Getting Fired Up With Chandra Tribal | EDH Gameplay
Chandra is one of the most iconic characters in the Magic: the Gathering universe. Making her debut as part of the original five planeswalkers printed in Lorwyn over a decade ago, Chandra has remained the face of the Red archetype ever since, a fiery hot-headed pyromancer whose impulsive passion is matched only by her uncontrollable destructive magic. Having regularly appeared in most of the sets in the past decade, Chandra has by far the most planeswalker cards of any planeswalker in the game, a whopping 16 cards so far, and even more cards that reference her. This makes Chandra the perfect candidate for our ambitious goal today: Chandra Tribal.
Chandra Tribal is loosely defined as a deck built around Chandra. You can build a 100% on-theme Chandra deck where every single card is directly tied to the planeswalker right down to the Mountains, or do a deconstructed take on her by running cards that evoke her core characteristics but not necessarily feature the planeswalker herself, or anything in between. For this article, however, we will build Chandra Tribal with a defined goal: we are running every single Chandra planeswalker card ever printed. That's 16 Chandra Planeswalker cards locked into our deck list, and the rest of the slots will be filled with cards that support them.
Our Chandra deck starts with our commander: Chandra, Fire of Kaladesh. Whenever you cast a red spell you get to untap Fire of Kaladesh, and she can tap to ping target player and if you dealt 3 or more damage this turn she ignites her spark transforming into Chandra, Roaring Flame, which has a variety of burn abilities. Now this commander doesn't look too scary at first, but you'll soon see just how powerful this Chandra can be with the right backup.
The rest of our Chandra planeswalkers all excel at four main things:
- Drawing cards through wheels like Chandra Ablaze and Chandra, Flamecaller or impulse draw like Chandra, Fire Artisan and Chandra, Heart of Fire
- Copying and recurring instants and sorceries with Chandra, Acolyte of Flame, Chandra, Flame's Catalyst, and Chandra, the Firebrand
- Generating mana with Chandra, Torch of Defiance, Chandra, Novice Pyromancer, and Chandra, Bold Pyromancer
- And, of course, burning away our opponents and their creatures with cards like Chandra, Awakened Inferno, Chandra, Pyrogenius, and Chandra, Flame's Fury
These are all very sweet abilities and we're going to fill our deck with cards that really take advantage them all.
First we're going to raise the heat on Chandra's burn abilities: cards like Pyromancer's Gauntlet, Torbran, Thane of Red Fell, and Fiery Emancipation are just some of the cards we're running that increase the lethality of our burn abilities. We also run Chandra's Incinerator, an absolutely disgusting card in this deck, which makes any burn damage we deal to our opponents' faces also hit their creatures as well, machine-gunning down every opposing creature.
Next we're going to run a bunch of powerful planeswalker support cards. We can get extra loyalty activations with The Chain Veil, or copy them with Chandra's Regulator, Rings of Brighthearth, and Repeated Reverberation.
Finally I want to quickly go over a key part of the deck: rituals. While we are running a lot of traditional ramp cards, rituals like Seething Song, Mana Geyser, Rite of Flame, and Runaway Steam-Kin are what really make the deck tick. The faster we cast our Chandras the faster we can get value out of them and set up defenses against our opponents' attackers, and rituals are the best way to do that. Plus spending rituals to quickly cast our Chandras puts us in a great position to take advantage of all the wheels and impulse draw that our deck runs.
So those are the key cards for our Chandra Tribal deck. Put it all together and you've got this beauty: at its heart, this is a Burn deck, but it's really so much more. Chandras have a ton of subtle depth to them and the lines this deck takes in games is always different and super enjoyable to pilot.
This list is budget ... ish, where the budget is that no individual card is over $50. Still, it's way higher than my usual budget brews, but I have good news for you, friends:
Bonus $100 Deck!
Here's a bonus $100 Chandra Tribal list for anyone looking for a strong budget option to start you on your Chandra journey. It has all 16 Chandras and pretty much all the same nonland permanents as the more expensive version, we just took out the needlessly expensive lands and voila! Honestly it's really not that far off from the blinged version; I promise it's packing heat!
That's All, Folks!
I hope you enjoyed my take on Chandra Tribal. What started as just a meme deck ended up being surprisingly powerful! Sure, it's not as strong of a Burn deck as Purphoros, God of the Forge, but this deck is still very strong and far better suited for my personal playgroup's power level anyway. Plus unlike Purphoros, which is linear and repetitive by design, Chandra Tribal is a more inconsistent messy deck that -- at least to me -- has more replayability since there's so much variety. I enjoyed this deck so much that I even ordered a copy of the budget version for myself!
Starting next week, however, we will focus back on $50 Budget Commander decks; if not for your wallet's sake then for my own because I usually end up buying my budget brews after publishing these videos!
If there's a Budget Commander you'd like to see me brew then let me know in the comments section below. And also I'd greatly appreciate any feedback on these videos if there's anything you think I could improve, or other Commander content that you'd like to see. Thanks for watching!
