Goldfish Gladiators: Gruul Frenzy (Standard, Magic Arena)

Welcome to Goldfish Gladiators! On Monday, we played Experimental Frenzy in Modern for Budget Magic, but the enchantment has a lot of potential in Standard as well. Most often, we see Experimental Frenzy as a source of card advantage in decks like Mono-Red Aggro or Boros Aggro, but what happens if we go all-in on building around the enchantment with cards like Dryad Greenseeker and Wayward Swordtooth? That's what we're going to find out today as we take Gruul Frenzy out for a spin! How competitive is a green-red build of Experimental Frenzy in Standard? Let's get to the video and find out; then, we'll talk more about the deck!

Just a quick reminder: if you enjoy the Goldfish Gladiator series and the other video content on MTGGoldfish, make sure to subscribe to the MTGGoldfish YouTube channel to keep up on all the latest and greatest.

Goldfish Gladiators: Gruul Frenzy

Discussion

• We played a competitive constructed event with Gruul Frenzy and finished with a 3-2, which is a good enough record to slowly build a collection on Arena with reward cards and gold. This being said, we played against Golgari repeatedly for some reason, which makes it a bit harder to know how the deck would do against a broader field. 
• The deck is really good at setting up some amazing Experimental Frenzy turns. Wayward Swordtooth specifically is close to a two-card combo with Experimental Frenzy itself by allowing us to play extra lands and continue the frenzy. The downside is that the cards that are good with Experimental Frenzy (apart from Treasure Map) are sort of medium when we don't have a frenzy, with Wayward Swordtooth not being able to block in the early game and Dryad Greenseeker dying a lot and offering inconsistent value when we can't see the top of our deck. 
• The other challenge we ran into with the deck is the mana. Right now, the only untapped dual land in green and red is Rootbound Crag, and considering that we have the triple-green Steel Leaf Champion in our deck, we need to weight our mana base heavily toward green. This leads to some games where we don't hit our red mana in a timely manner, which is especially important after we sideboard in removal like Lava Coil. 
• One thing the deck really struggles with is fliers. In the main deck, we hardly have any removal (just Banefire), and Multani, Yavimaya's Avatar is our only way of blocking something like Crackling Drake. While avoiding removal that can't go to the opponent's face makes sense with Experimental Frenzy (since an uncastable removal spell can fizzle the frenzy), it also leads to some really rough matchups. Finding a way to include more removal or maybe add some fliers of our own (like Rekindling Phoenix) would go a long way toward shoring up the weaknesses of the deck. 
• All in all, Gruul Frenzy is a deck that seems reasonably competitive in its current form but should get a big boost of power with the release of Ravnica Allegiance in a few weeks. The addition of Stomping Ground will not only make the deck more consistent but might also allow us to play more red cards, which could help to shore up our weakness to fliers through more removal or flying blockers. The deck has some incredibly explosive, fun frenzy turns—perhaps the best Experimental Frenzy turns in Standard—but can be inconsistent in games where we don't draw Experimental Frenzy, since we have so many cards in the deck specifically to power up the frenzy, and most aren't as good as other options if we don't have a Frenzy on the battlefield.

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.