Regal Caracal

Creature — Cat

Other Cats you control get +1/+1 and have lifelink.

When Regal Caracal enters the battlefield, create two 1/1 white Cat creature tokens with lifelink.

Discussion (50)

RA_HORAKHTE on

4 months ago

Hi,

Nice to see a cat tribal Nethroi deck!

I've played Arahbo, Roar of the World a lot, a when Ikoria was released, I pondered to make an abzan cat tribal with Nethroi. But I ended building it normal graveyard synergy as I wantet to keep my classic Arahbo constructed.

Anyway, I know the flavor is that all your cats are legendary, an I love that, but I think if you want to play the deck more efficient without losing cat theme, you can do some changes:

Falthis, Shadowcat Familiar in this particular deck is only a 2/2 vanilla, as your only commander Nethroi already has deathtouch. I love it, but in this particular case sadly doesn't do anything.

Cards you could add, knowing that aren't legendary, but they are cats that work very well with your deck:

Fleecemane Lion can became indestructible, and then you can mutate your commander on it, making a great indestructible menace and keeping that +1/+1 counter.
Fleetfoot Panther and Whitemane Lion can save one of your cats or can bounce your commander to keep doing his mutation and reanimating things. Bronzehide Lion also protects your creatures.
Qasali Pridemage you play it, control your opponent best artifacts or enchantments, dies and Nethroi will recover it later.
Necropanther to reanimate small cats or creatures, and can mutateo over your commander to repeat effects.
Feline Sovereign and Regal Caracal , if you go tribal, those are the best cats lords, in addition to Kaheera of course.
Rakshasa Debaser can be a wincon when you encore him.
Alms Collector for card draw and to control greedy card draws of enemies.
Phantom Nishoba and Phantom Tiger look scrapy, but they count 0 power when you reanimate them with Nethroi, and if you mutate Nethroi on them, you transform Nethroi into a crature that prevent all the damage that receibes, even if he loses all +1/+1 counters.

And playing something like Nethroi, believe me (I'm a Nethroi and a golgari player), you need graveyard synergy. If you don't, you'll find that you reached turn X, play Nethroi but you only can revive 1-2 sad creatures. You need to fill your graveyard before that.
Exmaples (of course there are much more):
Grisly Salvage
Satyr Wayfinder
Mulch
Buried Alive
Jarad's Orders
Entomb
Altar of Dementia
Life from the Loam

And last:
Eerie Ultimatum and Living Death you'll have much fun with those in this type of deck.

Hope that give you some ideas to improve the deck without changing its spirit.

aholder7 on Why Does "Phyrexian" Need to …

5 months ago

Creature types serve two main purposes. The first is mechanical, certain effects will apply only to certain types so the power of such cards is proportional to the number of cards with that type Elvish Clancaller. Notably there are also cards that don’t care about specific types so any creature type that is sufficiently large can get use out of them Coat of Arms. Because of this sparingly used creature types are generally not very good. Having a card like Uncle Istvan (pre-errata) would suffer due to not being part of a larger type. To be fair plenty of cards get by without any tribal support at all which is perfectly fine but by grouping some of these together you are opening up options for future tribal decks to be created. An example of this can be seen with cats and dogs. Cats are a unified creature type in magic. The leorin are cats, they aren’t catfolk, or Leonin creature type, they are cats. So cards like Regal Caracal work on all of them and you have plenty of cards to put together. Dogs on the other hand have jackals, as well as dogs. Dogs was a replacement for hound and all previous hounds were made into dogs so that wasn’t really a new creature type. Jackals will likely not fit into any dog deck and for that reason have less of a chance at being played. There is also the issue of creating cards that support a tribe in a creature type that have a lot of creatures such as elves or humans. Wizards could probably print a 1 mana 0/1 with the effect “other kraken’s you control get +2/+2 and flying” and this would be fine but replace that with elves and you have a card that would get banned harder than Oko. But if you want to create a card that benefits a creature type but it seems too powerful for the existing type it may be reasonable to create a new type to allow for this card and others in the future to thrive. Dinosaurs could have been kept as lizard if they really wanted to but the second goal of creature types is flavor. You want to get across a certain idea about a creature and it’s identity through its typing. And while dinosaurs are big lizards I think most people consider them drastically different enough to justify a new creature type. Warlock’s creation also fits into this second category by allowing the separation of people who get power from dark powers out of cleric which still could probably hold them but has a strong connotation of religion and demons (for dark clerics).

On the topic of creating the phyrexian creature type we can measure it against the criteria above. Does it serve a mechanical purpose? And is the difference in flavor large enough to justify it? Horrors, minions and constructs (a large part of old phyrexian cards) are not an overly supported tribes. Mechanically the main issue is that you wouldn’t be able to give cards across the spectrum buffs because of their variety especially when you consider that there are smaller pockets of other creature types that still could be phyrexian. Flavor wise are the phyrexians different enough as a group to justify a typing? almost all creatures have their type based on species and occupation (wizard, fighter, noble). From the species perspective, horrors and constructs still seem to fit the general theme of these cards quite well. Personally I don’t see their alterations to self as a new species separate from these categories or from other types that exist but this is where a lot of the discussion of the validity of this type will happen. Yes they are all United in purpose but the purpose is too specific for the general occupation creature types.

