Releasing Oxen for Fun and Profit

Hello All! 

I’m Jacob, and I’m new to this whole writing thing but let’s dive right in!

Today, I want to dive into the upcoming set, Theros: Beyond Death. We aren’t even halfway through spoilers at the time of writing but, even then, I have a few cards I’m excited to brew with in a couple of formats. I play mostly Commander as I love to brew, but right now I want to look at a card I think will break out into Modern.

Ox of Agonas

This 4/2 for 3RR has some amazing synergies with multiple strategies and mechanics in Modern. Let’s pick it apart.

The first ability is a copy cat from another modern staple, Bedlam Reveler. While I think it could be a great idea to put the Ox in a Mardu Pyromancer style build, let’s continue:

Next, Escape. This is one of the only Escape cards we’ve gotten at a cheaper cost than its mana cost. Not only that but it becomes a 5/3  instead of a 4/2? It still dies to Bolt and Path just the same but it’s a recursive threat that dies to Fatal Push. 8 cards is a steep cost but combining these abilities leads to an interaction I want to explore. 

When it enters, discard your hand. Some decks are almost excited to do this! Mardu Pyromancer obviously is fine with trading its hand in for 3 fresh cards. Hollow One could be a neat build, discarding 3 cards (the perfect number for a free Hollow One!). But Dredge? It recurs itself, fills our graveyard, draws cards to dredge more. I’m in. 

First, discard a few cards with Dredge, maybe some Prized Amalgams or other creatures. Then, instead of drawing 3, dredge 3 times. Stinkweed Imp, Golgari Thug, and others make this easy to put 9 or more cards into your graveyard when you resolve this. This is more than the amount you needed to escape. Then at the end step, you get back any Amalgams you lost. At that point, you are Escaping for fun and profit! 

Fueling into the initial 8 cards is probably the most difficult part given Faithless Looting was banned for the sins of Hogaak. I would love to put Hogaak and Looting and Grave Troll into our build but that’s not happening any time soon. As far as early spells to replace Looting, I actually thought of Hollow One. Burning Inquiry offers three things for the deck. It puts 4 cards out of our 8 into the graveyard. It costs 1 red so it’s on color for the Ox. Lastly, it offers some disruption to our opponent’s plans.

The combination of mild disruption and an aggressive start should be enough to earn some wins with the list. If we cast a turn 1 Inquiry and discard an Ox and a dredger, we can dredge turn 2 for our draw and then Escape. We then have a 5/3 on turn 2. After that, discard the same dredger again, can do any combination of draws and dredges, and have ruined our opponent’s opening hand to various degrees. If we have enough cards with dredge to mill another 8+ cards, and we mill another Ox, we can repeat this on turn 3. We can churn through to find more creatures to beat down with.

The List

Creatures:

Non-Creature Spells:

Land:

Explaining a few other choices: Life from the Loam gives us some more cards with Dredge to get it started and lets us recur lands (especially fetch lands!) to bring back Bloodghast like it does in traditional Dredge decks. Crippling Chill gives us the reach it gives those decks as well. Cathartic is a bit slower than Inquiry but it does let us discard before we draw. This lets us pitch 2 cards and Dredge them both in one card. The last inclusion is a bit of spice of my own design, in Echo of Eons. We discard our hand, exile our graveyard, we put our creatures that die back into play, and we would prefer to cast spells from our hand as little as possible. This card is pure fuel.

Essentially, the Ox exiles all of the Cathartics and Inquiries we only want to play once and the creatures and Dredge cards return to our hand or battlefield at will. So, if we cast this card, it mostly like shuffles a few Narcomoebas back in to be re-milled into play and draws us 7 cards for 3 mana. It sounds like a stretch but for 2 copies it seems crazy enough to work.

One more thing; I want to address is the lack of Conflagrate. It wants us to have a full hand. The only times I want to have a hand at all are when I start the game and when I just shuffled my graveyard away with Echo. Both the Ox and Conflagrate want me to discard my hand, and the goal of this list is to see how the Ox performs. 

Lastly, the land base is decently simple. Red is the primary color because we want double red for Ox, and access to red for all of the draw spells. Gemstone Mine is a piece of tech giving us all four colors while playing well with Loam. The fetches do the same, and all the shocks being red-based means any red fetches get us the color we need.

Finishing Thoughts

I’m very satisfied by what we came up with, and I can’t wait to see what this card does in Modern! What do you think is the best shell for the Ox to go in? What other things should I have considered in the build? What would you put in the sideboard and what other cards from Theros: Beyond Death are you excited for? Let me know in the comments down below!