All posts by Darren

Dinosaur Tribal Brawl Deck

Deck tech, magic, MtG, MtG Deck Building

This post will come as no surprise to anyone, especially after I said I’d put this list up in my previous post on Brawl. Yep jumping on the bandwagon like so many on the interweb whether they are youtubers or just players of the game, I’m putting up a Brawl deck list.

But before I start talking any more shite about deck building etc, I’m not claiming to be a brilliant deck builder, or that this is the greatest deck ever. This like the other decks I’ve put up here on the blog are just that decks I’ve built and enjoyed playing and decided to share with the world. Remember I don’t take part in FNM, or competitions, I’m just a casual player who enjoys building decks to play with. Feel free to suggest improvements, glaring mistakes, explain to me why my commander is the worst one ever, or why card X is better than card Y in the comments. If you haven’t commented before I need to approve your first comment but after that you don’t need me to approve anything. It’s just a little anti spam measure that hopefully isn’t too much of a hinderance.

For my first Brawl deck list I’ve gone with a dinosaur tribal deck based upon my dinosaur tribal Commander deck. With that as my starting point I first removed all the none Standard legal cards. This included all those cards not in Standard but legal in Commander, plus any cards that are banned in Standard (which in my Commander deck was 2 cards). That left me with around 74 cards. 14 too many for a Brawl deck.

Naturally I’m sticking with the same commander, Zacama, Primal Calamity. I don’t like playing against him. He’s so oppressive. In our meta once he’s out with the mana to back him up he’s stomping all over the battlefield. It’s basically game over. But how did I select which creatures stayed and which didn’t? With none of the Commander staples for mana ramp, the creatures that tapped for mana or gave me a discount had to stay. The Elder dinos were going to stay, then I went with creatures that gave me some ability when played, and stayed away from those that had the enrage ability in general. When I looked at the deck list when writing the post I thought I’m light on lands. Ideally there should be 23/24. But then I remembered with the creatures that tap for mana or give a discount, plus enchantments that increase the mana I can tap for, Growing Rites of Itlimoc, and Immortal Sun there is a bit of ramp and extra mana hidden elsewhere. There is also some tutoring with Commune, Forerunner, and Harvest Season. So with the tools or should that be cards? That I have this ain’t too bad a deck.

Here are the pretty pics the Decked app generates for me.


So the Brawl version has a slightly higher AMC to the Commander deck which has an AMC of 4.19.

So after all that waffle here is my first Brawl deck, Dinosaur Tribal.

Counts : 60 main

Creatures:27

1 Kinjalli’s Caller
1 Drover of the Mighty
1 Otepec Huntmaster
1 Raptor Hatchling
1 Atzocan Seer
1 Deathgorge Scavenger
1 Frilled Deathspitter
1 Kinjalli’s Sunwing
1 Ranging Raptors
1 Thrashing Brontodon
1 Forerunner of the Empire
1 Knight of the Stampede
1 Ripjaw Raptor
1 Charging Monstrosaur
1 Charging Tuskodon
1 Crested Herdcaller
1 Raging Swordtooth
1 Regisaur Alpha
1 Burning Sun’s Avatar
1 Carnage Tyrant
1 Etali, Primal Storm
1 Gishath, Sun’s Avatar
1 Polyraptor
1 Wakening Sun’s Avatar
1 Zetalpa, Primal Dawn
1 Zacama, Primal Calamity
1 Ghalta, Primal Hunger

Spells:14

1 By Force
1 Commune with Dinosaurs
1 Silent Gravestone
1 Abrade
1 Blood Sun
1 Crushing Canopy
1 Gift of Paradise
1 Growing Rites of Itlimoc
1 Harvest Season
1 New Horizons
1 Fumigate
1 Vanquisher’s Banner
1 The Immortal Sun
1 Star of Extinction

Lands:19

5 Forest
6 Mountain
5 Plains
1 Scattered Groves
1 Stone Quarry
1 Sunpetal Grove

Aaah Grasshopper

Game day

My formative tv years were the 70’s and 80’s. I grew up watching “classics” like Kung Fu, The Water Margins, and Monkey, among many others.

But you are probably thinking wtf has this got to do with board games? Today I was meant to be playing Mechs vs Minions with Diego at our usual gaming hang out. However there was a little hiccup in the plan. Yep where we planned to play wasn’t actually open because of the bank holiday. So we had to go to an alternate venue to play. Naturally the new place Wetherspoons isn’t ideal for Mechs and Minions. So I had quickly nipped back home, and picked up a selection of 2 player games more suitable for a pub environment.

Yes I know I still haven’t established a link, bare with me.