New creature types also always carry the baggage of should old types he errata’d into this new type? Hounds -> dogs was easy, all of things of 1 type are now other type. Phyrexian would involve a lot of changes that many people would not be able to guess by looking at the cards like they could probably do with dinosaurs. So I think the concern for retyping old cards is very valid.

Personally as much as I like Phyrexians I don’t see the need for the new type unless they are planning on adding specific support for it. And if they are adding support for it I don’t see it as worth the issues it causes as they probably would have to retype a lot of the old cards to make it make sense.

/rant

Spirits on Arahbo, Xenagos... for Cats EDH

5 months ago

Thinking of the following changes:

Seek Glory (Or whatever! from Kaldheim) | Replacing Archangel of Thune to Tutor Heliod, Sun-Crowned

Time of Need | Replacing Spike Feeder to Tutor Heliod, Sun-Crowned

Armored Skyhunter | Replacing Regal Caracal

Recruiter of the Guard | Replacing Greater Good to Tutor Walking Ballista

Feline Sovereign | Replacing Aura Shards to increase cat count (will decrease with land)

Branchloft Pathway  ^Flip | Replacing Leonin Arbiter to increase land count (cats increased above)

HalbrechtHalbrecht on "...and Lions, Oh My!" (Modern GW Cat Aggro)

6 months ago

ellie-is — I know, that rat art is so cute! They would be perfect for your deck! I guess look on the bright side.... I've heard the foil Secret Lair cards are extra horrid as far as foils go. Wouldn't do your deck much good if they were so curled they weren't tournament legal! Heh

Thanks for the resource suggestion. I'm totally out of touch with the Modern meta these days, so yeah, I'll check that out and see what sideboards look like these days.

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I_Want_To_PlayAllTheDecks — Thanks for the feedback! I love the effect of Kaheera; not so big a fan of the depictions of cats in Ikoria. That said, you're right that there's no reason to not run it, deckbuilding-wise, and since it starts outside the game, maybe I can imagine it as, like, some mystical cat spirit from the spirit world, a la Avatar: The Last Airbender. ;)

As to Cubwarden and Huntmaster Liger, I did actually consider them when I was initially looking at my cat options, but in addition to being the weird Ikoria cats, they're also 4-drops and don't play nice with CoCo. Do you think I should move away from CoCo to open up my options?

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abbatromebone — I agree, Feline Sovereign is awesome, and it's a must-run in any full-blown cat deck. But as mentioned in the description, this is specifically a lion deck, so cats like Regal Caracal and Steppe Lynx don't fit in. I realize this flavor decision makes the deck weaker, but I'm fine with that.

CoCo is already in the mainboard, and I'm also already testing out Honor of the Pure. But I had never considered Lead the Stampede before; I'll have to test it. What's the minimum creature count a deck is recommended to have to make Lead worth it? Same as CoCo?

As to lands, would you still recommend me replacing Canopy Vista, even though I don't need the extra fetches for Steppe Lynx?

I would gladly welcome some help with the sideboard! But I don't have a meta right now. I've been out of Modern for a few years, but my playgroup recently decided to try getting into it. So what would you recommend for the sideboard for the overall Modern meta right now? That'll be good enough until I get into a local meta.

TriusMalarky on Felidae Cult

7 months ago

I'm gonna stop you right there. In Modern, you have toolboxable cats. There are at least two cats in modern that can be called 'tools' in your toolbox -- Qasali Pridemage and Leonin Arbiter.

You have NOTHING like that in Pioneer when talking cats, and especially nothing in this deck right now. What this is is a early rendition of cat tribal. Which isn't bad, but you've got the terms wrong.

If you want 'toolbox', play WG CoCo(Collected Company) with Aven Mindcensor, Drannith Magistrate, Knight of Autumn and such.

If you want cats, you need to go all-in on face-beating with your cats.

Another thing: Adorned Pouncer, Fleecemane Lion, and Bronzehide Lion ARE NOT USED for their abilities. Eternalize, Monstrosity and the indestructible clause are useful and nice bonuses that take these cards from fairly good to really powerful, but they're not the core.

The core on those cards is that they deal large amounts of damage for the mana cost. 2 mana to deal 3 damage every turn is a very good rate. Don't force yourself to use their abilities, or think of them in terms of abilities.

Also, Felidar Sovereign takes care of artifacts and enchantments maindeck. If you run 4, you have four cards that not only buff every creature in your deck but also let you destroy an artifact/enchantment every single turn. That's so much better than a single random weird Naturalize.

Unbreakable Formation is good. Feel free to run multiple copies, but not instead of Felidar.

