I Built a Budget Brawl Deck So Brutal No One Will Play Me
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Budget Magic! When Katara, Waterbending Master was first previewed, I didn't pay much attention to the card. Since it's from Avatar Eternal, it isn't legal in Standard or Modern, so I figured it was just a random card for Commander. But a couple of weeks ago, I saw a tweet about someone going 5-0 with Katara in Legacy, which got me thinking more about the card and eventually led to me building today's deck. The two-drop doesn't do anything by itself, but we gain experience as we cast spells during our opponent's turn, and when Katara, Waterbending Master attacks, we get to draw a card for each experience counter and then discard a card. While this ability might not seem all that exciting, if you go all-in on building around Katara, I think it just might be one of the most brutal Brawl commanders ever made! Why is Katara so brutal? Let's get to the video and find out, and then we'll talk more about the deck!
Budget Magic: Katara Brawl
The Deck
I'm not sure if any of you were playing 1v1 Commander on Magic Online nearly a decade ago when they first added the format to the client. But if you were, you might remember that the format was quite literally killed off by Baral, Chief of Compliance, a two-drop commander that rewards you for countering your spells. It turns out that if you just overloaded your deck with counters and played Baral, Chief of Compliance on Turn 2, it was almost impossible for your opponent to resolve anything, and sooner or later, you'd figure out a way to win the game. Baral became tier zero in 1v1 Commander, and endless Baral mirrors led to people giving up on the format altogether. But why are we talking about an MTGO commander from nearly a decade ago?
Well, Katara, Waterbending Master is Baral, Chief of Compliance on steroids. It rewards the same thing—countering your opponent's spells—but in an even stronger way because all Katara really cares about is you casting spells on your opponent's turn, which means various cantrips and even flash creatures will gain experience. The idea of our deck is to drop Katara on Turn 2 and spend the rest of the game countering everything our opponent plays, and Katara's ability makes this possible.
Let's say we cast Katara on Turn 2. On Turn 3, our opponent goes to play a spell, and we counter it. We now have one experience counter, so Katara, Waterbending Master turns into a looter the next time it attacks. Then, on the next turn, maybe we counter another spell and cast a cantrip like Consider during our opponent's turn. Now, we are up to three experience counters, and when our two-drop commander attacks, we'll draw three cards and discard one. This is already absurd, but Katara just keeps snowballing from there. Every spell we counter gives us more experience. This means Katara will draw us even more cards, meaning we'll draw even more counters, which will gain us even more experience. It's pretty easy to end up in a position where Katara is drawing us a new HAND every turn, which feels almost unbeatable.
The rest of our deck is filled primarily with three things: counterspells (by my count, our deck has 33 cards that are either literally counters or, like Venser, Shaper Savant, work like a counter); instant-speed cantrips like Consider and Opt; and some bounce / removal spells like Brazen Borrower and Eaten by Piranhas that let us deal with anything that happens to slip through our counterspells—all at instant speed, of course, so they also up our experience, assuming we have Katara, Waterbending Master on the battlefield.
As far as actually winning the game...honestly, it isn't even necessary most of the time, as a huge percentage of opponents end up scooping once we get Katara, Waterbending Master snowballing and they realize that they'll likely never resolve a spell. But just in case we do need to win the game, the plan is pretty funny. We have a few cards like Aqueous Form and Access Tunnel to make Katara unblockable, to make sure it can keep attacking and draw more cards even if our opponent manages to stick a blocker or two. Eventually, we'll gain so much experience that every Katara attack will draw us 15 or 20 cards, which means we can draw our entire deck in just a few turns. Once we get close to drawing our library, we simply stick a Laboratory Maniac, with a handful of counters as backup, and attack one more time with Katara to draw the rest of our deck and win the game thanks to Laboratory Maniac's ability!
Wrap-Up
By the record, Katara is the best Brawl deck I've ever built. We pretty quickly went 10-0 with the deck, and I told myself I was going to keep playing until I lost. After winning 19 matches in a row, we finally fell to a mono-black deck in match 20 that managed to sneak a Liliana, Dreadhorde General through our counters, and we couldn't beat the planeswalker, giving us a 19-1 record overall for a 95% win rate...
But there's a catch: out of our 20 games with the deck, I'd say that maybe five of them felt like real games of Magic. Three went all the way through to their conclusion, while in a couple more games, our opponent managed to at least stick it out for a reasonable amount of time before giving up. On the other hand, 15 of our 20 matches ended with our opponent scooping pretty early in the game, sometimes as early as Turn 2 but more often Turns 4–6 once they realized how brutal Katara, Waterbending Master is and that they would likely never resolve a spell. The deck really is so brutal and so miserable to play against that most opponents just straight up refused to play against me!
Sadly, I recorded this before they announced they would be testing out competitive Brawl on Arena this holiday season. I'm going to have to take the deck out for a spin there because the odds of getting a good match in the normal queue are just so low. All in all, though, I really do think that Katara, Waterbending Master is pretty broken. It does the same thing as Baral, Chief of Compliance, but it snowballs like a 2025 card. If you like the idea of winning almost every game (but mostly because your opponents refuse to play with you), or just like making your opponent miserable, give Katara a shot. The card is absurd (and the deck is also budget-friendly with only 20 total rares and mythics)!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