Out of the selection of games I’d taken along we went with my kickstarter deluxe copy of Tao Long: The Way of The Dragon. Yes I was finally getting the game to the table. Within the game there are several modes to the game play. There is a novice/rookie mode called Grasshopper, then an intermediate mode called Monk, followed by the Master mode, and then finally a “The Chosen One” mode. As you advance the more sophisticated the game play gets, until you get to the The Chosen One Level.


Which as the screenshot above shows from the rules is pretty intense.

But it’s that rookie grasshopper mode that is my link to the opening sentence. Who from my generation would not think of that classic series and the flashbacks to the monetary and Caine’s journey to enlightenment? Or even the British comedians who did comedy skits based on those scenes on 70’s tv?

But back to the game. The components in this edition of the game, and the neoprene board are fantastic, and despite a simplicity stunning. And for being in essence an abstract game really generates an oriental feel to the game. I like Tsuro, but for me this is going to be my duelling dragons game of choice. It has that aerial battle feel, but with more strategy involved.

The strategy comes in the form of the Ba Gau part of the board where you select the action you want to take. There is some hard decision making going on here. You want/have to take a move, but if you do it leaves your opponent open to attack you, or manoeuvre into a more favourable position. This is surprisingly deep considering how simple a mechanic it is. But in Master mode it gets even deeper and more complicated! But we didn’t play at that level today.

If you rethemed this game as light cycles, it could be the light cycle arena from Tron (a movie I love) or a board game of snake (That old Nokia game).

We played the following map layouts: The Field, The Valley, The Gorge, The Torus, and The Cave.

Naturally our first game was The Field while we got used to the rules, flow of a turn, and discovered a couple of misplays. We then worked our way through the map layouts introducing new game elements such as portals and obstacles. We hit The Torus and it’s much smaller play area last and played about 4 games with that layout. Out of 8 games I won just 1. Yes Diego royally kicked my butt at this game. The only break in our games was when we stopped to consume out burger and chips for lunch. Hey it’s the safest thing they do at spoons. Very little for them to get wrong.

Despite that thrashing from Diego I enjoyed playing the game. It joins a handful (if that) of great abstract games I have in my collection now. I think Tao Long will make it in the bag for games to take to UKGE to hopefully play.

I did have my revenge on Diego afterwards by boring him with how I don’t get these youtubers and what kids see in them. Plus other ramblings of some-one who has seen better years. But still a great day gaming with a great friend, who will make a fantastic dad when his daughter arrives at the end of the month.

Easter Pulls Part 3

magic, MtG

A little Easter day fun to start off the third and final post on my Easter pulls. Why I didn’t think to do something like this earlier I don’t know. Personally I think Nico would make a rather good Planeswalker. He certainly could replace Nicol Bolas for scheming. Not long after Loki arrived I remember having both dogs on my lap and catching Nico shoving Loki off onto the floor when he thought I wasn’t looking! Mind you Loki is just as evil. Take this morning for example when I thought he was just after some attention, a little tummy rub. Oh no he came over and threw up all over me. I tell you these attack chihuahuas are pure evil.

So let’s get on and look at the last of my Easter pulls.


What a final 3 packs. Thalia was one I’d seen in the spoilers etc and a “that would be nice to have, but…” so to pull her is a real treat. Caustic Tar Pit is a nice pull, and will go into a Commander deck, maybe my revisited Scarab God deck. Highland Lake a land, always want them. Stoneforge Masterwork is screaming tribal deck to me.

Advance warning, this Friday sees the Challenger decks and final ever Duel deck hitting your FLGS. Got mine ordered and paid for. So look out for some coverage of those.

Easter Pulls Part 2

magic, MtG

So here we are Saturday, day 2 of opening the booster packs I bought. Apart from Timber Gorge, I wasn’t really over thrilled by these 3 packets. Nothing really jumped out for decks that I’m currently brewing.

Yesterday I caught an announcement by CardKingdom that they have added a new product to their offerings. As long suffering readers will sadly recall I like their rookie and battle decks. So when CardKingdom announce they will be now be selling limit copies of a cube for $99 then I’m interested. This is aimed at those who want to start obviously playing MtG and draft using a cube. The cube being offered by CardKingdom is a 360 card cube, which supports between 4 – 8 players drafting. If at the end of April they have any left I’m going to treat myself to one as a 50th birthday present to myself and to celebrate my new job that I’ll be starting at the start of May. Oh yeah I’m moving on. My time at my current employer is coming to an end. I’ll maybe write more about this in May. I’ve been interested in the cube format for a while, just not enough to do anything about it. However the announcement yesterday got me thinking about it again. I like the idea of building a tribal themed cube, using elves, goblins, vampires, and menfolk with possibly a fifth tribe that I’m undecided about.

