Lathliss, Dragon Queen - Dragon Tribal

Dragonlover
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Post by Dragonlover » 4 years ago




Lathliss, Dragon Queen



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Table of Contents



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Why Lathliss?


The driving logic behind building Lathliss over any of the multitude of other options to head up a dragon deck was maximum dragon for minimum effort. I'd just built Golos so wasn't interested in any of the five colour options, and getting a free token for every dragon incentivises playing a lot of dragons, as opposed to just a few that you combo with a la Scion of the Ur-Dragon. I tend to do the first draft of a deck with the 8x8 method just to organise my thoughts, and this deck had six columns headed up with 'Dragons'. Also monocolour is the easiest manabase construction in existence, which is a blessing after a 5c deck.

The deck snowballs very easily, has a tendency to suffer for a few turns when a wrath happens, and in terms of power level is clearly not tearing up a cEDH table but will happily tangle with a precon without too many issues. For wrath resilience without going too far afield in terms of colours and general strategy, I recommend Bladewing the Risen. Gets you reanimation from the command zone as well as general graveyard play, including tribal all-star Patriarch's Bidding.

In terms of psychographics, this deck is almost pure Timmy, in the classic sense of 'play big things while cackling gleefully'. If swamping the board with giant firebreathing lizards is your idea of a fun time then this is the deck for you. It's also a great entry point into the format in terms of ease of play and budgetary concerns, so even if it's not your general thing then having a copy sleeved up to loan out to potential new players might not be the worst idea.




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Current Decklist

Lathliss, Dragon Queen

Commander:

Tutors:

Approximate Total Cost:





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Budget Considerations

This deck is pretty cheap, and I suspect even with all the vagaries of the singles market will always be cheap outside of a few cards. The expensive stuff is mostly ramp like Extraplanar Lens and Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx, which while nice are not essential. If you're looking to stay in mono-red, I'd replace them with some of the recent enchantments such as Fires of Invention and Sunbird's Invocation, which once you've got going will allow you to keep going without too much input mana wise.

However, if you want to go dragon tribal but you've got all the budget in the world? Scion of the Ur-Dragon if you're feeling more combo-y, The Ur-Dragon if you just want to slam your favourite thirty or so dragons into a deck and back them up with ramp and card draw. For intermediate budgets, there's a few good two or three colour options including Atarka, World Render, Bladewing the Risen, Kolaghan, the Storm's Fury and the classic of Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund.




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Deck Strategy

Early Game Strategy
The ideal opener for this deck is at least three land (preferably four), a cost reducer/mana doubler and some dragons. You want to spend the first 3-5 turns setting up and working out which of your opponents is the most likely to be able to wrath you, because they're your first target. I'll generally play Lathliss out as soon as possible, because she will turbo-charge every subsequent play, and playing Lathliss is the point at which the early game is over. About the only time I won't play Lathliss immediately is if I'm chaining ramp pieces together, because in that case I can usually play Lathliss and a follow up dragon on the same turn. A game where you curve Dragonspeaker Shaman into Extraplanar Lens into Caged Sun is very different to one where you play Lathliss turn 6 with no follow up.

I would also say the quicker your start, the more you have to think about sandbagging a couple of dragons, cause you *will* scare the table and draw a fair bit of focus. It's fairly easy for this deck to have roughly 20 flying power turn four or five, and in my meta at least that's generally when everyone else is starting to move out of the early game so isn't quite at haymaker stage yet.

Mid-Game Strategy
The mid-game for this deck is quite short, probably the two or three turns after you play Lathliss. You hit the table with whatever dragons the deck hands you, making more in the process, and you murder the person most likely to wrath you. Mid-game is also the best time to drop planeswalkers and start ticking them up, if only because it distracts people from the wall of creatures you have. I do want to specifically call out Lukka, Coppercoat Outcast here though. You exile a random 5/5 token that you don't care about, flip over another dragon that actually does things, and replace the token in the process. It's glorious. He'll also dig through the deck for you as well which is good because generally by this point you've emptied your hand. Similarly, you can Indomitable Creativity a whole bunch of your tokens for massive swings in boardstate.

The only real disruption that can cause you issues here is being wrathed. Even if someone kills Lathliss, you still have a board full of flyers. Possibility Storm is a fantastic way to cause your opponents a headache here, because your entire deck is approximately the same things, so you know that you're gonna pay 6 mana, get a beefy flyer, and unless there's a very specific effect you're after you don't really care which beefy flyer it is. As mentioned earlier, I do recommend taking advantage of the fact you're churning out free 5/5's and saving a couple of dragons for if you do have to rebuild after a wrath.



Late-Game
The late game is signified by the fact you've taken out at least one opponent and now the rest of the table is frantically trying to stop the horde of dragons from eating them next. Often, you can just take the other two players in a single swing, but lets assume for a moment that they're stopping the combat win. Your options at this point are:

Scourge of Valkas/Dragon Tempest: If you can get one of these to stick, every dragon is just chunks of damage. Also triggers off the tokens Lathliss makes, so make sure you keep track of what order the triggers are in.

