This week I have a spicy little tribal deck for you guys, one that isn’t from Ixalan Block. Today we are looking at Kaladesh’s answer to Vampires- Construct Tribal.
This is an aggressive deck that can explode out of the gates before finishing the game off with some tribal synergies.
Our curve opens with Bomat Courier and Merchant’s Dockhand. Bomat is always a good card, as has been shown by its Ramunap fame. It lets us get aggressive early on, and can be cycled later on. Merchant’s Dockhand also provides us with some quick starts, but more importantly it is our tribal Azcanta, the Sunken Ruin during board stalls. The Dockhand can take over games, something that an aggro deck doesn’t always have access to.
Moving into the two mana slots we continue to play cards that are just good in their own right. First, we have the obvious playset of Metallic Mimic. This is an auto include, and is almost always the best turn two play. It also allows for some super powerful sequences alongside Walking Ballista.
Ballista has always been good, and probably always will be, but here it’s even better. We can put extra counters on it and make it cost less with our tribal synergies, plus it provides reach and is an easy answer to a lot of aggressive strategies. Finally, we have Scrapheap Scrounger, a resilient threat that can make a ridiculously fast clock. This causes headaches for all decks, and that’s why I love it.
Our curve tops out at three mana with our big tribal cards. Both Chief of the Foundry and Foundry Inspector are just plain good. Chief of the Foundry is our lord, plain and simple. Its job is to buff our team, and it always does it. It is reliability in a nutshell.
Foundry Inspector is less simple. Whilst it may look somewhat weak at a first glance, this is the best card in the entire deck. Our one drops are suddenly free, and we can often cast a Walking Ballista with two counters for one or even zero mana with a little help from Mimic. These cards are the glue that sticks the deck together, but they're not just any old glue, they are industrial superglue.
The final non-removal spell is Pia’s Revolution. Originally I was running Scrap Trawler, but it just required too much set up. Revolution will either provide near infinite resilience or a lot of reach before our opponent even realizes they are in trouble.
Fatal Push, Abrade and Lightning Strike act as our removal suite. All of them get rid of early blockers, which is all we really need. Of course, you may be questioning why I didn’t just opt for a playset of either of the burn spells. By playing the combination we have far more versatility. Not only can we hit creatures, but we can now also hit Planeswalkers, players, and artifacts. Essentially, there should never be an early play we cannot answer.
Since most of our cards don’t require coloured mana to cast, we can spice up our lands a little bit. We have Scavenger Grounds for Graveyard and Control decks and Field of Ruin for all those pesky pain lands and transform lands. They might not seem like much, but these little additions improve those matchups by a significant amount.
Now that we’ve seen the deck, let's talk match ups and Sideboarding.
R/x Aggro
The way we play this match is very player and hand dependent. We can sometimes race them, but often we prefer taking the controlling role.
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Grixis/ UB Energy
We should try to adopt the aggressive role here. A good habit to get into is gauging how controlling your opponent’s deck is as early as possible since we don’t want to over play into a board wipe.
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Control
Our resilience really helps here and we should be favoured for game one. Sideboarding is relatively easy, just don’t get caught out by Regal Caracal or something similar post-board.
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Tokens
This is definitely not a good match up for us. We really struggle to hit through the constant blockers game one, where our best chance is to get really aggressive and and hope they can't stabilize. It’s still not great after sideboarding, but it’s certainly better.
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Vehicles
This should go in our favour game one, but do not play into a Settle the Wreckage, because that is just game over. We will go into the post board games almost unchanged, but only because we are already good. When on the play Negate should also come in to counter an early Heart of Kiran.
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GB Constrictor
This is a hard one for us, but if we can get really tribal we can often out value them. It also helps that our removal matches up pretty well against their early pieces, giving us a few key turns.
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God-Pharaoh’s Gift
We match up pretty well against this deck game one thanks to our graveyard and artifact hate in addition to our fast clock. Sideboarding here just improves an already good match up. The only way we lose this is a turn four GPG with Angel of Invention in the graveyard.
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Side Note
Since I talk about Standard, I just wanted to quickly mention the Challenger Decks coming out on April 6th. These are a set of competitive Standard pre-constructed decks that WotC is releasing. There are a total of four decks, each playing as a popular and successful Standard archetype: Red Aggro, Mardu Vehicles, GB Constrictor and UW Approach.
They really hit the ball out of the park with these. If you are looking to get into Standard in the next few months, I would be looking at these as my way to play. I won’t be surprised when people start winning FNM and Standard Showdown with these lists. You can check them out right here.
Anyway guys, as usual thanks for reading and feel free to buy this deck from the store if it appeals to you. If you have any questions then don’t hesitate to send me a message on my Facebook.
