Ghost Food
Greetings Programs~!
This deck is a Zubera/Spirit Tribal deck, made for the Pauper world.
This deck came from the inspiration of Seth (probably better known as SafronOlive) playing 5-Colour Honden/Gallery of Shrines on MTGGoldfish's Youtube. Video Here
I've always wanted to make a Zubera deck, but I used to play Modern a bit more. Now that I've transitioned to pauper, it's found a home.
Current versions; Ghost Food I and Ghost Food II.
The Deck
The Main Zubera of the Deck work well together, and apart.
Floating-Dream Zubera
As a 1/2 that draws a card if it dies, it's decent at chump blocking, and doesn't care about anything at 1 toughness. This can be relevant at times.
But, if you team up this Zubera with another
Floating-Dream Zubera
. If both Zubera die, before both triggers go off, you will draw 2 cards off the first, and then 2 cards off the second.
4 Cards for two bodies is pretty rad.
This same formula works with
Ashen-Skin Zubera
, who makes your opponent discard cards,
Dripping-Tongue Zubera
who gives you tokens, and
Ember-Fist Zubera
who deals damage to a creature or player.
[The sideboard includes a 1 of
Silent-Chant Zubera
, who gains you life when it dies. This has saved me multiple times, in the past. Chumping, or in a Zubera group.]
Now, I wondered, how can we best use the Zubera, and I thought "Why not recursion?"! So, I looked in to Soulshifting, since we were playing spirits, and tried to find the most relevant.
Turns out, I didn't have that many choices, but it didn't matter.
Relevant Soulshifters;
Thief of Hope
and
Elder Pine of Jukai
.
The Thief is the best, since it gives us life, and loses the opponent life. Which is why it's a 4 of. But the Pine can grab us lands. I didn't want to flood the board with Pines, though, since their toughness is 1, and I don't want to send away too many cards. Once the Pines get started, they're very good, though. Filtering out lands from the deck is very nice.
With Soulshifters, it's nice to have multiple interactions. Soulshifting for
Nameless Inversion
, or the creature that just died, and replaying it, etc.
After Soulshifters, I basically looked up anything that had to do with Spirits, to see how we could abuse these guys. They very much like to die, and I found two cards that help with this, and help us, all at once; Devouring Greed and
Devouring Rage
. In this version of Ghost Food, I have 3 Devouring Greed.
I used to have 2 Greed and 2 Rage, but Rage just wanted too much mana, and I needed to consistently get creatures on the board. I eventually cut 1 Greed, which did it's part when I was attacking with all spirits, and won me games more often than not. But I feel that the lifedrain/gain combo works better in our favour. Not having to rely on that extra mana is helpful.
Either of the Devouring spells do X, and then let us sac Y spirits, to do additional X for each Spirit sacced. Greed makes opponent lose 2 life, and us gain 2 life. Rage gives a creature +3/+0.
But that wasn't enough for me. I wanted to make sure we had consistent sac outlets too, and 4 or 5 Mana was just too much to ask for. To add consistency, there's a 3 of Carrion Feeder and a 2 of Viscera Seer, for scrying action. The Carrion Feeder can't block, but at 1 Mana, and free saccing, it's one of the most helpful cards in the deck. The Seer is a 2 of, scrying can be handy, to filter some things we just don't need. Both are decent for combat tricks, and making your opponent think too often.
Since I mentioned the top end of our Mana curve, I should bring up
Distant Melody
.
Distant Melody draws us cards equal to the amount of a creature type on the battlefield, in our case; Spirits.
I always like to use this card in tribal decks, and in this Zubera/Spirit deck, it's no exception.
So, we've gotten through most of the cards at this point.
We can make a lot of creatures, we have sac outlets that can get huge, ways to deal indirect damage, gain life. but we don't always have a decent way to push through damage, even when we use Devouring Rage. Our creature might be blocked. Using the 3 of Rancor in the deck helps with this. Even early game, when all you have is a 1/2 Zubera, you can still slap on a Rancor, and go to town. Now you have a 3/2 Zubera and since the Zubera dies and it's ability happens, and Rancor goes back to your hand, it's a lot of value.
For main board removal I wasn't sure exactly what to get. but once I started to run Soulshifting creatures it became obvious.
Nameless Inversion
a Changeling card that counts as a spirit, so once a Soulshifted creature dies, it can fetch this.
We can do instant speed saccing, to get the inversion, to kill a creature too.
I've actually used this on my own creatures in order to pump them to with the game, too [at instant speed].
Nameless Inversion
is a crafty card!
What's left of the deck is Mana fixing, alternate targets, slight card draw, and our Mana base.
For Mana fixing we have Prophetic Prism which incidentally also draws a card.
Our lands themselves are carefully sculpted to have ratios that will be positive for us.
Only 3 card in our main Deck has a BB Mana cost, so we want to draw a decent colour ratio, too.
Equal Swamps, Island, and Forests help with this.Then we have 4 Dual lands, and 3 Evolving Wilds, in order to keep us in track with what we need.
There's also a singleton Mountain, fetchable with Evolving Wilds in case we don't get a Prism to Mana-Fix for
Ember-Fist Zubera
.
Win-Cons
The wincon for this deck is Inevitability.
Using inevitability can also be useful, we have different ways our deck can go; making an opponent discard to nothing, and getting card advantage, going tall with a huge creature Carrion Feeder, going wide with tokens/creatures
Dripping-Tongue Zubera
[Or just playing creatures], or life drain Devouring Greed.
Sideboard
On to the sideboard.
Going by CC, we have;
1 Bojuka Bog and 1 Plains.The bog is graveyard hate for anything using it's graveyard. Token decks, Teachings, anything using Gurmag, etc.
The Plains is for our other sideboard cards [I'll mention later]. It replaces the Mountain usually.
Next we have Tragic Slip.This is for anything running big bads. So, our little guys can't deal with huge fatties all that well, all the time. Well, atleast they die a lot, and that triggers Morbid.
On to the 2 costs, and the reason we side in Plains; we have
Circle of Protection: Red
, Burn, Kiln-Feind, etc.
Silent-Chant Zubera
for life-gain.
For anything trying to control us, we need to make sure we have protection; That's where our 2 Mana Leak and 1 Negate come by.
Token decks get the Shrivel treatment.
Artifacts, and Enchantments get Naturalize.
Then last, the most expensive cards in our sideboard, for 3 Mana; Choking Sands.
Choking Sands comes in against anything utilizing lands. Tron, Drake Combo, early Teachings, etc. It's a narrow list, but it's important.
And, that's about it!
Upgrades
If you want to upgrade this deck there are a couple cards that can be swapped;
"=" means "Swap for"
Naturalize =
Gorilla Shaman
Silent-Chant Zubera
= Suture Priest
Gorilla Shaman is a lot more reliable to wipe the Artifact Player's board. Suture Priest can still gain you life, but also hurts the token players.
Although, Naturalize is versatile, where it's effective against MBC.
Silent-Chant can be good for general life gain against control decks, too.
[Alternate Cards]
Alternatively you could use Unearth in the deck, somewhere. Undying Evil is in Ghost Food II.
Thanks for reading! Sorry if I'm terrible at presenting things. If you have any questions, don't be afraid to ask.