Sarkhan, Dragonsoul: I got to ult this guy once, somehow. Pulled out roughly half the dragons in the deck plus the previously mentioned Scourge of Valkas and dealt some unnecessarily large amount of damage to the table. Absolutely amazing, but a bit telegraphed if anyone is paying attention.

Lukka, Coppercoat Outcast: The ult here is pretty tasty as well, and if you've drawn him late not that hard to get to. I'd initially read it as 'target opponent' and kind of dismissed it, but each opponent? You can easily get 30-40 power on the board late game and just nuke everyone.

Additional stuff to help with the combat finisher includes:

Utvara Hellkite: Yes, it's a bit win more sometimes. Sometimes though, Lathliss is costing you like, 12 mana and you've got a few things in play. You drop this, swing with what you've got and at worst you have same amount of stuff you did before swinging.

Moonveil Dragon: Backup Lathliss basically. Also cheaper to activate, which is really handy. I sometimes find with the 1R I'll be like, one activation off killing the table.






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Card Choice Discussion


Ok so first off, any Dragon not previously mentioned? Probably not vital to the deck beyond the creature type. They all do *something* other than being a vanilla flyer, but generally not something essential. That does give a lot of wiggle room for your own build though, because there's a bunch of cool stuff that sits on that 'french vanilla beater' line that I didn't include, so if you really like Tarox Bladewing because it's got that sweet frame? Sling him in! That said, there are a few that I'm unlikely to cut, and would recommend making sure you include:

Steel Hellkite: Gets around pro-red, gives you some broad spectrum removal.

Hoard-Smelter Dragon: Kills Akroma's Memorial. I mean, it'll deal with a lot of other stuff too, but this deck loses to the Memorial so quickly it's unreal.

Opportunistic Dragon: Slows down opponents by nicking a mana rock, occasionally turns off a general, comes down early if you're not seeing any ramp.

Dragon tribal stuff:

Thunderbreak Regent: There's a Hanna, Ship's Navigator prison deck running all the Arrest variants you can think of in my meta, which this helps to deal with. Acts as a bit of a lightning rod for spot removal, also makes people think twice before going all in on individually tapping your stuff down if they're just gonna take half the damage anyway.

Utvara Hellkite: Who doesn't like swinging with a bunch of dragons and getting more? Massively improved with Dragon Tempest or similar in play, because often you'll just kill half a table.

Dragon's Hoard: This will draw you so many cards. It's not unusual to end up with 20 counters on it, and nobody ever wants to spend removal to get rid of it.

Dragonlord's Servant/Dragonspeaker Shaman: I favour these effects over rocks because they apply to each and every play as long as generic mana is involved somewhere. Having both of these out essentially makes all your dragons half price, which mean you can get to critical mass incredibly fast.

Crucible of Fire: What's better than free 5/5 every turn? A free 8/8 every turn! Makes Lathliss a 3 turn clock by herself with zero input, and if we assume the platonic stats for a dragon is 5/5, essentially adds half a dragon to every single one you play.

Kindred Charge: If casting this doesn't kill a minimum of one player either through triggers or just raw combat damage, something's gone very wrong for you. Absolutely fantastic finisher.

Vanquisher's Banner: The anthem is a bit irrelevant, but you can often just chain dragons together, especially once the cost reducers/mana doublers are in play. Also we're mono-red, so any card draw is a good thing and it doesn't need us to do anything we wouldn't have been doing anyway. Also has a cute synergy with Path of Ancestry, cause if you use the Path you can hopefully scry away something irrelevant and draw into more dragons.

Sarkhan's Triumph: Gets you what you need, when you need it. Also is an instant, so you can use it to set up your Scourge of Valkas turn, but will also toolbox if there's a particular problem you need to deal with. Scourge of Kher Ridges for tokens, Hoard-Smelter Dragon for artifacts, Knollspine Dragon if you're running low on cards and there's a juicy target.

Crucible of the Spirit Dragon: It's not much, but you probably have the odd turn here or there to stock this up. Handy for those starts where you don't see any of your other ramp, in a pinch it gets you a turn 4 or 5 Lathliss so that then you can start curving from her a turn or so early. There's also a non-zero amount of activated abilities, and sometimes that extra few mana into Lathliss will swing the game.


Haven of the Spirit Dragon: Sometimes Scourge of Valkas dies, or Lathliss just gets uncastable from the CZ, so this is in here as backup for those situations.

Path of Ancestry: This is pretty much scry 1 every turn, which is invaluable as there's not a lot of card advantage in here so having something that smooths out draws for zero investment is great.

Sarkhan Fireblood: Turn 3 this guy, turn 4 Lathliss is pretty solid. Also helps dig through land clumps. I don't think I've ever used the ult, but it's handy recovery from a wrath if nothing else.

