It’s Tuesday O’Clock! Time for a Deck Tech!
Hello and welcome to this week’s new deck! This time I’m diving into Standard to try out one of my new favorite cards, Goreclaw, Terror of Qal Sisma. In my brief experience with this bear, Goreclaw is a must kill threat that will win you the game if he is not dealt with. His unique ability to make your fatties cheaper can lead to explosive turns, where you go from a completely empty board to a massive, tramplin, army of creatures. The Terror of Qal Sisma is a powerful card that currently isn’t seeing much Standard play, which is surprising to me.
When I chose to build a deck around Goreclaw I looked to see what cards would synergize really well with him. Goreclaw makes it very clear that he wants creatures with 4 or more power, and as it turns out, Red has a lot of fairly costed creatures with 4 or more power. These creatures quickly become absurd with Goreclaw on the battlefield. But the main reason I chose to include Red as the second color in this deck is thanks to Fling. This innocuous-seeming card that got reprinted in Amonkhet is the backbone of our deck today. If our deck already wasn’t explosive enough, Fling can allow us to close the gap that Goreclaw creates for us. Cards such as Inferno Hellion can represent 14 damage in a single turn with Fling!
The gameplan of this deck is simple. Ramp out an early Goreclaw with Llanowar Elves and Grow from the Ashes, play a bunch of fat creatures on the cheap, and then finish off your opponent by throwing them at their face. Despite this simple, almost linear gameplan, the deck still has a good amount of resiliency to it. In the event that Goreclaw is countered/killed on sight, we still have the option of ramping out our creatures in the traditional way. If they stabilize at a low life total, a quick Monstrosaur or Lightning Strike can finish the job. If they manage to create bigger creatures than us, we just ignore them in favor flinging them at our opponents face. These various ways to play the deck make it have a lot of game against the rest of the field, while still bringing a lot of beef to the table.
One of my favorite things about Goreclaw Fling is just how cheap it is to build. For less than 50 bucks, (or 3.27 Tix on MTGO) you can have a fun and unique standard deck that has easy paths to upgrade. If you want to make the deck have even more explosive turns, cards like Ghalta, Primal Hunger are an easy addition as flinging that dino will often close out any game. Rhonas, the Indomitable is another powerful inclusion that will only cost 1 mana with a Goreclaw on the battlefield! This deck also loses only a few cards to rotation, making it a deck that you can comfortably pick up now. While it will unfortunately no longer have Fling, Thud is a reasonable replacement that will still serve the deck well.
Goreclaw Fling is a sweet synergistic deck that aims to utilize the power of Goreclaw to the fullest. This deck has a surprising amount of lines available to it, making it an easy deck to play, but hard to master. While this deck is unlikely to win any Pro Tours or GP’s, it still has enough punch to it that you are sure to win plenty of games off of it. And for less than 4 Tix on MTGO, you couldn’t ask for much more. If you would like to see this deck in action, be sure to stop by my twitch channel https://www.twitch.tv/tuesdaytastic at noon MST. Thank you all for reading, I hope you have a great week and an amazing Tuesday!
