Just when you thought it was never going to happen again, it’s time for a new decklist post! Today we’ve got a slightly more eccentric build than my usual lists as we take a look at my colorless Hope of Ghirapur deck. This deck started as something of a local meme in my area, as myself and a few others used to joke about building a list for Hope as far back as the spoiler season for Aether Revolt. There were -- and still are -- other colorless lists within the local playgroup, but for some reason the idea of building this little thopter never really progressed past a silly idea that we chuckled about.
A few months ago, though, I was looking through my big storage binder of older rares and I realized that I had a lot of cards that would make sense in a list for Hope, and so I decided to try putting it together just to see how it fared. The deck came together fairly quickly and garnered several responses of “Oh, you actually did it!” and “Finally!” when I first sat down with it. After a few games and some minor tweaking, I actually came to like the way it played a lot, and now it’s one of the decks I keep in active rotation.
With a guaranteed turn-one play in the Commander, this deck can start moving pretty fast, and so it has a large Equipment suite to make the most of its quick setup and the fact that Hope needs to swing in to activate its ability. While the lack of color limits access to support options for the Equipment strategy, options like Hammer of Nazahn and Armory Automaton help to keep things moving. It’s very possible to do a substantial amount of Commander damage very quickly with this list, but the deck is not a centrally-dedicated Voltron deck because its spell options are so limited and so it has very few ways to ensure the damage will connect once the other players start to get set up.
As such, this deck can organically switch gears to a more defensive role and develop an engine through cards like the Myr Retriever family, Krark-Clan Ironworks and Treasure Keeper, among others. Through massive cost reduction and cards that grant the ability to dig down into the library, the deck can start to sculpt its turns to its own liking without too much trouble. This allows it to build up into incredibly dense turns, sacrificing and retrieving cards over and over to net increasing value and playing card after card. While the abundance of artifacts makes this deck more fragile in a vacuum, it has ways of protecting itself or quickly rebuilding if it has to, and the activated ability on Hope can help grant a couple of turns to get things reorganized. Despite going entirely without the capabilities afforded by color identity, this list is pretty fun to play because it has a surprising amount of options and a deceptively deep toolbox. Even if it’s still a little silly.
