Hello,

Anybody can build a quite successful (casual) tribal deck featuring goblins or any other of the tribes featured in the Onslaught block (elves, wizards, clerics, beast etc.) or promoted by block specific mechanics (Champions of Kamigawa spirit decks, slivers etc.). If you want to try something more original for casual play, why not have a look at one of the most overlooked tribes? Yes, I'm talking about those little obscure faeries from long forgotten expansions - the only green flyers as far as I know.

Here's a deck that may not be very strong but which can hold its own in a casual multiplayer environment:

Faerietale

9 Islands
11 Forest
_
20 lands

4 Brass Herald
_
4 artifact creatures

4 Faerie Squadron
4 Sea Sprites
2 Weatherseed Faeries
_
10 blue creatures

4 Sleight of Mind
2 Alter Reality
_
6 blue non-creature spells

2 Scryb Sprites
4 Uktabi Faerie
4 Willow Priestess
2 Faerie Noble
_
12 green creatures

4 Elephant Grass
1 Lifeforce
3 Tribal Unity
_
8 blue non-creature spells

In total, there are 20 faeries in the deck, nearly all of which are cheap to cast, so 20 lands - although a bit low - should suffice. With the exception of Willow Priestess (and a non-kickerd Faerie Squadron), all Faeries have flying, so they should bypass nasty blockers. The Faerie Nobles pump up your faeries. Uktabi Faeries serve as a utility card in order to get rid of problematic artifacts. In addition, you have Brass Heralds, which may be expensive to cast, but which produce card advantage if you manage to find at least one faerie and which pump up your faeries as well. Another non tribe-specific tribal card is Tribal Unity which allows you to pump up all of your faeries quite a lot if you have sufficient mana. Because it is an instant, it serves as a means to alpha strike as well as a combat trick.

To make best use of your protection from red faeries or the Willow Priestess' ability to give any faerie protection from black until end of turn, color-changing spells like Sleight of Mind and Alter Reality are included. In order to enhance this color-hosing theme, I have also included Lifeforce (counters any black spell for GG) and Elephant Grass, which prevents black creatures from attacking (and others as well, but the attacker can pay 2 mana for each attacker to circumvent Elephant Grass) and provides very cheap early defence. The cumulative upkeep requirement doesn't hurt as much if you have a Willow Priestess in play which can be tapped to put a faerie from your hand into play. Be careful not to harm your early game development by dropping a mana-sucking Elephant Grass, though - rather take a little bit of damage until you have an acceptable board position and prevent the damage of the big guns.

Your basic strategy is very basic, indeed: Start attacking with your flying critters early to soften up the opposition and finish them off with pumped up faeries (Faerie Noble, Tribal Unity, Brass Herald). The color hosing has to be adjusted according to the opponents' decks and serves mainly to provide defenders with protection or set up an insurmountable Elephant Grass. Lifeforce is a serious problem with which you can virtually lock your opponent's turns.

The deck has its obvious problems: There is no direct creature removal (that should be taken care of by Elephant Grass, though) and you can't do anything against enchantments (other than eventually countering them with Lifeforce). The low land count might also cause problems in some matches when you cannot cast a Brass Herald or effective Tribal Unity. In order to improve the deck, I suggest you put in two more lands and some Naturalizes.

However, the deck as it is has worked out surprisingly well in practice. Flying faeries with variable protection have proven a big problem for many an opponent. It is also quite satisfying to see the shock on peoples' faces when they realise they're about to get beaten by a bunch of cute little wood sprites with dragonfly wings.

Another advantage of the deck is that it is relatively cheap to build. The major "rares" (Willow Priestess and Faerie Noble) are from Homelands which has a (deservedly) bad reputation so Homelands cards are cheap to get. Sleight of Mind is not so expensive and chances are you have cards with similar effects (changing the text of a spell by changing the color words) from other expansions. Brass Herald and Tribal Unity are readily available uncommons. It should also not be a problem to get older cards like Mirage's Uktabi Faeries or Visions' Elephant Grass.

Hope you've gotten some inspiration for building an original tribal deck.

Oli

(oliver.wenzlaff@westphalen-law.com)