iv never been a fan of growing ranks really. yeah you can populate once on your upkeep but thats all it does. if you dont have a token on your side come your upkeep its a dead card. i'm more of a fan of parallel lives, its almost never a dead card really.
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i have a deck that is very similar to yours, you should try adding in 2 garruk primal hunters, i usually 3rd turn parallel and 4th turn garruk. you get lots of 3/3 pretty fast