, I played everything I did for a reason so let’s go over that. I had Abrade and Lava Coil for additional removal as well as artifact hate, then Cindervines for more artifact and enchantment hate, on top of sometimes randomly hosing control. After that, I had Klothys, God of Destiny to go long against control and midrange and three Fry for Spirits and control to take down threats uncounterably. Lastly, I had two Scavenging Ooze for graveyards as well as a little bit of lifegain against aggro.

Wrap-Up

Anyway, that’s it from me for today! I hope you enjoy the video! Before we go, one last reminder that if you enjoy the series and anything else we do on the site, it would be much appreciated if you took a moment to subscribe to the YouTube channel and check us out on Twitter @MTGOracle! Don’t forget to follow me @TheRealBlueMTG and our sponsor @Mana_Traders while you’re there! That’s it from me today. This is Blue, signing out!