Easter Pulls Part 1

magic, MtG

As I threatened yesterday when I told you about my Easter present to myself, here is the first post with the pulls from the first three packs.

I’m really happy with Utopia Sprawl, Weirding Wood, Ensnaring Bridge, Corrupted Crossroads and Submerged Boneyard. The first two will fit nicely into my Elf Tribal Commander deck that I’m working on. The other two, well, it’s always good to have more land options when deck building. Why didn’t I mention Joraga? I already have her, and her inclusion in the that elf deck will be dependent on which Commander I choose. I haven’t made that decision yet. I can see Ensnaring Bridge being a good card to put in a Commander deck to shut down those decks that like to swing in with big creatures.

See you in tomorrow’s post.

My Easter Treat

Uncategorized

It’s the start of the Easter holidays, and I decided my Easter present to myself would be 9 booster packs of this little card game called Magic the Gathering.

So starting tomorrow I will open 3 packs and post my pulls on here. And then I’ll repeat that for the following 2 days.

While I was choosing my packs at my FLGS, I put my order in for pre-release weekend. Along with which of the Summer releases I wanted.

Oh one for the diary it’s MtG Open House again on the 14th April at your FLGS.

I’m so tempted by Star Wars Legion which has just been released over here. But I don’t know anyone who is getting it, or wants to get it and play. So I’m loathe to invest time and more importantly money into it. It’s not as if I’m getting some of my more miniature heavy games like Imperial Assault, Zombicide, and The Others to the table. So if I’m struggling to get them played it’s going to be even harder to get a miniatures game to the table. It’s not like I was playing X-Wing every week when I had that. That’s the drawback of living in the back of beyond.

Brawl Play First Impressions

magic, MtG

So the curiosity for brawl has been satisfied. I thought I’d be writing this over the Easter hols. But I managed to get 3 games in yesterday. So here are my initial impressions of the new format.

I was going to build a dinosaur tribal deck over the weekend. But then I had the bright idea of using my dinosaur tribal commander deck as the basis for the brawl deck. As it turned out after I removed all the non-standard legal cards from the deck I was left with 59 cards, I added a single extra basic land, and that became my dinosaur tribal deck for brawl. My second deck was a mono green deck (deck list in another post) that was going to try and abuse etb effects and energy counters.

One of my students knocked together a menfolk deck from the cards he had with him. So lending my dino tribal deck to another student we played some games of brawl.

We played 3 games in about an hour forty. So brawl games are a little quicker then Commander games. Or can be. Playing it the games are basically commander. So if you like Commander then you will like playing brawl I think. The deck building side is challenging not having the Commander staples to call upon. But that’s an interesting twist and constraint to the deck building. Sometimes there isn’t an alternative and you have to work around it. For instance my mono green deck may have to evolve to a different commander so that I can splash in a second colour and get access to some board wipes of some description. I felt that was an element that the deck was missing when I played it.

The games were fun. The speed of the games did surprise me. The games we played I enjoyed, despite not winning. Although today as I write this I did get to play my dino tribal deck and stomped my way to glory. It’s not nice being on the other end of this dino deck. I can testify to that from yesterday. I’m almost coming to the conclusion that Zacama is too powerful. Once that hits the battlefield mid game, with lots of land to use to pay for it’s abilities, it’s almost game over. Well that’s how it appears in the local meta at the moment.

For me I think brawl will be for when I want that Commander experience but don’t have the time to play Commander, like during a lunch break for instance.

Current bloomin play me already games

Uncategorized

Sometimes games sit there on the gaming shelf eating away at your conscience saying “Play me, play me”.

Here are three games I haven’t played since getting them that I’d really like to get to the table soon, and are screaming at me to play them.

I got Homeland for a bargain tenner in the later half of 2017. It had reasonable reviews at the time, at that price a steal. Hidden traitor games are fun. Just need to get the right players together to try it. Naturally the other two are kickstarters that arrived in 2018, and yeah I want to get them to the table.

Existing games I want to play


I have the new expansion for Cry Havoc, and the first expansion for Kemet. So naturally I want to play these games with the new stuff. Scythe I just want to play again with those lovely airships from The Wind Gambit expansion.

Let’s brawl

magic, MtG, news

Last week WotC made some interesting announcements. Announcements that I’m pretty sure a few MtG podcasts whichever format they cover will discus, dissect, and over analyse with far superior insight than myself.

