Budget Magic: $25 Blight Goblins (Lorwyn Eclipsed Standard)
Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Budget Magic! Lorwyn Eclipsed is finally here and today we kick off our budget exploration of the format with Blight Goblins! When I think of Goblins I mostly think aggro, but thanks to the blight mechanic, this build of Goblins actually plays more like an aristocrat-style sacrifice deck, with some potential beatdown wins thrown in as a bonus! The best part? The deck costs just $30 in paper and 14 rares on Magic Arena! How good are Lorwyn Eclipsed Goblins? What cool trick can the blight mechanic enable? Let's get to the video and find out!
Budget Magic: Blight Goblins
The Deck
Blight Goblins is a Goblin tribal deck that can win by beating down or with some interesting blight sacrifice synergies!
The core of our deck today is two new Goblins from Lorwyn Eclipsed: Boggart Cursecrafter and Boggart Mischief (which is a Goblin even though it's an enchantment thanks to the kindred mechanic). These cards are essentially Goblin Blood Artists, letting us damage our opponent (or drain away their life) whenever one of our Goblins dies. Boggart Cursecrafter is a pretty wild card, along with pinging for one whenever one of our Goblins dies, it's also a 2/3 deathtoucher, which actually makes it a great body in combat along with having its powerful triggered ability. Meanwhile, Boggart Mischief has the upside of making two 1/1 Goblin tokens when it enters assuming we put a -1/-1 counter on one of our creatures, which is oddly something we want to be doing with this deck, along with being a literal Goblin Blood Artist (in enchantment form) while on the battlefield.
Of course, for our Goblin Blood Artist to work, we need plenty of Goblins that like dying, and for this we have two plans. First, we have Goblins with death triggers. Bile-Vial Boggart puts a -1/-1 counter on something when it dies, making it a good way to kill things like Llanowar Elves, and Mudbutton Cursetosser is even better, destroying any creature our opponent controls with power 2 or less when it dies, making it a great way to kill things like Badgermole Cub (and a lot of other popular stuff). Together these give us one-mana plays to get on the board early that later support our Goblin aristocrat plan by giving us Goblins we can kill for value. Cursetosser specifically was very impressive. Along with being solid with the sacrifice plan, it's also a good beatdown card as a 2/1 that our opponents often don't want to block, because if they kill the Mudbutton Cursetosser we'll be able to kill one of their creatures. We picked up a couple of wins by drawing multiple copies and simply beating our opponent down!
Our second plan for generating killable Goblins is Goblin tokens. While we don't really want Searslicer Goblin, Howlsquad Heavy or even Sourbread Auntie to die, the 1/1 Goblin tokens they make are great blight fodder to trigger our Boggart Cursecrafter and Boggart Mischief. Howlsquad Heavy giving all of our other Goblins haste is also nice with our backup beatdown plan, letting us chip in for some damage by surprise.
The final piece of the puzzle is a way to sacrifice our Goblins to trigger our Goblin Blood Artist, and our plans here are unique. First we have Dropkick Bomber, which is a three-mana Goblin lord that also lets us pay a mana to give a Goblin flying for the turn and then when it deals combat damage we have to sacrifice it. Normally in sacrifice decks you want free sacrifice outlets so you can sacrifice your board all at once, and while costing a mana is a big downside to Dropkick Bomber, the huge amount of damage we can deal by sending our Goblins to the air to smash in for combat damage before they are sacrificed helps make up for this.
Our primary sacrifice outlet, however, is Champion of the Weird. Champion's ability, paying 1 life to blight 2 both us and our opponent, reads a bit weird, but in practice it is not only a free sacrifice outlet, but one that also wraths away our opponent's board, all while coming with a 5/5 body for four mana! Assuming we have enough life (or we have a Boggart Mischief on the battlefield to recoup the life we pay) we can play Champion of the Weird, activate its ability a bunch of times to blight our entire battlefield to death. Ideally this will just kill our opponent with our Goblin Blood Artists, but if we don't have lethal, we should at least be able to sweep away our opponent's board by making them repeatedly blight 2! While the "behold and exile a Goblin" text might seem like a problem, since we're playing 32 Goblins it's unlikely we'll ever be in a position where we can't cast Champion of the Weird when we need to. Even at four mana the card felt super powerful, and being able to "sac" our entire board is a huge deal for the deck.
The blight theme continues with most of our removal, and the one thing I wanted to mention about these cards is that blighting is actually an upside a lot of the time. Being able to blight our Bile-Vial Boggart or Mudbutton Cursetosser can sort of turn these removal spells into 2-for-1's, letting us kill one thing with the spell and another with our Goblin's death trigger!
Finally we have the mana, which is super budget friendly, very unique and oddly effective. Our two "dual lands" are the uncommons Eclipsed Realms and Secluded Courtyard, which enter untapped and make mana of any color, but only for Goblins. The rest of the manabase is all basic lands. The upside of this manabase is that it's basically free as far as the budget is concerned and has zero tapped lands. The major downside is that it's only really good for casting Goblins, which means you can't really add many non-Goblin cards to the deck without needing to add more expensive dual lands. Really though, if you are looking to build budget tribal decks in Standard, I think this is the direction to go, and then you can upgrade by removing basic lands for dual lands like Blood Crypt as you go along!
Wrap Up
Record-wise, we were playing on early access day (thanks to Wizards for the account), so records don't really mean much, but I believe we were just above a 50% win rate with the deck. In general the deck felt pretty solid. While we didn't have many wins where we just played a bunch of Goblins and then sacrificed them all for lethal Boggart Cursecrafter or Boggart Mischief triggers, we didn't need to. The power of the deck is that, unlike traditional sacrifice decks, it's actually pretty good at beating down. The way the deck played in practice is that we'd chip in with our creatures to get our opponent low on life and then use our Boggart Cursecrafters and Boggart Mischiefs to finish off the game once our opponent got low on life! While we'll have to test the deck a bit in best of three non-early access Standard to know for sure, I wouldn't be surprised to find Blight Goblins be one of the better budget decks of the season, at least compared to the cost of the deck, especially considering its ultra-budget price tag!
As far as changes I'd make to the budget build of the deck, I'm not sure I'd really change much of anything. The deck might need a bit more removal, but I don't really want to cut any of the Goblins for it, but getting up to something like 7 or 8 removal spells from the current 5 might be necessary to fight things like Badgermole Cub.
On the other hand, if you want to upgrade to non-budget the starting point is the manabase. While the tribal lands are fine, especially if you are going to play best of three and be able to cast non-Goblin sideboard cards, adding Blood Crypt and the Rakdos Verge over some basics will help. Also, if budget is no concern then Cavern of Souls is an upgrade over our uncommon tribal lands (although not being able to use it to activate Dropkick Bomber's ability is a small downside).
As for Goblins themselves. Personally I think Hexing Squelcher is pretty overrated, but in a removal or counterspell heavy matchup it is worth considering at least. Grub, Storied Matriarch seems like a solid one-of, and I really wanted to find room for Taster of Wares, but it might be more of a sideboard card to bring in against control and sweeper decks. There's also probably a world where you could play more copies of Howlsquad Heavy for haste and then Krenko, Mob Boss to make a ton of tokens, which does sound sweet, although without haste Krenko is pretty clunky. It's more explosive but likely less consistent than Sourbread Auntie. One of the fun aspects of three-year Standard is that even if you limit yourself to just playing Goblins, there are actually a ton of options, and I think there are several different ways to potentially build the deck. While I'm happy with where the budget deck landed, there's also a ton we can still explore with the archetype over the coming weeks!
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.
