Relentless Ratsless Rat tribal build for rat players who want to play a rat deck with a rat sub-theme.
Rat Colony is amazing update 5/12/2018: Thank you Dominaria for giving us a good rat to play on a nice spot of our curve while giving us a decent beater thats basically Pack Rat without having to worry about the wacky Pack Rat combat math because they're all x/1's.
Some musings on this deck:
This deck started as a meme and has become one of my favorite decks to play. I only have 3 decks at the moment so all of them get extensive play and single card consideration. Cuts and changes to this deck have become extremely hard. The joke I tell when people ask why I don't/if I will/if I'd try x-card is, "I would, but I'd either have to cut a rat or a good card."
As with any tribal deck, it's always hard to have that balance between cards that have the creature type you want and all the cards that supplement that. I think even with 35 creatures, (2 of the 6 non-rats making rat tokens, 1 of them being a demonic tutor for rats) this deck walks that line. And unfortunately our payoffs for playing rats aren't that high. Ink-Eyes and Okiba-Gang Shinobi are notably our best top-end rats. At least we get an easy-include infinite with Thornbite Staff. Now with Rat Colony, that means we usually get to delete at least one player or win the game on the spot with either Blood Artist or Zulaport Cutthroat.
Being that I've played this deck for so long though, there are some unconventional cards for commander, and I'd imagine other builds of this deck that I think are notable.
One of them being my ramp package. It's extremely limited. Ideally this deck either goes 1, 2, 3 Rats into Marrow Gnawer and then gets at least a turn or 2 to beat down until someone wraths. Usually the best you can hope to do is knock everyone down considerably or remove one player from the game. Then you're usually hell-bent and hoping to topdeck some amount of value. These are the openers where I love Springleaf Drum. Since you're going to have cheap creatures out most of the time anyway, it's a free spell with almost no downside. No real way to abuse it, though for a deck with a curve this low, it's explosive.
Or your opener lets you develop a board before playing Marrow Gnawer, and then some rats to make the tokens. These board developments are some of our enchantments. Namely Dark Tutelage and Oversold Cemetery. Dark Tutelage has been a dollar box card for forever and we finally play a deck that never minds playing it. Our curve tops out around 3 and only ventures into 6 for a few key cards (and if Dead Guy Ale in Legacy will play Batterskull and Bob in the same deck, we'll play Tutelage and Bolas's Citadel in the same deck). Oversold Cemetery was also a dollar box card that unfortunately crept up around the time Muldrotha came out, but being a creature deck that's saccing creatures all the time (and getting wrathed), it's just free cards most of the time. People won't bother dealing with it until you've nuked the board with a Crypt Rat 2 or 3 turns in a row.
We have the pretty standard non-combat finishers in Blood Artist and Zulaport. We can feed these with Bolas's Citadel's secret ability or Thornbite Staff like I mentioned before. I play Languish for the same purpose. I don't usually care about wrathing people's boards because I should have blockers and my creatures are usually unblockable (fear, menace, or deathtouch from any of our lords). And then the big killer is Some random common from Rivals of Ixalan "Gruesome Fate." It's not uncommon for this card to read "Each opponent loses 15-25 life" and at the point that you have that many creatures, it's going to kill at least one person. Pretty effective for a 3 mana sorcery. More token decks should be playing this card imo.
Other than that, my only complaint about the deck is that I only have 2 Ron Spencer art cards in the deck any more (I use Invasion Swamp 339, and Yawg Will), and I'm dangerously low on Thomas Baxa art. Though it's nice to know that Kev Walker holds the spot for top artist in the deck.
Really though, I built this deck to be a budget Rat tribal deck that didn't use Relentless Rats (this was a year or two before Rat Colony was printed) and it quickly grew into... "something great" would be too charitable... but an actually interesting, fun, and rewarding deck to play.
If you're going to build a Rat tribal deck I highly suggest you don't go the Thrumming Stone route, you carefully consider how many Rat Colony you ACTUALLY need, and you consider this list as a jumping off point (any of the expensive cards can easily be substituted for budget options with little actual detriment to the deck's performance).
