I happened to open four copies of Karumonix, the Rat King on Arena and I keep looking at the Standard-legal rats and thinking there’s almost a passable deck there. Does it want to be toxic with Blightbelly Rat? Does it want to be ninjas with Nashi, Moon Sage’s Scion and the otherwise unexciting Nezumi Informant and maybe go into blue for Silver-Fur Master? Is it worth it to run Okiba Reckoner Raid even though Karumonix can’t find it (I’m like 99% sure)? There’s plenty of black removal to fill out a deck like this; I just don’t know how to build the creature half.
MTGGoldfish lists some Commander/Brawl decks with Karumonix, but nothing in Standard.
Tier 3 is right I think. But I’d settle for something that could steal the occasional win on days when my daily quest involves casting black spells.
I was starting to lean towards the ninjas build, but the problem with that one is the more you develop it, the more it just wants to be ninjas instead of rats and you probably end up booting Karumonix. Not that I have anything against ninjas, but it wasn’t the assignment.
Tribute to Horobi making a couple of tokens that would get toxic from Karumonix is somewhat synergistic. But you’re right, the tribal synergies in a deck like Soldiers are just light-years ahead of anything Rats can do right now.
If I end up building it I’ll let you know how it goes!
This is unrelated, but to me, this is the main problem with Arena. You can’t do anything with those 4 Karumonix cards. Even if you want to build a fun deck to try it out in the play queue, you have to burn wildcards that you can’t get back. And instead of building around something fun like rats, players have to weigh the risk/reward and decide to just spike it and optimize for winrate, like switching to Soldiers entirely or just playing Dimir ninjas instead of rats.
It’s probably impossible to fully solve without changing something big with the economy system there, but it would be nice to at least see something attempted. They have all data on what % cards are played, so even just allowing you to play w/ a certain low % card for free in the Play Queue would be a good first step here. We can’t even play against Sparky with un-crafted cards.
Yeah, it’s kind of weird that I’m thinking about spending wildcards on a Karumonix deck when there are Tier 1 decks that I’m interested in and can’t build yet. Though to be fair, I’m like that with physical cards too. Definitely have some that I should have sold years ago, only I keep thinking I might use them.
Testing cards against Sparky is a good idea. Would save you from the situation where you craft four copies of something only to realize that you misread what it does.