Honest Rutstein

📖 How to build Honest Rutstein

Honest Rutstein is a three-mana legendary Human Warlock with two abilities. When it enters, you return target creature card from your graveyard to your hand, which gives you card advantage from creatures that have already died. Its static ability makes every creature spell you cast cost {1} less. Together, these support a creature-heavy game plan: trade creatures, rebuy the best ones, and deploy them more cheaply than usual.

Build the deck around plenty of creatures, along with ways to put creatures into your graveyard. Cheap creature ramp such as Birds of Paradise and Llanowar Elves fits well, since the discount applies to them too. Ramp spells like Cultivate, Farseek, Rampant Growth, Kodama's Reach, and Nature's Lore help you reach your big threats faster. Beast Within can destroy a problem permanent and put a creature into your graveyard for Rutstein to return. Reanimate and Dark Ritual are also worth considering as additional graveyard and mana support.

Watch the weaknesses. Rutstein's return trigger only targets a single creature card, and it does nothing if your graveyard has no creatures, so it can whiff early. Its cost reduction does not affect noncreature spells, so spells like Three Visits and Heroic Intervention get no discount. As a three-mana creature, Rutstein is also easy to remove, and losing it shuts off both the recursion and the discount.

Deck guide written with AI assistance based on the card's rules text.