Hello and welcome to a bittersweet day. Today is the final day of our two-week daily article series. These articles were a lot of fun to write, and I feel like there is a lot more I could pour into such a series. Ah well, it’s back to regular articles for me, I suppose. I’m sure that you guys’ll find the next writer to be much more interesting and whatnot.
Let’s see what we’ve done so far, shall we:
Day One: Living Swap – A Living Death deck that harnesses the power of counters
Day Two: Blew Skies – A Pez deck with quick blue beats, some tempo, and Unhinged
Day Three: Enchantment Beats – Combolicious powered up deck for your amusement
Day Four: Godo and his Maul – Champions flavored equipment and samurai deck
Day Five: Andre Rison – Recursion based deck with old school feel
Day Six: The Fungus Among Us – Saproling deck with clever tricks
Day Seven: Sing a Song for Me – A song deck designed to give opponents headaches
Day Eight: Equinaut – An Equilibrium based Invasion Block deck brings fun
Day Nine: Wild Knowledge – My attempt to build a U/R Wild Research deck for all.
Day Ten: The Deck challenge – Well, you’ll see…
I wanted something different for today’s deck. I already tapped my Most Underused Cards lists twice. I have good decks, fun decks, and even a deck that you will never win with. I have decks with cards from both of the most recently released sets. What could I build today?
For the final installment of A Deck a Day, I decided to give myself a bit of a challenge. I have a box of junk rares…er…I mean low trade value rares. Today’s challenge is simple, I’ll reach into said box sight unseen and select a card at random. Whatever card I select will be the card that I’ll build today’s deck around. Sounds simple enough, right? Okay, today’s deck building challenge card is…
Wow, that’ll be hard to use. Let’s see here, Caribou Range makes 0/1 Caribou tokens, uses a lot of White mana to do so, enchants a land, and you can sac Caribou for a life. Yep, definitely not an easy build here. Let’s try this:
Caribou Tribe
4 Caribou Range
4 Serra Angel
4 Ancestor’s Chosen
2 Archangel
4 Hand of Justice
1 Atalya, Samite Master
1 Hazduhr, the Abbot
1 Jareth, Leonine Titan
4 Congregate
2 Goblin Lyre
1 Healer’s Headdress
2 Skull Catapult
2 Energy Storm
4 Glorious Anthem
24 Plains
The goal of this deck is relatively simple, you want to stall until you can run your opponent over with, ehm, Caribou. You can sack Caribou for damage to the Skull Catapult, Congregate for made life with Caribou in play, tap Caribou for the Hand’s ability, or even try a Goblin Lyre and see if you can get the insta-kill coin flip.
The Energy Storm is secret Ice Age tech. It can keep flyers and burn away from you for a while. Note that your Angels can swing through the Storm without any problems.
You can move a Headdress from Caribou to Caribou, sucking up damage like a sieve. Hazduhr can save the occasional Caribou as well. If you want to have real fun, try this deck with a Test of Endurance. However, adding that makes it seem like a Test deck and not a Caribou Range deck.
I really like Goblin Lyre as an alternate win condition in this deck. Get a bunch of Caribou out, use the Lyre on someone with few creatures. If you win the flip, they take damage equal to the number of creatures you control. With, say, ten Caribou out, no one will mess with you, on the chance that you deal ten to them. If you lose the flip, you take damage equal to the number of creatures your opponent controls, which is why you choose someone with a small number of creatures to use the Lyre on. Although it’s a red ability, the way it works seems so white.
Personally, I hate Congregate. If Congregate makes you public enemy number one at your table, then you obviously want to pull them out. Congregate’s mileage varies from multiplayer group to multiplayer group. Note that if someone pulls it out on you, you can always sack Caribou in response for life. For each Caribou sacked, your opponent will gain two less life and you’ll have gained one.
Caribou are pretty innocuous. Nobody fears the mighty Caribou. You could try to go whole hog and really push the Caribou envelope. Crusade, Glorious Anthem, Divine Sacrament, Shared Triumph (naming Caribou), and more await. Making uber-Caribou might be really fun. Swinging with 7/8 Caribou is bound to make any player sit up and take notice. Suddenly, the fury of frenzied fauna seems less humorous and more dangerous. Feel encouraged to make Death Caribou.
Another possible goal might be to turn a harmless, gentle Caribou into the Incarnation of the Apocalypse. See how big you can make a single Caribou. Using Sword of Kaldra, Divine Transformation, Serra’s Embrace, and Tatsumasa, the Dragon’s Fang, you can make a little 0/1 into the Avatar of Armageddon.
Caribou are innately funny, so I’m rather glad that I ended up using Caribou Range as today’s card. It was a lucky pull. Anyway, I hope that you have enjoyed this series. It was a blast to write, and you can expect to see my weekly articles resume shortly. Enjoy deckbuilding and Caribou!
Until Later,
Abe Sargent