Welcome all to Standard Deck Tech week here on the Daily Dose of Hour of Devastation. This week I'll be taking some of the new cards from Hour of Devastation and incorporating them into some new Standard decks to use during the upcoming season. The decision on which deck to talk about first this week wasn’t difficult, since I have four cats at home. Today I’m going to be talking about a Cat deck.
Cat creatures come in two prominent colours, green and white, so that's where we'll begin.
When building through a deck idea, you want to make sure you look at all possible cards that could be used and make sure that you have the right fit for the deck that you're trying to make. I like to look at subsets of cards to help me figure out what should go in the deck. In each subset of cards, I’ll choose which cards would work well in the deck, and which cards would work well in the sideboard.
First off, let’s talk about Cats. This deck will be making lots of Cats, but unfortunately not all of them make the cat (I mean cut). Here are the Cat creature cards currently available in Standard:
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Aetherstream Leopard
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Felidar Cub
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Felidar Sovereign
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Graceful Cat
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Initiate’s Companion
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Longtusk Cub
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Pouncing Cheetah
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Prowling Serpopard
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Regal Caracal
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Riparian Tiger
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Sacred Cat
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Scrounging Bandar
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Scythe Leopard
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Stalking Tiger
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Watchers of the Dead
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Wily Bandar
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Pride Sovereign
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Adorned Pouncer
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Cards that made the cut for either main deck or sideboard
Longtusk Cub – This is one of the strongest Cat creatures in the game. It can grow stronger and often make your opponent come up with some bad blocks just so that it doesn’t continue to grow.
Prowling Serpopard – This awesome Cat Snake has four power, three toughness and some great abilities to help you against control decks.
Regal Caracal – This Cat lord will make sure you have plenty of creatures on the battlefield and gaining a lot of life in the mean time.
Pride Sovereign – This Cat can get quite large quickly while bringing more Cats onto the battlefield. It can become a 5/5 on turn four most of the time, and works very well with Regal Caracal.
Adorned Pouncer – This two-for-one value creature could become too big for your opponent to deal with if you're able to Eternalize it. Beware the double striking Cat!
With Longtusk Cub in the deck, the next subset of cards I started looking at were Energy cards. Here are some of the cards that could work well in the deck:
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Attune with Aether
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Aether Hub
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Bristling Hydra
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Greenbelt Rampager
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Highspire Infusion
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Servant of the Conduit
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Aethersphere Harvester
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Cards that made the cut for either main deck or sideboard
Aether Hub – This land just makes sense. It will help us make sure we can play our creatures on curve, while providing extra Energy as well.
Attune with Aether – This can be used to replace some of the lands in the deck. It will help thin out the deck as well as provide crucial Energy to be used for Longtusk Cub and other Energy hungry cards.
Servant of the Conduit – With some four and five mana cards looking to be in the deck, this card is a way to ramp up to those spells while also providing extra Energy if needed as well.
Greenbelt Rampager – This is a great early game play to get some Energy and get out an early game 3/4 creature to do some damage.
Next, I want to look at other powerful cards from green and white to see if they could work well and fit in the deck that I’m trying to create:
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Ajani Unyielding
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Oath of Ajani
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Renegade Rallier
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Majestic Myriarch
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Gideon, Ally of Zendikar
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Rhonas the Indomitable
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Nissa, Voice of Zendikar
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Oketra the True
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Angel of Invention
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Archangel Avacyn
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Thalia, Heretic Cathar
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Anointed Procession
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Oath of Nissa
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Verdurous Gearhulk
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Cards that made the cut for either main deck or sideboard
Majestic Myriarch – With tons of Cats running around the battlefield, this creature can get out of control quickly. Some of the stats that it can get based on what creatures are in the deck are double Strike, lifelink, deathtouch, trample, indestructible, and vigilance. It’s like having my very own Chromanticore in the deck!
Gideon, Ally of Zendikar – Everyone knows how great this card is, but it has a bonus of being able to get an Emblem to make all our Cats even bigger!
Rhonas the Indomitable – This I believe will be a crucial creature in the deck as it will be able to make our Cats large and in charge.
Oketra the True – It won’t be very hard to attack or block with this honorary Cat creature as you have cards like Regal Caracal and Pride Sovereign that represent three other creatures by themselves.
Anointed Procession – With five prominent cards in the deck making tokens, this seems like a great addition to get extra value from all those cards.
Another subset of cards I want to have a look at, are those that can help protect my creatures and help remove their threats on the battlefield:
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Blessed Alliance
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Blossoming Defense
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Prepare // Fight
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Cast Out
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Immolating Glare
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Gideon’s Defeat
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Cards that made the cut for either main deck or sideboard
Prepare // Fight – This will be a great way to get in with Longtusk Cub in the early game and protect your creatures. Use this as a great removal spell later in the game. Great card to untap Pride Sovereign as well.
Immolating Glare – Another great removal spell which will allow you to take care of larger creature threats attacking you that your own creatures can’t deal with.
Gideon’s Defeat – This is a sideboard must to be used against cards like Gideon, Ally of Zendikar.
Cast Out – Great all-around removal spell which will help you deal with cards you wouldn’t normally be able to deal with just with your creatures or other removal spells.
Blossoming Defense – Could be brought in against removal heavy decks who are looking to take out your early threats.
Now that we have picked which cards will work for our deck, it’s time to decide how many of each will constitute our final deck. Most of the time when first building the initial deck, you'll have too many cards in your deck and will have to shave it down to 60 cards. Let’s start by figuring out our initial mana base and how many lands we want to have in the deck. With four Attune with Aether in the deck, you will only need 21 lands to complete the mana base. Here's my initial mana base:
- 4 Aether Hub
- 4 Canopy Vista
- 4 Fortified Village
- 6 Forest
- 3 Plains
Let’s take the cards have passed our initial first pass of cards and add them into our deck without any numbers associated with them. One of things you mind find is that you have too many cards to fit in one deck. Let’s see what it looks like with just one of every card in the deck, except for our initial mana base.
Now that we have an outline for the deck, join me tomorrow for part two of the Green White Energy Cats deck as I break down the final numbers and see what the finalized deck looks like. Thanks for reading this Standard Deck Tech and I look forward to seeing you again tomorrow!
