Crabs are tough.
Phenax cares about toughness.
Crabs mill. Phenax mills.
Phenax taps. Crabs untap.
Phenax is blue and black. Crabs are blue and black.
Don’t be deceived. Phenax is the true crab god.
This crabby build is designed to encourage jests and puns while hanging with bracket 2 precons. If you’re looking for a fun, typal game night experience that ensures players get to at least see most of their deck (while being milled), the Crab God is for you.
Crabs, Big and Little
Run-of-the-Mill Crabs
Phenax and mill crabs are team players all the way. Hedron Crab, Ruin Crab, and Iceberg Cancrix have long been staples of landfall mill strategies with Hedron and Ruin making a recent splash into LSV’s Vintage Roto Cube to go infinite enough with Simic Growth Chamber and Fastbond.
Here, the crabs act more as chip damage to whittle opponents down before we bring in Phenax and the beefier crabs.
Horseshoe Crab + Equipment = Profit
Horseshoe Crab of crab rave meme fame (enchant Horseshoe Crab with an aura that grants “tap: add one mana of any color” and the Horseshoe can tap and untap infinitely), is not here to dance.
Alongside Phenax, Horseshoe Crab can read as “U: Target player mills three cards.” Equipped with Captain America’s Shield, those three cards become eleven, and our opponents will quickly be out of cards.
Little Crabs
We have a suite of little crabs to invalidate our opponents’ early attackers. All sporting at least three toughness with a variety of upsides, these little crabs are our power-level concession to bracket two, will naturally slow the game to encourage more decks to do their thing, and are inexpensive in foil for those who like shiny things…. or like crabs who like shiny things.
Our little crabs are followed by the big crabs that put a full stop to ground-based aggression.
Big Crabs
At 0/17, Charix is the beefiest of the crabs and is Phenax’s #1. Equipped with an Illusionist’s Bracers, enchanted by a Crab Umbra, or simply copied with Peter Parker’s Camera, Charix threatens to end the game for one opponent at a time in a crab’s pace version of a hurry (which is 3 or 4 turns).
Uchuulon provides an alternative win-con through damage by cashing in on milled creatures to effectively double the number of Uchuulon in play on each of our end steps. Again, slow by design and sped up by Gogo and our doublers.
Chromeshell Crab allows us to swap a little crab for an opponent’s commander, causing the opponent to become the crabby one.
Crabomination is just plain fun to play. Roll the dice to see what random cards you steal from an opponent, pick one, and play it for free. Alongside cards like Season of Weaving and Cackling Counterpart, we can aim to disrupt our opponents’ game plans while building out our board.
King Crab is chunky, slow, right at home here, and never going to be played anywhere else. He’s on the team.
Copycrabs
What Crabs Do
Peter Parker’s Camera, Illusionist’s Bracers, and Gogo are here, first and foremost, to multiply mill triggers.
This is especially true for Illusionist’s Bracers. Equipped to any of our creatures, they tap to double mill our opponents. On Horseshoe Crab, we also get double untaps for each blue mana spent. On Riptide Chronologist, we get a double untap for all of our crabs in play. And, on Duskmantle Guildmage we can quickly stack triggers of the guildmage’s damage dealing ability.
Peter Parker’s Camera and Gogo offer the same benefits of the bracers, but offer a little additional functionality. For example, we can copy Evolving Wilds triggers to ramp ourselves, copy Dance of Many to make additional tokens, or receive bonus Uchuulon, Chromeshell Crab, and Crabomination triggers.
Then, when stars align, Gogo wearing Bracers takes a selfie with Peter Parker’s Camera after activating for X=2 to give us six additional activations of our favorite target.
Copycrabs
Because we have access to so few crabs, we will rely on copying the crabs we have in play to maximize our typal support cards. If crabs release at our current cadence, we should continue to receive new crabs to optimize our build. Until then, we copy crabs.
Untap (Mill and Protection)
Untap to Mill
We need to win, eventually. This small selection of cards allows us to power up our mill plan to either untap our whole team (Dramatic Reversal and Riptide Chronologist) or untap an individual crab multiple times (Pemmin’s Aura and Freed from the Real).
Untap to Protect (and then Mill)
We need to win, really. And when our Pemmin’s Aura or Freed from the Real come down, our lowly crabs will suddenly become big targets. What better way to protect our team then to untap them and add insult to injury?
Ramp & Removal
With crabs, we pilot the big and clunky.
To do so wisely, we will need efficient ramp and removal. However, this is not a place for Sol Ring. Is Sol Ring powerful? Yes. Easy to buy? Yes. For the good of the game at lower power levels? Absolutely not.
In this build, we include four 2-cost ramp pieces alongside a Midnight Clock to refill our hand and a Patriar’s Seal to untap Charix and Phenax.
While Peter Parker and Gogo ramp synergies exist in this build, without Polluted Delta and the other fetches, they are unreliable at best. A more ambitious build could lean more heavily into selfies with Gogo.
Notably, our removal suite is sparce on account of all the crabs. Our hard-shelled horde will have to act as a first line of defense to invalidate attackers. But, when we need a little extra help interacting with the board, a small team of spot removal and sweepers are here for us.
Supporting Cast
Damage Dealers
Alongside Uchuulon, Duskmantle Guildmage and Syr Konrad give us a ‘Plan B’ to damage our opponents out rather than milling them.
Recursion
People tend to get salty about mill because they can’t play their cards if they’re in their graveyard. They included cards to have them played, not just milled. Well, Espers to Magicite, Memory Plunder, and Rise of the Dark Realms allow our opponents to see all of their best cards as we take them over for our own ends.
Carried by the Tides
Coral Reef is slooooow. So slow. But, with double blue pips in its cost, it can be a nice way to up our devotion to blue and turn Phenax into a creature. And, maybe once ever, we can use it to boost the toughness of our Horseshoe Crab. More than anything, it’s here for flavor, fun, and conceding to bracket 2 power.
Orysa is designed for exactly our deck and even has the word “Tide” in her name. Auto include.
Halt Aggression
Following on the sparce removal suite. We will run Fog Bank, Wall of Frost, and Silent Arbiter to invalidate as much of combat as possible on a budget (and without running propaganda because the goal is fun and propaganda is not fun, right?).
Lands
For our lands, we are playing primarily Snow-Covered Islands and Snow-Covered Swamps to support our Iceberg Cancrix. Additionally, we have the tapped snow-covered duals and four common fetches for our landfall crabs and our Gogo/Peter Parker’s Camera plan.
Additionally, with so much toughness in play, we have a copy of Baxter Building to help us draw when we get stuck in the sand.
Cleanup Step
Are we here to win? Hopefully, but not necessarily.
Phenax Crabs is here for a fun casual game night or when playing in a lower-powered, precon-friendly pod.
Sit back, cast some 0/5s, and enjoy the game.
