So, [scryfall]Yarok, the Desecrated[/scryfall]… a card made for the fans of [scryfall]Panharmonicon[/scryfall]. Personally, I haven’t been that keen on breaking that particular card, but in the context of our meta, where wraths are plentiful, I would rather go for [scryfall]Mulldrifter[/scryfall]s than Baneslayers. (You can read more on this here.)

OF course, it would be easy to just throw a bunch of creatures with ETB-abilities into the deck, but I decided to go with a theme. I mean Yarok happens to be of a specific type. Elementals it is (even though horrors does tickle me as a theme, but there aren’t that many of them as of yet).

Here’s some:

Okay, the Bane isn’t especially great here, but it’s still a good card. Please do remember to announce both triggers. Fun for the whole group.

There’s clearly two problems here: The curve is horrible as most of these cost quite a bit and if we play the Cavaliers, the pressure on the mana is quite bad. This means two things: We need to ramp and we need a lot of sources for each of our colors. Sadly, these two goals are not fully compatible, because ramp often requires basics. This means that we should play all the fetches we possibly can.

Some ramp: First, creatures:

This clearly isn’t enough (and Nissa isn’t even true ramp), so we need more:

I would gladly play more, but let’s go with this. In order to make sure we still make those important early land drops, we should play some card draw:

Next, we need something to do in the early turns, in case our ramp doesn’t come through:

We also need some ways to keep yourself afloat if the game goes long. You should always have ways to maximize your resources in EDH, be they card advantage or ways to use your mana or whatever that might be.

[scryfall]Barishi[/scryfall] is actually pretty good here, if we are thinning our deck.

This leaves plenty of room for some interaction. These colors have many of my favorites:

This leaves room for 44 lands, which is probably enough. Usually I like to make these lists at least a little bit budget-y, but in this particular case you should play all the fetches you can, all the targets for them you can, five-color lands and also plenty of basics.

With the Cavaliers, this is going to be difficult, as you should probably have at around 30 sources for each color, perhaps more. You can rely somewhat on the ramp and card draw, but not too much.

Clearly, this deck isn’t competitive. It’s more of a fun, flavorful deck with an elemental theme it sticks to way more than needed, as the synergies are not strong. Red would be much better color than black, but than we wouldn’t get to play Yarok.