Also, 'tutors' are almost entirely used to combo off. They have to be very efficient if you want to be going and getting specific cards from your deck in an aggressive creature deck. I recommend cutting all noncreature, nonland cards except maybe 1-2 Formations and then running 4 Collected Company. Or, if you want, run Eldritch Evolution. Evolution would be used on a 3 mana creature to go get one of 1-2 Regal Caracal, which is pretty good when you can pull it straight from your deck.

Or it can be used on a 2 or less to grab Lurrus for value.

9-lives on Felidae Cult

7 months ago

But don't you think that 27 cats is enough, TriusMalarky?? I'd rather cut some cats and get more lands. Remember that this is also a token deck, so Pride Sovereign would greatly benefit when there are a lot of tokens of 1/1 lifelink cats which also get buffs.

Pride Sovereign in numbers of 2 is really useful with Blessed Alliance, and can generate tokens on his own. I am using Regal Caracal for tokens as well. I have 4x Anointed Procession for a reason. I've usually had great success using tokens in my cat deck. I also have 1xSundering Growth for its populate ability not to mention it will be useful if I ever need a artifact or enchantment removed, which will most likely be hard to draw this card, but regardless I believe it will be used often in games.

The reason I don't have many Feline Sovereigns is because I traded one for Unbreakable Formation. This balances out my ability to have +1/+1 with a creature and instant. But does the Feline Sovereign only give +1/+1 when its on the battlefield, or not?

I_Want_To_PlayAllTheDecks Birthing Pod is really nice. But I don't think I could use that to eternalize adorned pouncer or anything like that; the only card it would work on is Regal Caracal when paying 4 or 3 mana and 2 life for making a 5 mana creature. And Karn, the Great Creator is only useful if I'm running lots of artifacts. And what is CoCo? With Ajani's Pridemate if I have a lot of 1/1 lifelink cat tokens, and attack with those using Encircling Fissure, I can buff him up so much it will be very useful to have Setessan Training and/or Angelic Gift.

Adorned Pouncer is very expensive mana-wise when you eternalize it, so it will be late in the game when I use it. Same goes for Fleecemane Lion. And Bronzehide Lion is expensive for making a single creature indestructible when I can use something like Unbreakable Formation for 1 more mana cost while buffing my entire army. Yes, they're good for 3/3 for 2 mana, but regardless I have other cards for that. For instance, Prowling Serpopard is very useful against blue counter heavy decks, covering my entire army with their ability, and is a 4/3 for 3 mana.

Angelic Gift is a must if I'm facing flying decks or if there are decks that don't have fliers or reach so I can deal direct damage, and on top of that it functions as a 2 mana cost draw 1. Just think if I used that on a Eternalized Adorned Pouncer!

What I need are tutors or something that allows me to pick out what I need for whatever occasion; that's how a good toolbox deck would work. Perhaps splashing black for Agonizing Remorse and Lay Bare the Heartand Grim Tutor??? Hand control is great when you know what cards are best in their hand, and Grim Tutor is currently the best tutor in Pioneer, I think.

TriusMalarky on Felidae Cult

7 months ago

Looking at this, it feels like you have a bunch of fun cards that you like, and it's slightly hurting your competitiveness.

IF you want to be more competitive, I recommend running the full four Adorned Pouncer. With any lord, i.e. Kaheera, it gets REALLY scary. It's a much better beater than most of your other cards.

Second, you have a lot of maindeck cards that should stay in the sideboard. Use the full 4 Fleecemane Lion -- it's a great card. Also get 4 Bronzehide Lion. This high number of 2 mana creatures with 3+ power will allow you to deal some real damage.

Additionally, the 2 CMC allows you to cast them off Lurrus.

Feline Sovereign is much better than your other creatures -- Pride Sovereign and Regal Caracal could be cut and turned into those.

If you want bigger stuff, I recommend either Pride Sovereign OR Regal Caracal.

Or cut a bunch of your random stuff. Most of your noncreatures are not relevant.

Additionally, due to the power of Feline, you don't care near as much about artifacts and enchantments. You can easily be destroying one or more every turn.

That's all if you want to be more competitive. If you're mainly concerned with a cool deck, this seems pretty much fine as it is. But if you want to win more.... replace literally every noncreature in your maindeck with cats.

Peoni on Sarah McLachlan Adoption Agency

9 months ago

A few off the top of my head you might like are Regal Caracal, Pride Sovereign, Prowling Serpopard, Bronzehide Lion, Qasali Pridemage, Marisi, Breaker of the Coil, and the Cat Daddy.

One thing I would recommend you do is add more ramp. You should have probably around 34-36 lands for this deck if you're on a budget. You should also probably add in a good amount of mana producing artifacts like Sol Ring, Arcane Signet, and talismans like Talisman of Conviction, Talisman of Impulse, and Talisman of Unity. Finally more ramp spells like Rampant Growth, Farseek, and Kodama's Reach would do you a lot of good. You gotta make sure your mana base can consistently support your mana curve, and with these changes it'll be able to no problem.

I tried to keep my recommendations in the spirit of casual pups and kits cuz it's a cute deck. I like it a lot. Hope this helps! :^)