Rukarumels Rebellion

A friend of mine created a Dynaheir, Invoker Adept Commander deck that used Rebels to find more Rebels and do Rebel stuff. This was before Rukarumel, Biologist even came out, but after I saw the spoilers for Rukarumel I knew what had to be done! I created a Rukarumel Rebel deck, and another, and another, and this is the latest installation. I think hopefully the first actually good one, cause otherwise I really don’t know why I keep doing this. Well I know why because it’s fun. Anyway I want to outline my decklist here to explain why I added certain cards and what their uses are. You can find the decklist on Archidekt.

If you’re just here for the decklist: Archidekt

Categories

Rebel Tutor

Firstly, let’s look at all the Rebels. This is basically what you get when you search all cards with the tag tutor-creature-rebel on Scryfall. These cards allow me to tutor any combos I need to win and some are also part of some combos.

Most notable are Defiant Vanguard mostly because it is an amazing blocker that can be found with most Rebels at instant speed. Also very notable is Lin Sivvi, Defiant Hero because she can tutor for any amount of mana you have left, so even if it is just one, all other Rebels can’t tutor anything but Lin Sivvi can. Also Blightspeaker is pretty useful when you get an infinite combo with untapping (which most of them are) as it could be a way of winning. There are also two flyers Defiant Falcon and Ramosian Sky Marshal which can be ok-ish blockers if need be. The rest are just normal Rebels with tutoring more expensive Rebels, nothing special.

Typechanger

These cards are the second piece of the puzzle, by making everything a Rebel, we can tutor any creature with our “real” Rebels. Our commander does this by itself (Rukarumel, Biologist ), however we have to choose a creature type (Rebel of course). The same is true for Arcane Adaptation , Conspiracy and the more recent Leyline of Transformation . We also have Maskwood Nexus in this deck of course, but it is not much better than the other cards because we have literally no tribal synergies except for the Rebels, if you can even call that a tribal synergy. If we have just one of these then we can start our shenanigans.

Combo

These are all the combo pieces, let’s go through them one-by-one and see what combos exist. Note: I will most likely miss some combos as there are a lot of combinations of pieces you can have in this deck that lead to infinite mana and then to other stuff etc.

First we have Emiel, the Blessed if we can combine this card with Village Bell-Ringer and some mana dorks that tap for 3+ mana, then we can have infinite ETBs and/or infinite mana. We can use that infinite mana, or just some regular mana, to flicker some creatures with good ETBs. Emiel is not really a big combo engine but it is a very big pay-off and it can be a combo engine.

Next we have Intruder Alarm, this synergizes with Emiel of course, and with Kiki-Jiki, and with all Rebels as they then untap. It is a very good card that helps comboing, or combos itself with other cards. It is just THE untapping card and because that is kind of the theme of this deck, I have it here.

After that there’s Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker . Who combos with Intruder Alarm, Village Bell-Ringer and Pestermite . Each of these allow him to untap and then create an infinite army of a creature and then kill everyone else. This is like, the second-most powerful and reasonable way of winning, the most powerful and reliable involves Timestream Navigator.

Finally, we get to Timestream Navigator , this card is extremely powerful, it allows us to take infinite turns if we have a Typechanger, Rebel Tutor and enough mana. First we tutor it, then we activate it, rinse and repeat and we get infinite turns to get any other combo, like Kiki-Jiki, or use Emiel to then flicker a bunch of Removal creatures and kill everything from artifacts to enchantments to creatures.

With these combo pieces I hopefully get to a point where I have a lot of Protection and then can just take infinite turns or attack for infinite damage. Now you have the general gist of the deck and approximately how it works. After this I will go into more detail on how the deck works!

Tutors

To get all the pieces for the combos we need some consistency, and to get consistency we can use Tutors. I have a few general tutors like Demonic Tutor and a few tutors that specifically find creatures like Eladamri’s Call . With these I can find cards like the Rebels or Intruder Alarm.

Protection

These cards make sure that we can protect our pieces until we have all of them, most of these are creatures to make sure we can tutor them at instant speed with our Rebels. There’s not much more to say, some give hexproof, some indestructible, some phase everything out. No matter how, all these protect our key pieces and that’s important.

Rest

The rest is Ramp, Removal, Untapper, Haste, Boardwipe and Cost Reduction. All of these are pretty self-explanatory and given all the previous information it can be easily figured out what they are used for.

History of the deck

So the history of this deck is very interesting, at least to me it is. The first iteration used Seedborn Muse a lot to keep adding more and more creatures to the board and then, using Lin Sivvi, find Craterhoof Behemoth . Some cards I then added where Spore Frog , Tuktuk Rubblefort . Originally I also didn’t have any type-changing effects except my commander which made my deck EXTREMELY dependent on my commander, but that is largely fixed with cards like Arcane Adaptation and the Tutors I run.

After the first iteration I used some combos like Kiki-Jiki and Hateflayer with some Cost Reducers and Tazri, Stalwart Survivor , it was a very bad combo so I removed it and used the much better Timestream Navigator, that is the current iteration of the deck and I hope it is at pretty good, but I’ll have to actually play it to figure that out.

Statistics

I wanted to calculate some chances on drawing and getting certain cards to give myself and you, the reader, more of an idea of how the deck plays.

Rebel Tutors

There are 10 Rebel Tutor cards, using Card Game Calculator I calculated that the chances of drawing a Rebel by turn 2 is 63.28%, however we do have some tutors, the chances of drawing a tutor by turn 2 is (4 creature tutors + 3 general tutors = 7 tutors) 49.81%, so with that the chances of having a Rebel by turn 3 is pretty big, that combined with mulligans to start with a Rebel or Tutor makes it almost guaranteed that we find a Rebel. What are the chances of getting a Rebel if we don’t have one in our opening hand? Well drawing it naturally it’s 19.27%, and getting a tutor works just 13.71%. If you don’t have a Rebel or Tutor in your opening hand, I would recommend mulliganing to find one. Don’t always do of course, but it is a pretty solid rule of thumb I think.

Typechangers

Now let’s figure out the chances of getting a Typechanger, let’s first look at getting our commander out, that requires 5 lands. Just looking at it naively it gives us 48.78% to have at least 5 lands by turn 5. If we add the ramp cards and see them as extra lands even though they are not, it makes it easier it gives us 74.48%. The chances of playing our commander on curve is pretty large. The chances of drawing a different Typechanger by turn 5 is 40.87%.

Conclusion

Our deck should most of the time work, however to get a more realistic and concrete image I would have to do many more calculations as these are all pretty naive. For example, if we draw certain cards then all the other chances change as well. The chance of getting a Rebel is not equal to the chances of drawing at least one Rebel + the chances of drawing at least one Tutor. If I actually wanted to calculate all the chances I’d have to make some sort of calculator myself and maybe I’ll do that, though no promises!

Wrapping up

That was my deck in detail, I haven’t played the deck yet but I have played the previous versions, which either went off or the commander got removed and I couldn’t do anything or I didn’t have any mana to play anything. Protection is very, very important so keep that in mind.