Decklist: URG Shenanigans' Path

Settle down children, and let me take you on a journey. Not only do I have a decklist for you today, but I thought I'd give you some insight into my deck building process. It was an interesting journey, and hopefully someone out there will be able to gleam a little deckbuilding knowledge from it.

Now, today's deck is an odd one. Every once in a while I'll stumble across a card from Magic's past that had somehow eluded me for all these years. Some cards, like Surprise Deployment or Saprazzan Heir, are nice additions to my Johnny arsenal and beg to be built around. On the flip side, others are so bad that they stick with me and taunt me until I put their spirits to rest by building a deck around them.

The lynchpin for today's deck is one such card. Often called the worst Magic card in existence, this card gives a mediocre effect for such a steep cost that it's ridiculous by today's standards. Can you guess which card I'm getting at? Hailing all the way from 1994's The Dark, it's...

Decklist: URG Zada, Hedron Grinder

Today's BFZ spoilers gave us quite the Johnny tool. A friend and I had challenged each other to build a deck around an RTR gem; unfortunately we never really got any traction, and the deck fell onto the backburners. That is, of course, until this card was spoiled today. Can you guess what the RTR card was?

Decklist: WURG Tribal Changelings

Come on. Don't look at me like that. Changelings are a tribe too! Sure, they're every tribe, and technically I should be calling this a Tribal Shapeshifter deck. But aren't tribal decks so much fun when you can include tribal cues from any tribe??

Decklist: Monoblue Tribal Djinns

Here's a decklist that took some serious conceptual work to put together. You're probably thinking "But wait, Djinns don't have any tribal synergy!", and you'd be right. What this deck manages to do is weave together a mechanical theme through the tribe, giving us a nice, polished, and most of all thematic product.

Decklist: Monoblack Tribal Clerics

To cap off tribal week fortnight month, I'm going to share a trio of decks that will demonstrate different approaches to tribal deck building. First on the docket is a deck that has a bit of an identity crisis; a Cleric deck that wants to summon Demons and other abominations, but a lot of those Clerics also happen to be Zombies.

Decklist: RG Tribal Hellions

Continuing Tribal Week (more like Tribal Fortnight at this point, amirite), here's another deck I've mentioned in the main article: a Tribal Hellions deck.

Decklist: Monoblack Tribal Horrors

My earlier Off-Brand Tribal post mentioned tribal decks that have no overt strategy to gel it together, but rather more subtle cues that let us build something cohesive if we pick up on them. This is one of those decks.

Decklist: Monogreen Tribal Wolves

As a follow-up to my post on building an off-brand tribal deck, I've dusted off some old tribal decks and given them a bit of an upgrade to stay current. Up for review today: a monogreen Wolf deck.

How to Build an Off-Brand Tribal Deck

For this post, I wanted to go over some techniques and strategies for building off-brand casual tribal decks. By "off-brand", I mean creature types other than the obvious build-around types (Goblins, Elves, etc.) that have little-to-no proper support. You can find a list of tribal decks that I've put up at the end of this article.

The first thing to keep in mind is that this obviously isn't going to result in a competitive build. You're going to be making decisions that favor certain cards based solely on the fact that they promote the creature type of your choice, so as long as you stay within the casual spirit, you should have a good time.

Onto the actual deckbuilding process:

Decklist: BR Graveyard Burn

A while ago a friend of mine and I both coincidentally ran some Wheel of Fortune-based decks at the same time. I'm obviously a Johnny player, so I based mine off of the Commander format (Nekusar being my obvious commander-in-chief) and filled it with 99 other fun cards to make everyone draw. My friend is more of a Timmy player, and hence went for power.

Decklist: WU Self-Bounce

Here's a fun little Vintage deck I built a year or so ago. The concept is simple: the deck likes to bounce your own permanents back to your hand. Almost everything in the deck costs 2 or less, so you can promptly replay whatever you've bounced for fun and profit.

One of the best things about this deck is that it's incredibly cheap to build, consisting mostly of commons, so it should appeal to new players just getting into the game.

Onto the list, then: