I’m relatively new to magic and I’ve been enjoying all the various tribes/types/groups/themes you can build around. I like that you can build a cat deck or a dragon deck or a crab deck or an angel deck or a vehicle deck and all work with lots of options. What’s your favourite theme and what are some of your favourite cards for that theme?
My all-time favorite has to be Skeletons. I think it’s really fun to play a theme where the creatures never die, just keep coming back over and over and over.
[[Gutterbones]], [[Sanitarium Skeleton]], and [[Reassembling Skeleton]] are my favorites. You can add other great sacrifice effect cards like [[Bone Splinters]] or [[Village Rites]] and [[Altar’s Reap]].
- Gutterbones - (G) (SF) (txt)
- Sanitarium Skeleton - (G) (SF) (txt)
- Reassembling Skeleton - (G) (SF) (txt)
- Bone Splinters - (G) (SF) (txt)
- Village Rites - (G) (SF) (txt)
- Altar’s Reap - (G) (SF) (txt)
[[card name]] to call
I like my big cool creatures, so I love my Dinosaur, Dragon, Sea Monster, Sliver, and Angel decks. I’ve actually made two Dinosaur and Dragon decks each, one in paper for Commander and one on Arena.
[[Gishath, Sun’s Avatar]] is a super cool commander. Some of my favorite cards in the deck are the new dinos from March of the Machine: [[Ghalta and Mavren]] and [[Etali, Primal Conqueror]]. Ghalta and Mavren is a really fun card for the flavor, and Etali is ridiculously strong.
Some of my favorite Dragons are [[Klauth, Unrivaled Ancient]] who generates a ton of mana to cast more Dragons with, and [[Miirym, Sentinel Wyrm]] who gives you twice the Dragon per Dragon. Copying [[Niv-Mizzet, Parun]] creates a really strong effect that opponents always have a tough time figuring out how to handle, and copying [[Wrathful Red Dragon]] means that anyone swinging into your board is likely to just die from the retribution damage. I also opened a copy of [[Terror of the Peaks]] in a random sample pack from a draft that’s still one of my best-ever pulls, and that thing puts in tons of work.
Slivers we’re one of my personal favorites. It just feels so cool to build out a swarm in whichever color mix you feel like and to be able to get fun and flavorful results. Sliver Queen was just awesome.
Agreed, themes of all kinds can be fun! And I’m loving everyone’s themes here. Most of my decks have a theme, though sometimes I sacrifice it for a little performance.
My three current favorites:
- Unionize : colorless, Assembly Worker tribal (took me a while to get that to work right! In particular [[Foundry Inspector]] + [[Self Assembler]] is fun)
- Red Wedding : black/red, vampire tribal with [[Edgar, Charmed Groom]] and [[Olivia, Crimson Bride]] (with almost all wedding themed cards)
- Ballroom Blitz : black/red, blitz ability aggro with graveyard return… basically “dancing” the cards between hand, graveyard, and battlefield (not the most efficient but pretty fun and efficient!)
I think it depends on whether or not you are building a standard vs commander deck. Since commander decks are larger it can get more complicated trying to build a full theme deck with some of the more obscure creature types. That being said you can’t go wrong with a cat deck.
I love token decks of all types. Squirrel tokens, copy tokens, whatever. My favorite is a mono-white deck that does nothing but create tokens and accrue value from them. I don’t usually like to attack with my tokens, so I generally wait until I can end the game with something like [[Starlight Spectacular]] or just dig for [[Halo Fountain]].
I love seeing an artifact deck build up a board state, and then just activate a bunch of abilities on someone’s end step.
Also playing with something that changes the way the game functions like using a [[Leylines of Singularly]] to shut down tokens, forcing a game to close out with a [[forced fruition]], or equipping an opponent’s creature with [[spy kit]] and hitting it with [[eradicate]] to exile their non legendary creatures from all zones.