I don’t know how I feel about Wizards simply taking real Norse mythology and just painting it over, but I guess that’s what’s largely expected from them, so they can’t really avoid it.

You have to careful with this one. It can become very oppressive and thus boring, if you play it that way. You can simply use various ways to put a bunch of +1/+1 counters on it each turn and just nullify each opponents whole turn. Of course, this is also easy to interact with, because this only happens during the upkeep, which leaves your opponents at least one turn cycle to do something, whether that is just killing Sarulf, or removing counters from it somehow.

The thing is, I just like playing midrange value decks. I’m not going to try to spam Sarulf with counters (I could use like Scavenge for this) and try get extra turns with various methods, which could actually be fun due to the interesting color limitations on this.

Instead, I’m just going to play a regular midrange game and have Sarulf there as a threat or emergency valve of sorts. Not that it’s especially good as either. However, what can happen with it is that your opponents might be unwilling to play much and you can run rampant with it, as your opponents are waiting for others to deal with it. This is highly dependent on the group you play with, but you can always hint at this in various ways. People are highly suspectible, after all.

So, in a situation such as this, I would always just put in all the cards I would like to play in this particular color combination, because I might have limited opportunities to do so in the future. I would actually like to play a higher curve here than I usually would just because Sarulf punished low drops, but I also do like playing low drops, so that I have things to do throughout the game.

Just for the purposes of growing Sarulf, we should have interaction.

Drawing cards is strong, but also kind of too easy, so I would rather find other ways of gaining value.

I am not above drawing cards, however. I would much rather do this at least in a little bit complicated way. You know, jump through some hoops to do it.

You also need some ramp. Due to the nature of our commander, I would rather not play creatures or artifacts that produce mana. I would much rather make sure I don’t interrupt my own mana sources. (Yes, I know I have mentioned some previously, but deal with it.) I don’t mind the extra bodies either, due to all the sacrifice effects I’m using. I’ve talked about this before, but I would also like to keep these cheap. No more than three mana, so that I can play them early to facilitate later plays.

That’s 60 cards, leaving you room for 40 lands. I won’t usually play cards like [scryfall]Strip Mine[/scryfall], but in this particular case I would consider it due to the synergy with Sarulf. If you decide to do that, you should remember to keep the colored mana requirements in mind and have at least around 30 sources of each color.

All in all, the deck doesn’t have much synergy to it. There is some, but not enough to pay any mind. My approach is what you should note. If you find it interesting, just play the cards in each slot you want, not what I’m interested in. For example, I did consider some mutate cards for the deck, just for the hell of it, but decided against it at the last moment.