Zombie Staircase
This is another tribal staircase deck, this time focusing on Zombies.
Zombies have support in all five colors, which is helpful, but that's only part of the reason I picked them. The biggest reason is this: zombies are cool and I like them.
Starting Hand
It's a five-color deck, so you need a solid mana base in your first hand. Bear in mind however, that 3 mana is enough to cast 50% of all spells in the deck, and if you only ever hit 5 mana you can still cast 83% of the spells. That means that having a good mana spread (as many different colors as you can) is every bit as important as having enough mana.
I wouldn't accept a hand with less than three mana sources - two lands and some kind of accelerator (
Ignoble Hierarch,
Ilysian Caryatid,
Kodama's Reach,
Wayfarer's Bauble) is good, but three lands is fine too. Black is the most common mana symbol, so make sure at least one or two of your mana sources can provide black.
You also want at least one one- or two-drop and a three-drop that you can play with the mana in your hand is best. Mulligan until you have 3 mana sources (including lands), a 1 or 2 cost, and a 3 cost that matches your available mana.
Early Game
Zombies are a bit slow, but you don't have to be! You might not always drop something on turn one (too many tap lands), and turn 2 should be a land + mana accelerator if possible. Otherwise, something hostile so you can start swinging on turn 3.
Card Selection
There are some obvious cards missing here, like the good dual lands, Mikaeus, the Unhallowed, Relentless Dead, Lord of the Undead, Neheb, the Eternal, Undead Warchief, Cavern of Souls, Urza's Incubator, Kindred Discovery, Door of Destinies, and a few other great cards. The reasoning is simple: too expensive. This deck is cheap, and most of those cards would increase the cost by way too much.
The Rainbow Stairwell Format
Rainbow Stairwell is my favourite format in MtG at the moment, followed by EDH and pauper. It's a singleton format with a boat-load of restrictions that make for challenging deck-building!
The problem with Rainbow Stairwell as a format is that there is a lot of disagreement about what the format actually entails. I would argue that the
2011 article on the WotC website (https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/serious-fun/stairway-compleation-2011-05-09) is the closest to an official guideline we have. It presents the following rules:
- Your deck must be exactly 60 cards, six cards from each of the five colors as well as six artifacts or colorless cards.
- Additionally, you must have one each, for each color, of cards with converted mana cost one through six. That is, you much have a staircase of cards starting at one mana and moving up to six, for each color.
- Multicolored cards are not allowed.
- Singleton: no duplicate cards, except for basic lands.
A very popular rule is to disallow sideboards, which I have done.
I have seen other popular variations however, including a 56-card setup (4 of each basic land, no nonbasic), versions requiring a full set of dual lands, banning X in mana cost, and using multicolored cards that count as only one of their colors, but those seem less common. I have also seen the additional rule that cards cannot target nonbasic lands, but that seems more like an etiquette thing than a firm rule. None of my Rainbow Stairwell decks follow these additional rules.