First up WotC announced a new format for MtG. A kind of Commander lite, called Brawl.

Brawl is meant to be an easier version of Commander for new players to get into. Here is a brief summary of the brawl specific rules:

  • 60 card Singleton (apart from basic lands there can only be a single copy of a card in the deck) decks
  • 30 starting life
  • Only legal cards in Standard can be used
  • Commanders can be legendary creatures or Planeswalkers
  • No commander damage

Otherwise it follows the Commander rules for everything not covered above.

I’m not sure how I feel about this new format. I’m definitely curious. But there is some doubt about do we really need it? Why not just play Commander? If you read the WotC articles that have gone up about the format and the announcements tied up with it, they argue it has a lower barrier to entry, easier to get into, than Commander especially for new players to the game with smaller collections (which may be just the current set released). It’s interesting to see that WotC see Brawl as an introduction to Commander and Standard. I thought the new Challenger decks were/would serve as that. The question I have is this just a format to sell more booster packs? If this takes off won’t it just push up the price of cards in standard, and thus making the barrier to entry to standard even more expensive? Which is something I thought they didn’t want to do.

I don’t see getting into Commander as that expensive or with the imminent arrival of Challenger decks Standard also. Buying a precon for Commander and upgrading it doesn’t have to be an expensive thing to do. Recently I under took that very exercise with the 2017 Arcane Wizardry precon. After putting my amazing google ninja skills to work I found an article that did a $20 upgrade for the deck (I’ve now ordered the cards from a sister post for the dragons precon). But there are a few articles/videos out there with tips for upgrading them. And I would imagine that not long after the Challenger decks hit, that a few articles will appear on how to upgrade them. Once you get a precon you start to get some of the Commander staples that are needed for building your own decks.

Naturally as a format this is going to have a changing card base. So for Commander players there are going to be a few challenges in building these Brawl decks because all of a sudden staples like Sol Ring are gone. How do you mana ramp in Standard? With that shifting card base decks will also need to change, and I can see certain styles of play coming and going. A deckbuilders paradise.

I think there will be some interesting decks built for Brawl. I’m working on 2 at the moment. Mainly because I want to at least try the format. So our MtG tournament over Easter will now be a Brawl tournament instead of a Commander tournament. I’m doing the 2 decks so that Dale can join in. One will be a Dino tribal deck which will be the one I’ll give to Dale to play. Whilst mine is probably going to be mono green, trying to use the etb effect to my advantage. I’d like to keep bouncing creatures to get multiple etb use from a card. But I need to solve how to do that in Standard.

Tied up with the new format is the poster child for it, the buy a box promo legendary creature, Firesong and Sunspeaker Minotaur Cleric.


This card will only be available as a promo and only when you buy a booster box while stocks last. I think it’s pre-orders only too. But I may be wrong on that front. So yes like many I’ll probably be building a deck with it as the commander. Although I gather there may be some complaints about this exclusivity.

The final announcement was that WPN authorised stores (ie your FLGS) are allowed to sell booster boxes a week early at the pre-release events! Great news for the FLGS (especially US ones that have to compete with the likes of massive chains like Walmart for your MtG money, UK FLGS don’t have that competition yet to my knowledge). Pre-release weekend is going to be massive for the FLGS. But is it only shifting sales from one weekend to another? Hopefully it will get more people taking part in the pre-release events.

What do you think about this news? If you haven’t commented before I need to approve your first comment then after that you can comment as often as you like without my approval. This was the least intrusive way to cut out on spam. So I hope it hasn’t put too many folks off from leaving comments.

Rivals of Ixalan Commander Favourites Part 2

Commander, magic, MtG

And I’m back with the second post looking at cards from Rivals of Ixalan that I like for Commander.

The first card for this post is Mastermind’s Acquisition. A 4 CMC black sorcery that allows you to tutor (that’s MtG talk I believe for search) for a card in either your library or outside the game. So you can bet I’m taking a pile of ‘useful’ cards with me to Commander games when I have this in my deck. Those ‘useful’ cards will for me be those cards that very nearly made it in to the 99. My reasoning is if they were good enough to be almost in, then they are good enough to be in what will effectively be a sideboard. The reason I’d take this approach is it’s less hassle than taking my whole collection along to games with me.

Although there are 6 of them, this is only really one choice, and it’s the Elder dinosaurs. These are BFD’s (Think about it). I think one or two are slightly weaker than the others. But if you need a big hitter with a nice added bonus then these fit in nicely to any none tribal deck. Etali is the commander for my mono red deck, with Zacama the commander of my dinosaur tribal deck. I think that that should tell you what I think of those cards.