Honey Badger Don’t Care

It doesn’t matter what deck you’re playing against; Honey Badger don’t care. It’s a U/B control shell designed to get maximum utility out of the 3 Cranial Extraction cards current in Standard (Surgical Extraction, Memoricide and Haunting Echoes).

I’ve tested this deck a fair bit and it’s terrible. Every single game just drags out to 20-30 turns. You end up in terrible top-decking positions you can only pray to get out of.

That said, it’s a ball of fun to play.

I tried the Mana Leak main, but as most decks end up with both sides on infinite mana, they turned out to be terrible so I stuck ‘em in the sideboard against certain matchups.

You can board into some sort of terrible mill deck as well, which is also terrible. But Honey Badger don’t give a shit, it just wins anyway. I don’t really understand how, it just does.

Improbable plays with this deck:

* Showing Chancellor the the Spires at game start, using Surgical Extraction before opponent’s Turn 1 to remove Splinter Twin from their deck.

* Activating two or three Archive Traps off a T2 Stone Forge Mystic activation.

* Dying to every mid-range deck ever invented. Ok that’s not so improbable.

I don’t know if this is a viable archetype – hell, it probably isn’t – but I do insist this. If you see people playing Surgical Extraction main you refer to that deck as “Honey Badger X”. So Esper Cawblade with Surgical Extraction would be “Honey Badger Cawblade”. I think that might just piss enough people off to make it all worthwile.

Honey Badger
A Standard Deck by Neale Talbot

// 2 Creatures

2 Chancellor of the Spires

// 24 Sorceries

3 Preordain
4 Despise
4 Inquisition of Kozilek
4 Sign in Blood
4 Memoricide
1 Haunting Echoes
2 Life’s Finale
2 Black Sun’s Zenith

// 12 Instants

4 Surgical Extraction
1 Geth’s Verdict
1 Go for the Throat
1 Doom Blade
2 Dismember
3 Into the Roil

// 22 Lands

2 Terramorphic Expanse
4 Evolving Wilds
6 Swamp
2 Island
4 Drowned Catacomb
4 Darkslick Shores

// Sideboard

4 Archive Trap
4 Mana Leak
4 Hedron Crab
2 Chancellor of the Spires
1 Blue Sun’s Zenith