Esper Reanimator Deck With Unburial Rites

September 25, 2011 | Posted by Dee

Esper is going to be one of the most popular color combinations in post-Innistrad Standard because of a couple awesome cards that work very well together.

Liliana of the Veil, Snapcaster Mage, Unburial Rites, and Forbidden Alchemy provide the core of a powerful graveyard based deck. Here’s a reanimator deck that I’ve been working on. It’s been testing well so I recommend it for FNM Standard tournaments.

Esper Reanimator

Creatures (10)

Spells (24)

Lands (26)

Sideboard (15)

The main plan for this deck is putting fatties in the graveyard and then reanimating them with Unburial Rites. To get fatties in the graveyard, you can discard them to Liliana of the Veil or move them to the graveyard from the library with Forbidden Alchemy. Unburial Rites has flashback so you don’t even have to cast it from your hand to reanimate a creature. It’s a great spell to discard to Liliana or put in the graveyard with Forbidden Alchemy.

Snapcaster Mage continues the graveyard theme of the deck. My first builds did not have this creature. I didn’t think it was a good idea to play 4 Snapcaster Mages and 4 Unburial Rites since they take up a bunch of space to be effective. Unburial Rites requires a lot of fatties while Snapcaster Mage requires a lot of instants. However, I kept losing to other Esper graveyard decks that had Snapcaster Mage.

It is huge in the mirror because it gives you another way to use your graveyard and makes Liliana discards less damaging. Also, it is solid in other matchups so I cut some removal spells and a Mana Leak to make room. The deck feels a lot more powerful with 4 Mages. In games two and three, the Mages get better with 9 instants/sorceries to choose from in the sideboard.

Against aggro, you’ve got removal spells to stay alive early in the game. Snapcaster Mage allows you to replay those spells and it gives you an instant speed blocker. Later, you can swing the game into your favor with a reanimated Elesh Norn or Grave Titan.

Against control, you can overwhelm their counterspells and removal by hardcasting your big creatures and reanimating them multiple times. Unburial Rites has flashback so it’s not uncommon to keep bringing back the same creatures.

I tried Visions of Beyond as the early card draw spell but Think Twice is just more consistent. I don’t play cards like Dream Twist to fill the graveyard quickly so Visions of Beyond rarely drew three cards.

Forbidden Alchemy is an all star because it mills your library and helps you find the card you need. It even has flashback for card advantage. Even though the flashback cost is seven mana, I found myself flashing it back often in control and mirror matches. I would not cut Forbidden Alchemy in any matchup. Versus aggro, the sideboard plan is turbo Elesh Norn/Grave Titan so I want a mill + draw card to find those creatures and Unburial Rites.

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