Krark, the Thumbless and Thrasios, Triton Hero Deck Tech

For reference, find the deck here

I have recently been testing out a Temur partners deck based around Krark, the Thumbless and Thrasios, Triton Hero. The focus of the deck is Krark, so in theory you could swap Thrasios for Kydele, Chosen of Kruphix if you are looking for a more budget option. Thrasios does offer a somewhat useful ability, whereas Kydele is completely useless apart from providing the Simic colours. This deck was inspired by this video by Tolarian Community College, so check that out if you find this interesting.

The theme of the deck is a essentially a spell slinger deck, focusing on cantrips with single targets. Krark himself is almost a value engine. He provides a couple of wincons, in the sense of “almost” infinites, but is mainly focused on generating more value from the cantrips. The “infinite” combos are pretty interesting, because they are not guaranteed to go infinite. As you tend towards going infinite, you’d actually have a probability of 0% of this happening. This is because if we have a card that generates mana on cast (Storm-Kiln Artist), we can keep casting the spell until we win the flip (i.e. 0.5 * the number of flips you want to lose). The decks main wincon is going wide, with token generators such as Talrand, Sky Summoner.

If you know Magic well, you might think of including Ivy, Gleeful Spellthief in this deck. I found that she doesn’t offer quite enough to warrant a slot in the deck, but you are welcome to attempt to make it work.

In the deck, we have 19 permanents that have an activated ability on the cast of a non-creature spell or an instant/sorcery. This includes 18 creatures and 1 enchantment. Having one of these permanents out with Krark, allows us to benefit from losing the coin flip when we cast an instant or sorcery. In a lot of cases, we actually want to lose the flip in order to keep getting these benefits, especially with low cost spells.

The main goal of the deck was to make a fun, interesting yet consistent gambling deck. However, I wanted to stay away from clones of Krark (and other creatures) as this often results in confusion. As such, the only cloning cards are Vesuvan Duplimancy and Quantum Misalignment.

Playing On Curve

Initially, I started to build this deck with the plan of consistently playing Krark on turn 2, and optimising the mana base for that goal, by ensuring that the hypergeometric distribution probability of having at least 1 red untapped land in the first 9 cards I saw was as high as possible. However, I quickly realised that this is not an optimal idea - and is a lot of effort to calculate. This requires the decks manabase to be more heavily weighted towards red, which can cause problems in the middle game. Also, playing Krark on turn 2 can be a waste, as you’ll likely ramp/play a pay-off on turn 3, therefore there is no reason for Krark to be out and vulnerable. By playing Krark on turn 4/5, you are almost always guaranteed to be able to cast a instant or sorcery that turn (or at instant speed on a opponents turn) in order to get benefits straight away.

Of course, you can play either way. If you want to play Krark on turn 2 though, I would suggest not using instant / sorcery based ramp like Explore as you potentially lose the flip and can’t ramp. Playing Krark later allows for more consistent gameplay.

The average mana value for the deck is 2.28, and as such ramping early should allow us to cast a lot of spells on later turns, and build up a menacing board presence. The deck only runs 32 lands, so you should mulligan aggresively for lands in your opening hand.

Removal & Interaction

We don’t want to run any costed instant / sorcery based removal or interaction. You want to be able to remove threats at any point in the game, including when Krark is out. Whilst you may get some more benefits from your pay-off cards, in most cases actually removing the threat is going to be more important. Due to this, I have included removal via enchantments, “free” sorceries and creatures that can remove threats. There is one board wipe in the deck, via an artifact. The creatures that can remove threats are also pay-off cards, so you can get some value from them, for example: a one-sided board wipe via the backside of Urabrask & another one-sided board wipe via Ashling, Flame Dance.

Amphibian Downpour also can potentially act as a “mini” one-sided boardwipe. I have also included Boseiju, Who Endures, but this is not required for a more budget friendly option.

Since the deck does rely on going wide, spot removal plus these one-sided board wipes that prevent my opponents from going wide should be enough. The deck has a disadvantage against ‘big’ token decks, like Hydras, but other than that there is enough removal.

Best Cards

The card you most want to see in your starting hand is Talrand, Sky Summoner. Being able to cast him on Turn 3/4 will set you up very well for the rest of the game, and requires removal within 2 turns from your opponents. Murmuring Mystic also offers a similar effect. Essentially, anything that generates tokens as a payoff is good, but creatures that can generate flying tokens are the best.

Wincons

The main wincon is the go wide strategy, building up an army of tokens before buffing them with Balmor, Battlemage Captain or combining a single target spell with Zada.

An alternate wincon is giving out poison counters with Venerated Rotpriest.

Another fun, but not guaranteed wincon is repeatedly casting 1 mana spells with Storm-Kiln Artist on the field. Doing so allows you to repeatedly cast the spell until you win the flip, at which point you’ll make 2 treasure tokens. This can be used to potentially cast infinite 1 mana spells, but is not guaranteed to go infinite, as mentioned in the intro. This also works with Urabrask, as long as the spell is red.

Manabase

Since the curve is so low on this deck, the manabase does require a fair number of dual lands. This does contribute a little to the cost of the manabase, but at the moment, £30 of the £80 manabase comes from Boseiju, so you can drop that for a cheaper set up. Since the deck only splashes Green, I really like the filter lands, such as Fire-Lit Thicket, which allows us to turn a single Green mana into 2 Red mana - if required.

Final Remarks

Overall, piloting this deck has been fun and and the deck genuinely has a chance at winning. It also strays away from being too powerful, i.e making it impossible to win (like a cEDH krark deck). As with most of my decks, I like to make the game change hands a lot, and not just win out of the blue.

I will keep updating this post as new sets come out, if better payoffs / spells come out with those sets.

If you have any comments / questions, please reach out to me on X “the everything app” - find me here.