My playgroup has decided to try building on a budget. We are not strictly enforcing a set of parameters that define what is "budget." Individual cards shouldn't cost much more than $5 most places, but it's pretty loose. I chose to build a bird tribal deck because the archetype has a lot of cards with decent power:moneycost ratio. I went with
Kangee, Aerie Keeper
over
Derevi, Empyrial Tactician
because I wanted to save money on the mana base, and because I wanted to focus more on the tribe.
I want to talk about the custom categories I organized the cards into. First of all, I apologize if the list is cumbersome to look at because of all of the different categories. If anyone wants to suggest a better system, I'll gladly consider it. Otherwise, I'll talk about some of the cards in each category and why I chose them.
Ramp: Kangee requires you to have 4 mana to cast him at all, and at least 7 mana to put a single feather counter on him. With that in mind, I chose more ramp cards than I would normally put into a U/W tokens or weenies deck. The ramp cards help you to cast Kangee for higher numbers and to fight against the commander tax if he gets removed. This shouldn't happen often, as I would rather play him only once all game & right before the alpha strike where I KO all of the opponents at once.
Myriad Landscape
and other basic land searching also helps to get Emeria, The Sky Ruin online.
Feathers: If the alpha strike plan doesn't look like a good one, you can play Kangee with a few counters, and he'll be a pretty good lord. Adding feather counters to Kangee seems like a good thing to be able to do. Riptide Laboratory doesn't appear to fit with the proliferating effects, but by bouncing Kangee, you are able to replay him from your hand with more counters than he had before. If he has been removed several times, you may not be able to pay his kicker cost, but with Riptide, you can first play him without kicker, return him to your hand, and then play him without the tax.
Sawtooth Loon
and Keeper of the Nine Gales can do something similar, but not as well as Riptide, and not as well as they do their other jobs. Everyone knows that Aven Mimeomancer is good at adding feather counters, and I can even see myself turning some of the lackluster birds into base P/T 3/1. Finally, Panharmonicon and Strionic Resonator allow you to copy Kangee's ETB trigger and effectively double the number of feather counters he enters with. Those two cards have other interactions in this deck which you'll read about later.
Anthems and Lords: None of these cards should surprise anyone. I don't assume that Kangee will be around or be enough by himself to win me the game. Door of Destinies goes well with the bounce effects mentioned in the last section. I chose more anthems than lords because they are more robust against board wipes. Technically
Gravitational Shift
might not be an anthem, but it seemed to fit better here than in "Synergy."
Draw: Drawing cards is well known to be a good thing in this card game. Ariborne Aid and Distant Melody are similar cards that I expect to perform very well. These cards are hard to goldfish with because you don't know how many of your creatures are still going to be alive when you cast them. I worry that they might draw too many cards, so I'm playing Thought Vessel as well as Reliquary Tower.
Kefnet the Mindful
Is on theme and I don't mind that he isn't actually a bird. One of the priorities with the deck is staying on theme, and Kefnet is definitely on theme.
Tokens: I tried to pick good cards here, I really did. I decided that with my ramp,
Riptide Replicator
was better than
Volrath's Laboratory
. Soul Foundry can imprint two creatures if you copy the trigger with Panharmonicon or Strionic Resonator. I haven't spotted a particular pair of creatures that this is spectacular with, but it's not all that likely anyway. Anointed Procession has a very powerful effect.
Battle Screech
is easier to flashback immediately, and I'm excited to have it in the deck. To those of you who play token decks in EDH, do you think I have enough token producers? Have I selected the wrong cards? I will gladly accept suggestions in this department.
Protection: These cards just got lumped into a pile because they all do something that keeps me safe. I've had good experiences with Nephalia Academy in other decks, so I just slapped it in. Aven Mindcensor is a bird, a good card, and now with it's reprinting, very affordable. Angel of the Dire Hour has a pretty steep cost, but with the ramp I've included, I expect to be able to play her when I'm desperate. One player in the meta has Omnath, Locus of Rage, and conventional board wipes don't usually end well, so in addition to the angel, I have The Obvious choice.
Creatures:For a creature to be in this category, it just had to not fit into the other ones. Coincidentally, these are mostly the guys who are above average attackers.
Guilescape: If attacking with creatures doesn't work, I plan on falling back to Dovescape
+
Guile
.
Dovescape
counters all of the noncreature spells and replaces them with bird tokens. Without Guile, this just looks like it gives my opponents a way to outpace me in terms of bird tokens. (Kangee and other anthems buff more than just my creatures.) So, Guile comes in to save the day. He takes the spells Dovescape wants to counter and replaces the countering with exiling the card and letting us play the card without paying it's mana cost. (Dovescape still makes the tokens.) Since the way you play a nonland card is by casting it, Dovescape will again try to counter the spell, make more tokens, and as long as we choose to, Guile will keep the loop going. This is an okay lockdown because most of the ways out of this lockdown are noncreature spells. I would rather just win the game by playing Brain Freeze. This plays out just like any other spell in the loop except that when Guile has you cast your copy of Brain Freeze, storm will trigger. The copies of Brain Freeze from storm are not cast and therefore don't trigger Dovescape. They resolve milling out the opponents while the actual card is cast and countered repeatedly.
I decided that the other categories didn't need don't need much elaboration. Cryptic Gateway has a nice interaction with Airborne Aide and Distant Melody. If I have 6 birds, I'll draw 6 cards, and be able to put 3 birds onto the battlefield. Another synergistic card in Amonkhet is Aven Wind Guide. Giving vigilance to all of our tokens isn't just about blocking for the rest of the round, but it also means we don't have to choose between attacking or tapping for Cryptic Gateway or
Crookclaw Elder
on our opponent's turn. Intangible Virtue and Always Watching might be better, (The latter is even a reference to The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock) but I don't think it will have a significant impact.
I would like any and all input. If you can't think of anything that fits within the budget, I'll consider it anyway.
