Budget Magic: $59 Abzan Felothar Rhino Aggro (Standard)
Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Budget Magic. Tarkir: Dragonstorm is finally here and today we kick of our budget exploration of the format with a deck I'm super excited for: Abzan Felothar Aggro featuring Skirmish Rhino! The idea of the deck is to flood the board with cheap, sacable creatures and permanents, use Felothar, Dawn of the Abzan to grow our team into massive threats and then finish the job by draining our opponent out of the game with Skirmish Rhino, perhaps using it's enters trigger multiple times by bouncing it with Sunpearl Kirin or Nurturing Pixie! The best part is that the deck is super cheap at just $69 in paper and with only four non-land rare on Magic Arena! How good is Skirmish Rhino? Can a three-color aggro deck work in Dragonstorm Standard? Let's get to the video and find out!
Budget Magic: Abzan Felothar Rhino Aggro
The Deck
Our deck is built around two new Abzan three-drops in Felothar, Dawn of the Abzan and Skirmish Rhino. Skirmish Rhino is easy, it's basically a baby Siege Rhino, costing one less mana while it's power, toughness and drain trigger are also powered down by one. It's a solid threat with a good body and a powerful enters trigger that gets even better if we can use it multiple times in a game. Meanwhile, Felothar really intrigues me since it's ability lets us sacrifice any nonland permanent to give all of our creatures a +1/+1 counter, which is super powerful since we can not only sacrifice creatures but also our removal spells, which are all attached to enchantments.
The rest of our creatures break down into two different package. The first is sacrificable one-drops. These creatures do two things for our deck. First, they give us bodies on the battlefield to grow with Felothar, Dawn of the Abzan's counters. Second, they offer sac fodder for Felothar with both Infestation Sage and Nesting Bot leaving behind bodies when they die while Novice Inspector gives us a Clue we can sac.
While sacrificing creatures to Felothar is fine, it's even better when we can sacrifice non-creatures. As such, all of the removal and interaction spells in our deck come attached to permanents which we can later sacrifice to Felothar, Dawn of the Abzan to grow our team. Nowhere to Run and Momentum Breaker deal with our opponent's creatures, while Hopeless Nightmare deals some damage and makes our opponent discard, while also letting us scry once we sacrifice it to Felothar. All of these cards are absurd in our deck, since they not only deal with our opponent's creatures but later end up adding a bunch of power to the battlefield to help us overwhelm our opponent with our small, cheap creatures.
Our final two creatures are Nurturing Pixie and it's new best friend Sunpearl Kirin, which allow us to bounce one of our permanents when they enter. This is extremely powerful with our enchantment removal since we can play a Nowhere to Run or Momentum Breaker to kill something and then pick it back up with Pixie or Kirin to play it again and kill something else, but these cards are even better in our deck than most because they also let us pickup and reuse Skirmish Rhino's enters trigger to drain our opponent out of the game!
As for our mana, I mostly wanted to mention it because of Magic Arena. Technically our deck costs 25 rares to build, although the only non-land rare in our deck is Felothar, Dawn of the Abzan. As a result, if you already have painlands and fastlands, you should be able to build this deck incredibly cheaply. The bad news is there isn't really a way around playing a bunch of rare lands, especially for an aggro deck, there isn't really a way to make a functional three-color manabase that doesn't require a lot of rares. Overall the mana for the deck felt fine, although is it painful (in a literally "we take a lot of damage from it" sense) and we do occasionally have games where we a missing a color on turn one or two, although that's just the price we pay for playing a three-color deck in Standard.
Wrap Up
Record wise, we won right around 50% of the time with the deck, although I don't really put much weight into wins and losses on early access day (thanks again to Wizards for the account!) since people are trying out new thing and the meta is unique. I'm more interesting in how the new cards feel, and overall I'd say all of our Tarkir: Dragonstorm cards felt solid. Felothar, Dawn of the Abzan really impressed me. The biggest problem we had was that sometimes we didn't draw it, and in those games we sometimes had trouble getting enough pressure, but the three-drop just adds a ton of power to the battlefield and can snowball out of control if it sticks. Meanwhile, Skirmish Rhino felt great. I'd be surprised if it was a format defining card like its ancestor, but it did feel very playable. Finally, Sunpearl Kirin played like expected, as a more expensive but flashy Nurturing Pixie. It's a card that could have a big impact on Standard since it allows more self-bounce style decks that don't play blue by offering redundancy for white self-bounce, although it is worth mentioning that it's upside of drawing a card if you bounce a token rarely comes up.
So should you play Abzan Felothar Rhino Aggro in Tarkir: Dragonstorm Standard? If you are looking for a budget deck that's super cheap to put together (especially if you already have the lands), I think the answer is yes! The deck if fun, it felt powerful and can deal a lot of damage quickly one Felothar, Dawn of the Abzan shows up. Plus, who doesn't want to win some games with Skirmish Rhino?
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 or Bluesky @SaffronOlive, or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
