Junk Reanimator (what was largely considered the top deck of the pre-Dragon's Maze Standard format)... might very well still be the best deck. At the very least, in the hands of Chris VanMeter, Junk Reanimator was able to take the first big event.

VanMeter played a fairly no-frills version of the strategy; Chris ran only eleven main-deck spells. Grisly Salvage and Mulch help fill his graveyard (ostensibly with creatures) and Unburial Rites gets them back, generally leveraging some measure of card advantage. A hard-cast Unburial Rites implies (at least) a two-for-one; and when you mill Unburial Rites into the graveyard? That gives you the one-for-one freebie. Generally speaking, you can get a pretty good return on your four-to-five mana, bringing back anything big from a Thragtusk to an Angel of Serenity.

Instead of Craterhoof Behemoth for the quick corner kill, VanMeter played with Acidic Slime to punish the mana bases of opponents trying out new Dragon's Maze strategies (possibly with suboptimal land configurations). Acidic Slime, of course, gave him some extra resistance to Bant Hexproof plus some additional value on Restoration Angel.




Restoration Angel functions with a number of VanMeter's creatures, of course; the most famous two-card dynamic duo of course being Restoration Angel + Thragtusk (where Thragtusk will cash in an extra 5 life while producing a 3/3 Beast progeny) but among the various enters-the-battlefield options—Acidic Slime, Fiend Hunter, and so on all work well with the tight 3/4—is new Human Cleric, Sin Collector.



Dragon's Maze's Sin Collector is an emerging option that is seeing play not only in Reanimator but tempo decks like The Aristocrats. Sin Collector gives Reanimator decks resistance to hard-to-beat sorceries or instants like Sphinx's Revelation or contextually backbreaking answers like Dissipate.

VanMeter also sideboarded Voice of Resurgence. Voice of Resurgence is one of the best cards in the format against both beatdown and control. Against beatdown you can trade with the opposing Burning-Tree Emissary (or whatever X/2 creature) and have a little something left over for future blocking and trades. In a deck like Reanimator, with lots of Avacyn's Pilgrims and Arbor Elfs, the Elemental token can actually be a significant threat.

Ditto against control. Not only does Voice of Resurgence badly punish decks with lots of instant-speed card drawing, it gives a deck something to swing with even after a Supreme Verdict or the equivalent. It might not seem immediately obvious in Reanimator, but Voice of Resurgence can be quite the card.