Ok, I wrote earlier about a theoretical deck I wanted to make. Well, now I have. This deck takes advantage of the power of exponential growth, building up a small army of tokens that gets very, very big very, very fast.
It doesn't actually use Scute Swarm anymore, because while that's a great option in a ramp-heavy landfall deck, it doesn't play as synergistically with our other options.
The MVP of this deck is Rabble Rousing. This white enchantment for 4W gives you a white and green 1/1 citizen token for each creature you control that attacks. So, say you have two tokens out - now you get two more when those two attack. This includes any creatures you have that are attacking, so it could be your Prosperous Innkeeper or, most importantly, the very citizens that the enchantment created. If the opponent isn't killing the tokens, you've got a re-doubling army every turn, which can get out of hand very quickly.
Given how many creatures we're summoning, Prosperous Innkeeper is a very useful part of our deck. Even though it focuses on small creatures, this deck does take a little while to get set up. When all that exponentially-growing mob is coming into play each turn, we're getting a lot of life back from our Innkeeper, which helps us sustain. However, the treasure token the Innkeeper brings shouldn't be ignored - that will help us get the five mana we need without necessarily having to get to turn 5 (and get land drops on all of them).
Devilish Valet here is, I think, usually icing on the cake. If we get a token army and Rabble Rousing out, this guy is an utter menace - exponential upon exponential. If we have five tokens and we swing in with this thing, that means six more tokens, which means doubling the Valet's power six times, or 64 power if we're just starting at 1. Still, the Valet can potentially win the game for us even if the opponent has gone wide, thanks to his trample.
Jetmir, Nexus of Revels is actually a pretty strong part of the deck. While he doesn't really get insanely powerful until you have ten guys on the board, which even this deck only sometimes gets, getting up to six is not that difficult, and that means everyone getting +2/+0 along with vigilance and, importantly, trample. (Ten adds one more power and then double strike, and at that point you're basically winning immediately.) Jetmir is actually a great option for the Hideaway feature of Rabble Rousing, because when it triggers, you'll be getting Jetmir at his full power (the only downside is that you potentially warn your opponent - though if you have five creatures on the board when you plunk down Rabble Rousing with a Hideaway Jetmir, you can get it all in one turn. Even if they're only 1/1 tokens, with that play, you'll have five 4/1 double-strikers, which is 40 trampling damage that the opponent will have to deal with. And while an opponent should be nervous to see five creatures of any sort on the opponent's side of the board, they might not expect this massive of a threat.)
Wedding Invitation is naturally pretty useful here, pumping out tokens or potentially drawing you cards, and then paying off with an anthem effect that is always very good in go-wide decks.
We're actually going to get use of all three of the options of Cabaretti Charm - the direct damage can be crucial to destroy big threats, the creature pump (and again, importantly, giving them all trample) is great as a finishing move, and the token generation can be useful either to recover from a board wipe or to help enable Jetmir or the Devilish Valet.
So, lets talk about the deck's weaknesses.
The first is that it is extremely vulnerable to board wipes. Meathook Massacre usually doesn't have to be cast at a particularly high value for X to take out everything we have. Farewell (which, honestly, I think is a BS card) is a nightmare here, as it can also take out Rabble Rousing (there's another wiper from I want to say Strixhaven that takes out all nonland permanents that totally screw us).
This is also a bit of a feast or famine deck (which, to be fair, might just be the nature of the game). Ideally you'll be able to grow a big army and then swarm them down. But super-fast aggro decks might be hard to defend against, while permission decks will keep any of your best cards from ever actually hitting the table. The deck is a bit reliant on Rabble Rousing, and that enchantment is only useful if you also have some things in play.
Still, the strengths I think are that you can sometimes pull a victory from the jaws of defeat. Even without the crazy exponential possibilities of Rabble Rousing and Devilish Valet, you can catch a cocky foe off guard with cards like Jetmir and the group-pump of Cabaretti Charm.
Some of the cards in the deck that are kind of just filling slots here are Felidar Retreat (which might be a holdover from when we were doing more of a landfall thing) or Gala Greeters, which certainly benefit from all the creatures coming into play but might be too limited to really benefit from the huge number of tokens we're making. I'm also considering playing a bit with the lands - right now I have the Cabaretti "triome" lands and the pathways, but I might throw in some of the Innistrad dual lands as well to smooth things a bit.
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