Gatecrash Review:Gruul

By James Earl

James Earl continues Pixel Splatter's look at the newly released Magic: The Gathering card set, Gatecrash, by taking a look at the Gruul guild.  

Take the burn of red with the large creatures of Green

At first I was very reticent to all of the Gatecrash guilds. While each of them seemed to be interesting, none of the new guilds seemed to suit my super quick, super aggressive play-style that I had honed with decks like Rakdos in the Return to Ravnica set. I first tried my hand at Orzhov, believing that that might be the only one that interested me, but after losing terribly with my first Orzhov deck, I found myself thinking that Gatecrash might be a total bust for me.

That was until I played my first draft with Gatecrash, and discovered the Gruul guild. Although it contained a color I rarely, if ever, played (green), the Gruul guild perhaps best suits my style of fast, aggressive play (shown in its red mana) while also combining it with the sheer power of green mana.

According to Magic: The Gathering lore, the Gruul guild was meant to help keep the wild animals and beasts of Ravnica alive. Their job was to preserve nature at all costs and to keep Ravnica connected to its natural roots. As Ravnica became more and more industrialized, however, the other guilds, especially Azorius and Orzhov, began to see Gruul as less and less relevant. The Gruul began to shrink and eventually fractured into many different clans, but these clans all still consider themselves Gruul at heart. They realized that they need to fight to stay alive, and quickly. Using the natural world around them, the Gruul did fight back, and with ferocious, wild power.

Looked down upon, the Gruul fought back!

The Gruul’s orignal mechanic, called “bloodthirst”, was meant to demonstrate the savage nature of the guild by having creatures with the keyword come into play stronger if you managed to damage another player that turn. Bloodthirst was a decent enough keyword and proved popular with the player base, so much so that the mechanic has recently re-appeared on several Core Set cards, although designers decided to move its affiliation to black/red instead of green/red to better match mechanical flavor. That being said, bloodthirst often just doesn’t provide enough bang for your buck, especially since against certain opponents getting any kind of damage in at all is a tricky proposition.

On the other hand, the new mechanic, “bloodrush”, for the Gatecrash version of Gruul perfectly matches the desperation and raw power of the Gruul. “Bloodrush” allows you, for a mana cost lower then the actual creature cost, to discard a creature with bloodrush from your hand in order to boost an already attacking creature you control. This can range from giving creatures simple power and toughness boosts to granting deadly abilities like trample and deathtouch. As a result of the low mana cost required to play a bloodrush effect, the keyword works well as a fast acting mechanic, allowing you to do tons of damage with one low cost creature early on in the game. In my personal play-throughs, when all goes well you can get rid of almost half or more of your opponent’s life with just a single early attack. 

The element of surprise is one of bloodrush's best features

The mechanic is helped by the fact that there are great cards to back it up. Ghor-Clan Rampager, for only 1 red and 1 green mana, allows you to boost a creature by +4/+4 and give it trample, making you almost certain to damage to a player regardless of whether they block or not. Wasteland Viper’s bloodrush allows you to give a creature +1/+2 and deathtouch, letting you to save your creature from a block and ensure the death of anything that gets in your way. If you just want to hit hard, Slaughterhorn, for only 1 mana, gives you a +3/+2 boost that can hit your opponent where it hurts. The nice thing about bloodrush is that it is put on creatures that, if you are running out of board presence, are good on or off the field. Bloodrush also doesn’t count as a spell, so good luck to blue control players who can’t counter it.

The thing that holds the Gruul guild back is that its non-bloodrush cards seem to be a bit limited. While other options can certainly help with trying to give your (most often) one attacking creature an open field, they don’t leave you many options for dealing with creative opponents who build decks with a lot of removal. Things like Ground Assault (which does damage equal to the amount of lands you have to only creatures) and Serene Remembrance (which gives you three cards plus Serene Remebrance itself back from the graveyard to your library, allowing you to re-use bloodrushed cards) seem to have very limited utility and might not give you a ton of help. Gruul also has absolutely no flying creatures, so while cards like Clan Defiance and Gruul Charm try to stop the flyers, if your opponent has a lot of them you’re probably in trouble. Another drawback is that you need to be very careful with using bloodrush, as a smart opponent will hold back and wait for you to power up your attacker and then blow it away with instant-speed removal, making you waste your resources for nothing. In this way a simple Unsummon, Doom Blade or similar card can be a devastating blow.

This does nothing for Bloodrush.

Gruul is great at what it does, but if you are put in a stressful situation for the guild you may find it hard to adapt, which perhaps also fits the storyline and character of the slowly dwindling guild. Also, the fact that you have to discard creatures from your hand to activate bloodrush means that the longer your opponent lives, the weaker you become.

Overall, Gruul is one of the fastest guilds in Gatecrash, second only to Boros. But don’t let its speed fool you; Gruul isn’t about quickly nicking away at your health like Rakdos, for example. For Gruul, it’s all about quickly taking you down with a big, early punch to the gut. The Gruul say that, “The only law that matters in the world is the law of nature.” For the Gruul, packing a large punch is only natural.