Against the Odds: Ninja Dragon Pirate Demon Dino Skeleton Turtle Faerie Goblin Merfolk Silvers
Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! This week we're heading to Standard to play a deck inspired by Tomer's infamous The Ur-Dragon Changeling Commander deck - it's Tribal Tribal, but in Standard! The plan of the deck is to play Firdoch Core, a mana rock that happens to be all creature types, alongside a smattering of changelings to back it up, and then see how many different creature type matters payoffs we can fit into a single deck to take advantage of the fact that Firdoch Core and the changelings are all of them! Can Tribal Tribal work in Standard? How many different creature type matters cards can we fit in a single deck? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Tribal Tribal, but for Standard
The Deck
Firdoch Core might be the sweetest card from Lorwyn Eclipsed and it's the reason we're playing our deck today. While it might look like just another bad three mana rock, having changeling makes Firdoch Core unique. Not only does it count as all creature types to help power up our payoffs, but it does this without even being a creature which means our opponent's creature removal can't turn off our synergies!
Backing up Firdoch Core we have a few changeling creatures. Mischievous Sneakling gives us a flashy Grizzly Bears that's all creature types. Chomping Changeling is oddly powerful right now since so many Standard decks are running artifacts or enchantments, and Mutable Explorer doesn't have all creature types, but it makes a Mutavault token that turns into a creature with all creature types, essentially giving us two changelings for the price of one!
The rest of our deck is a little bit of removal and as many different creature type matters payoffs as possible. Let's do a quick rundown of all the various lords and payoffs we have in the deck!
Ninjas
Dark Leo & Shredder take advantage of the fact that all of our changelings are Ninjas, giving them deathtouch and if we can sneak it in and hit our opponent with a big board, potentially make our opponent lose half of their life in a single attack!
Dragons
Mox Jasper gives us a bit of ramp while Caustic Exhale becomes a great early game removal spell, assuming we have a Dragon, like Firdoch Core or any of our changelings, to behold.
Demons
Unholy Annex // Ritual Chamber gives us a steady source of card advantage and even helps drain our opponent out of the game, assuming we have a Demon, which Demonic Counsel helps us find by tutoring up Firdoch Core or any of our other changelings.
Skeletons
Corpses of the Lost gives all of our Skeletons haste, which is especially powerful with another one of our creature type payoffs...
Pirates, Merfolk, Dinosaurs, and Vampires
Throne of the Grim Captain is insane with changelings, letting us exile any four of them (including Nameless Inversion, one of our removal spells) to craft into The Grim Captain. The biggest problem with The Grim Captain itself is that it doesn't have haste, which means our opponent can potentially untap and wrath it away even though it's hexproof before we can get value from it, but it turns out that The Grim Captain is a literal Skeleton, which means if we have Corpses of the Lost we can flip it with our changelings and immediately attack to get its triggers!
Slivers
Thrumming Hivepool gives all of our changelings...err..slivers double strike and haste, making all of our not super scary changelings into suddenly very game-ending threats!
Turtles
Turtle Power! is actually super far above the curve, giving all of our Turtles +2/+2 for three mana with flash. The problem is it cares about Turtles, which isn't an especially powerful creature type, but since all of our changelings just happen to be Turtles, it's actually one of the strongest payoffs in our deck! Meanwhile, Turtle Lair lets us make a creature unblockable which is a great way to force through the last few points of damage!
Faeries
Ego Drain gives us a painless Thoughtseize, but only if we control a Faerie.
Goblins
Champion of the Weird is part of our removal package, coming down to behold a Goblin and then blight away our opponent's board. It works especially well with changelings with enter triggers like Mutable Explorer and Chomping Changeling, since if we behold them we'll get them back in our hand once Champion of the Weird dies, letting us reuse their enter triggers.
Wrap Up
And that's the deck! By my count, we have payoffs for 13 different creature types in the deck, and even if we count Throne of the Grim Captain as just one rather than four, we still have "creature type matters" cards for a massive 10 different tribes in the deck!
So did the plan work? Honestly, better than I expected. Across nearly 20 matches with the deck, we won 47% of the time, which is way better than I was expecting. It turns out that a lot of the creature type matters cards are really powerful, the problem they have is that the creature type they support isn't especially good. Changeling in general and especially Firdoch Core change this equation, and make cards like Turtle Power!, Thrumming Hivepool and friends surprisingly powerful! If you are a fan of Tribal Tribal in Commander, this deck is about as close as it gets for Standard, and while it's not going to break the format or anything like that, it does win more than it should and does so in a super funny way!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive, or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
