Is Boros the new graveyard color pair? With the Strixhaven legend Quintorius, Field Historian, we can take advantage of the numerous cards in red and white that resurrect or retrieve creatures from the graveyard. Not only will we be generating tons of 3/2 spirits, but we will maintain a healthy card advantage by replaying dead creatures, and playing spells from the graveyard.
Our goal with Quintorius will be to play, exile, or return to hand one card at a time from our graveyard. This will maximize the number of spirits we can generate from our graveyard. The best cards from this group are the ones that provide good value even before the spirit comes into play, or ones that can remove one card from our graveyard at a time multiple times. Relic of Progenitus and Seance are easy ways to generate spirits every turn, while possibly messing up other opponents with graveyard based strategies or activating powerful enter-the-battlefield effects. Any cards with flashback, retrace, jump-start or dredge are also excellent ways to take advantage of our graveyard while generating even more spirits.
Since we have so many ways get get cards from our graveyard to literally anywhere else, it’s in our best interest to keep our graveyard stuffed to the brim. We will be using red’s many discard then draw effects to not only put cards into our graveyard, but give us the always needed card advantage. In addition, we can mill ourselves over time with cards like Mesmeric Orb, and Codex Shredder, or even just sacrifice creatures for powerful effects, only to replay them later on. Make sure to discard cards that can be played directly from the graveyard, or high mana bomb creatures if you happen to be holding a resurrection.
When we successfully build an army of spirits, we may want a few boosts to make sure we’re making the greatest use them. Desecrated tomb and Stonebound Mentor will give us even more creatures and card selection when we generate spirits, and board buffs like Cathar’s Crusade and Blade Historian can give our army just the budge it needs to completely overwhelm our opponents.
Quintorius’s +1 power to spirits definitely tempts us to go spirit tribal, but the real reason to add spirits is for their highly synergistic ability, Soulshift. Creatures with this ability allow us to replay spirits from our graveyard upon death. Along with their ability to return cards from our graveyard to our hand, spirits make an excellent creature base for this deck. Hofri Ghostforge is a powerful inclusion, giving us not only a boost to our spirits, but reviving our creatures upon death.
Mistveil Plains is the perfect land for this deck, giving us the option of creating a spirit token at any time. Drownyard Temple is also a wonderful fit for this deck, as it will be the perfect card to discard, giving us a form of ramp when we return it, as well as a spirit if we have Quintorius out.
That’s all we’ve got for now! We’re currently working on a budget version of this deck to include in our Custom Decks collection for sale, so check back for that soon!
