Decklist

https://archidekt.com/decks/16499885/copy_of_raffine_reanimator

Credit: Stormcaller15

Primer

https://moxfield.com/decks/Yh4u5JLKCE2cp-dKhThpLA/primer

Overview

Play small, annoying creatures to loot big, annoying creatures into the graveyard and reanimate them.

Ever since I pulled the Raffine Gilded Foil from a pack, I’ve been crafting this deck. The amount of thought and work I’ve put into this is excessive but I couldn’t be happier with the outcome of my own brewed high powered EDH deck. The overall goal of this deck is to connive a big nasty creature into the graveyard then reanimate one of those onto the battlefield no later than turn 4.

Play Pattern

let’s first go over the ideal keep hand. You’ll want the proper color fixing along with at least one creature that is 1-2 CMC and either a big creature or reanimation spell in hand.

Turns 1-2 is about fixing your colors and getting at least one creature onto the battlefield. We don’t have enough 1 drops to make a consistent turn one play so be sure to utilize the fetch lands into the surveil lands to help setup the next draw step. We have a lot of card draw built into our 1-2 CMC creatures such as Esper Sentinel, Faerie Mastermind, Ledger Shredder, Malcolm, Alluring Scoundrel, Psychic Frog, Pollywog Prodigy.

Turn 3 - You should be aiming to cast Raffine every turn 3 with at least 1 creature on the field to start conniving those big threats into the graveyard. I built the deck to never hard cast those big targets which is why I set Moxfield to not calculate their mana cost.

Turn 4 - At minimum you will have 2 more connive triggers to dig further into the deck and fill the graveyard. At this point you should have at least one big creature to reanimate along with some form of protection.

Turn 5 - You are free to be flexible after this as it’s pretty tough to plan anything past turn 4. The deck has plenty of tutors and card draw to get you out of any situation that you’re put into.

Wincons

Over time I‘ve realized that I never win by actually killing my opponents. My wins are mainly from my opponents conceding. Therefore I’m leaning more into ways to lock out my opponents as quick as possible. besides locking my opponents out the couple win cons are to control the board until I can win though combat damage. Akromas Will is one of the big finishers to close out the game. Secondly is Abdel. There’s the basic infinite token loops with Abdel but if you have something else on board to blink endlessly like Summon: Bahamut you can destroy everything. Or even Archon of Cruelty to kill everyone though the life loss.

Creature and Ramp card selection

I find it very clunky to run any 3 CMC creatures. I use to run a variant of great 3 CMC creatures but it always left a very hard decision on turn 3 to either cast Raffine or continue to setup more. I always found myself casting Raffine and ditching the 3 CMC creatures. So I decided to cut all them minus Lurrus of the Dream-Den. Ever since I cut out the those 3 CMC creatures, I find the deck running perfectly through the first 5 turns and making decisions much more straight forward as described in the play pattern section.

For a long while I ran a handful of 2 CMC artifact ramp. I struggled deciding if they were worth running or not and they definitely are not worth running in a deck like this. They really take away from the play pattern of getting down a body early and start conniving on turn 3. The ramp package is very small in this deck but I don’t feel the need to generate massive amount of mana due to the very low CMC of 1.85 in the deck. Obviously the expensive 0 mana ramp artifacts would go great here. Mox Amber, Lotus Petal, Chrome Mox and Sol Ring are the obvious choices. Maybe one day I’ll get a Mox Diamond. You also have Lotho, Corrupt Shirriff and Currency Converter which both play into the strategy at play here. I love currency converter as it protects our important graveyard pieces until we are ready to reanimate while also providing ramp and creature tokens to help connive more.