Better description coming soon! Suggestions welcome!
This is a Combo deck in the flavor of goblin tribal! Goblins have a surprising number of combos at their disposal. This deck can either be played as a gotta go fast creature combo deck, or as a midrange goblin tribal deck, with many silver bullet goblins that can help in any situation you find yourself in.
Why run Alesha as a “Goblin Queen”?
The deck can function pretty well without ever resolving our commander. Unfortunately,
Wort, Boggart Auntie
’s ability is simply too slow. Alesha allows us get the ETBs for 2 mana, putting the creature into play instead of into hand. This ability is so valuable that Alesha will literally smile at death as we swing her into lethal situations knowing she will be blocked and destroyed by our opponents. When looking at the mana distribution, the deck is predominantly red, making Alesha’s R2 mana cost a much easier pill to swallow. Alesha also gives us access to White, something that other goblin tribal decks don’t often include. Surprisingly, there are a few decent white goblin cards (mirror Entity) as well as cards that already play well with our Goblin combos, giving us further redundancies. It also gives us access to a few other combos, such as karmic guide loops, which also just so happen to have less than 2 power, further giving us Alesha targets.
Main combos:
Conspicuous Snoop + Boggart Harbinger/Goblin Recruiter + Kiki Jiki Mirror Breaker + Mogg Fanatic / Sling-Gang Lieutenant / Goblin Bombardment
SNOOP DAWG! Probably the most straightforward and easiest combo to assemble. You need Conspicuous Snoop on the field, get Kiki Jiki on top of your library, make a LARGE number of tapped snoops by targeting itself with Kiki’s activated ability (Snoop is NOT considered a legendary creature), then with an untapped snoop, target boggart Harbinger and the like to put an outlet for the snoop army. There are a lot of different ways to make this an end gaming play. Easiest way is to simply put the Mr. Fantastic Mogg Fanatic on top, then sacrificing the snoops to ping everyone to death. Goblin Bombardment offers the same effect in enchantment form. The Dragon’s side of Outpost siege will see each goblin leave play, pinging everyone to death. With Skirk Prospector, you can make infinite red mana, which can be put into Siege-Gang commander for pings. Whole lot of pinging going on!
Nim Deathmantle + Ashnod’s Altar + Murderous Redcap (Or any creature that can make 1-2 creatures/ Persist Creatures or Dockside Extortionist)
If you have these pieces on board, the Murderous Redcap will result in infinite pings, as you sacrifice the Redcap to the Altar, have the Redcap ETB ping someone, comes into play with a persist counter, then sacrifice it again, use the 4 colorless mana to activate the Nim Deathmantle to return the Redcap to the field, now without any -1/-1 counters. This will also go infinite with any creature that can at least produce another creature token (results in infinite creature deaths and ETBs). If the creature can produce 2 tokens, this will result in an infinite amount of creatures, as you sacrifice one of the tokens followed by the token producing creature and activating the Nim Deathmantle, you will net one token
Revellark + Karmic Guide + Sac Outlet (or Mirror Entity)
If Karmic Guide is in your graveyard and Reveillark is in play, sacrifice Reveillark. Target Karmic Guide with Reveillark's “leaves the battlefield” triggered ability. When the trigger resolves, Karmic Guide enters the battlefield, triggering her own ability.
Metallic Mimic / Luminous Broodmoth + Putrid Goblin / Murderous Redcap + Sacrifice outlet
Another janky way to use and abuse our little redcap murderer! The +1/+1 counters we get from the Mimic ETB cancels out the -1/-1 counter, giving us another infinite route! Same goes for persist or undying and Luminous Broodmoth. When a creature dies, we’re able to stack the triggers, being able to get either a flying counter or a +1/+1 or -1/-1 counter, then able to alternate between the counters.
Particular Noteworthy Inclusions:
Sling-Gang Lieutenant:
This card is invaluable, as it overlaps with several of the combos. It offers a free sacrifice outlet for goblins, produces 2 tokens to go infinite with Nim Deathmantle combo, and can be used to infinite ping with Conspicuous Snoop activation. All around good gobbo!
Mirror Entity:
While TECNICALLY a goblin, there’s more to meets the eye for this changeling. Taking the card at face value, it can be a team pump once we flood the board with goblins. BUT with some tricky stacking, we can make this into a jank source of infinite “sacrifice”. By stacking several activations this card’s ability for 0 cmc, we can keep making our creatures have 0 toughness, thus killing all of our creatures and kicking off any of our revelark combos!
Goblin Charbelcher:
When combined with Goblin Recruiter, this turns into an source of quick burst damage to deal with an individual player or problem creature. Flavorful include that also comes in handy in a pinch!
Goblin Matron:
Another invaluable goblin, this should usually be your first tutor target, as when you play it, you can search for any of the other goblin pieces needed for the combos. Even after it’s in the graveyard, we can easily reanimate it with our commander’s ability to double down on searching for even more goblins. Allows the deck to play as either a heavy creature combo deck or a toolbox of effective goblins.
Grenzo, Dungeon Warden and Wort, Boggart Auntie:
Both of these can be seen as spiritual “alternate commanders.” If playing the deck in a more casual setting, I find myself tutoring for these instead of combo pieces. Grenzo plays well with our commander, able to directly get creatures from our deck into play, or put a relevant piece into our graveyard to be returned at a later date. Same goes for the Auntie. Auntie can be seen as a slower Alesha, able to grind goblins back from the grave again and again.
I’ve added some of the Hideaway lands in the deck to also go along with Grenzo, as we’re able to “stack” the bottom of our deck, ensuring a successful Grenzo trigger.
