Emerge decks were one of the premier strategies in Standard heading into the rotation, but didn’t really have anyone championing them going into the new format. Previously we saw some amount of four-color emerge/delirium craziness featuring Prized Amalgam and Haunted Dead powering out Distended Mindbender and Elder Deep-Fiend while buying back Kozilek's Return. The problem was that all of your enablers were Green, which was a huge stress on the manabase of the deck. This weekend, Zach Voss showed that you don’t need Green anymore now that Kaladesh is in the mix:

Grixis Emerge - Kaladesh Standard | Zach Voss

• Creatures (24)
• 4 Elder Deep-Fiend
• 4 Haunted Dead
• 4 Insolent Neonate
• 4 Prized Amalgam
• 4 Scrapheap Scrounger
• 2 Cryptbreaker
• 2 Wretched Gryff

• Spells (13)
• 4 Cathartic Reunion
• 4 Smuggler's Copter
• 3 Kozilek's Return
• 2 Perpetual Timepiece

• Lands (23)
• 2 Island
• 3 Mountain
• 1 Swamp
• 4 Evolving Wilds
• 4 Smoldering Marsh
• 3 Sanctum of Ugin
• 3 Spirebluff Canal
• 3 Sunken Hollow

• Sideboard (15)
• 2 Distended Mindbender
• 3 Invasive Surgery
• 1 Kozilek's Return
• 2 Lightning Axe
• 2 Summary Dismissal
• 2 Liliana, the Last Hope
• 3 Collective Brutality

Buy This Deck

There are some interesting, moving pieces here. The key is that there’s so much looting available in this format that you don’t need the likes of Grapple with the Past and Vessel of Nascency. Insolent Neonate is a fine way to get some graveyard synergies going as long as your top end is powerful enough to make up for being down a full card. Scrapheap Scrounger gives you more consistency in your ability to rebuy Prized Amalgams and get aggressive starts that way. Smuggler's Copter is a fantastic aggressive and defensive cards in this deck, since you have plenty of early creatures to crew it and your is particularly adept at taking advantage of the looting effect.

But the deck doesn’t end with just looting away Prized Amalgams and Scrapheap Scroungers. You’ve got Perpetual Timepiece and Cathartic Reunion to help pitch Haunted Dead and Kozilek's Return, and all the looting helps you find one of your three haymakers: Cryptbreaker, Wretched Gryff, and Elder Deep-Fiend. It may seem like Elder Deep-Fiend is the only real threat among those cards, but you’ll be surprised at how consistently the body of Wretched Gryff and card drawing engine of Cryptbreaker matter.

Wretched Gryff is awesome in this format as a card that can block Smuggler's Copter, survive most Harnessed Lightnings, and beat down in the air while you lock down the ground with Elder Deep-Fiend. Cryptbreaker, on the other hand, is just there to get your graveyard going early and generate cards later on. You’d be surprised how easy it is to get multiple zombies in play with the density of looting effects in the deck. This makes it easier to chain Elder Deep-Fiends in the late game to close things out.