In case you haven’t noticed by now, Jack Kiefer is pretty good at Magic. He prefers playing Limited and it seems to me that’s because he really likes deckbuilding, which gets stressed more often in Limited than Constructed, where you’re more often tuning a known deck to the current metagame.
So when he plays a Constructed event, you can often find him playing some spicy brews, and he came with a sweet one last weekend in Memphis. Standard right now is a battle between Mono-Red Aggro and midrange decks that feature a lot of great removal. A card that is sneaky good in both those kinds of matchups is Call to the Feast. Three bodies in one card makes Vraska’s Contempt look awful, and the lifelink is incredible against aggressive decks.
Starting from that base, the rest of the deck is built with a Limited player’s mindset. Every card is on-theme and built to shine in its role, even if it’s not a particularly powerful card on its own.
It even looks like Jack’s been looking through all his Draft commons recently because he dug out four Queen’s Commissions and four Dusk Legion Zealots – at least we know he cleans his room. But the thing is, both of these cards are perfect for what this deck is trying to do: go wide to make spot removal and falter effects bad. The Elvish Visionary clone is sneaky good because the extra card represents some percentage of another body. With tokens you really want a critical mass and every cantrip counts.
Continuing to dig into his Draft leftovers, we have Martyr of Dusk. I imagine a lot of players would slot the more powerful Skymarcher Aspirant or Adanto Vanguard here, but the two-for-one body is better in this shell. It’s yet another creature that both blocks well and plays well against removal spells.
Seriously, what are you targeting with your Harnessed Lightnings and Fatal Pushes against this deck? Legion Lieutenant and Crested Sunmare are the only cards you’re ever going to trade for at parity and they are so powerful they need to be answered immediately, so it’s not that hard to apply pressure with your other cards and open a window to land one cleanly.
It also makes sideboarding very challenging for the opponent. How much removal do they leave in to cover the powerful threats but not have to sheepishly kill a lifelink token with one that’s rotting in their hand? It’s a difficult question to answer and one that I’m sure induced many mistakes over the weekend.
Sure, there are cards the rest of the format can play that are great against this deck, like River’s Rebuke and Golden Demise, but until the format shifts away from Mono-Red, Grixis Energy, and U/B Control, I don’t see how they can have more than one or two cards dedicated for this deck. If you’re looking for a tribal deck to play around with, this is the one, and the window for it to be competitive is now.
Creatures (15)
Lands (24)
Spells (21)
- 2 Fatal Push
- 2 Thopter Arrest
- 4 Call to the Feast
- 2 Ixalan's Binding
- 3 Legion's Landing
- 4 Queen's Commission
- 4 Radiant Destiny
Sideboard