Sarkhan, Dragonsoul: He's in here purely for the ult, although clearing out X/1 utility creatures while you get there is reasonable too. That ult though. As mentioned, I only managed it once so far, but it will end the game on the spot.

Sarkhan the Masterless: At some point, people are going to start thinking 'that guy has a lot of dragons, but I can probably out-attack him if I strike now'. Not with Sarkhan the Masterless in play they can't. At worst, they'll just lose all their creatures, at best it's mutually assured destruction time. Honestly, this could be an enchantment, but sometimes you get a few extra dragons to swing with with the + ability.

Relevant non-Dragon stuff I haven't already mentioned:

Magmaquake: There was a superfriends deck in my meta when I built this so this got thrown in to help curb that, and now sticks around as another hedge against weenies/tokens alongside Scourge of Kher Ridges.

Panharmonicon: This does so much. The floor is an additional token from Lathliss, but the ceiling is double Scourge of Valkas triggers. Absolute nonsense will happen if this sticks around for any length of time.


Notable Excludes

I'm not running changelings because I didn't think I needed them, and I generally dislike using them in a tribal deck, especially one that has options from nearly every set in the games history. There's also the fact that a lot of them don't have flying, and knowing all your attackers have built in evasion makes life a lot easier when you're swinging with the absolute mess of stuff you can end up with on the board. I'm all about reducing the mental load for both myself and my opponents.

Dragonstorm was in the deck to start with, but you're generally just not going get the storm count to anywhere relevant, so I cut it. Shared Animosity was in the deck to start with as well, but was largely underwhelming. There's various other tribal support stuff and/or new dragons that haven't made it in through a combination of me either not knowing it existed when I built the deck or CV19 meaning it's too new for me to have paid attention to. Of that, Terror of the Peaks, Leyline Tyrant and Cryptic Gateway will likely end up in the deck once I'm seeing the table more often.

I'm not running Sneak Attack or similar effects because I don't want to sacrifice my dragons, I want them to stick around and swing every turn. Nothing wrong with them though, they're undoubtedly powerful and you keep the token if Lathliss is out.




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Change Log
Last edited by Dragonlover 1 year ago, edited 33 times in total.
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Post by Dragonlover » 4 years ago

M20 considerations:

Drakuseth, Maw of Flames: That's a lot of mana, but I might give him a whirl. Siege Dragon seems like a decent option to swap out for him.

Rapacious Dragon: Love the flavour, and assuming it's on curve it'll guarantee turn 6 Lathliss, but after that it's just a 3/3 flyer assuming no shenanigans. Probably doesn't make the cut.

Icon of Ancestry: I think I've found my Shared Animosity replacement.

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Post by Dragonlover » 4 years ago

So I put Panharmonicon in... yeah that's a keeper for sure! Still not grabbed an Icon of Ancestry though, I should get on that.

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Post by Dragonlover » 4 years ago

Throne of Eldraine thoughts:

Opportunistic Dragon: Neutralise a threat, make a dragon? Probably worth a look, I know for a fact there's some fat that can be trimmed for it.

Fires of Invention: I feel like play two dragons, make two Dragons, pump my team with Lathliss is a pretty decent play. I'll cut Sarkhan's Unsealing for it most likely.

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Post by weltkrieg » 4 years ago

Fires of invention seems like quite a good card. However, I would argue that it has serious dissynergy with Possibility storm. You don't want those two out at the same time!

If you can afford to drop lathliss, you can probably play most of the other dragons in your list. Why aren't you running sunbird's invocation? It's a 6 drop, but a stupidly powerful one and probably does a better job than fires of invention.

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Post by Dragonlover » 4 years ago

I had noticed the major nonbo there, I'll just play one or the other and hope not to hit Fires off a Storm trigger, cause that will suck majorly.

The Invocation is a solid call, I think I'd got it in my head that the free spell had to cost less than the one I cast and that's why I didn't run it. If the Fires of Invention turns out to be not as awesome as we'd hope I'll give it a whirl in that slot.

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Post by Dragonlover » 4 years ago

So I've not managed to make any of the previously discussed changes thanks to getting a new job and moving house, but we have a new set to mull over so here we go!

Furious Rise: I mean, I'll nearly always have it turned on, and it's a free card every turn. Gotta be worth a look right? Can be tried in that floating enchantment slot I seem to have acquired.

Purphoros, Bronze-Blooded: One of the rare non-Dragon creatures to be considered. There are times when I don't really care if one of my dragons sticks around, but having its ETB and a swing off it would be really handy. It also halves the mana costs of most of my deck, and will often be a creature in and of itself which is potentially a bonus. The cut? No idea.

Terror of Mount Velus: Yes. So much yes. Probably a bit win more, but sometimes I'll only have a couple of tokens left and this can turn even that into a credible threat. Again, no idea on the cut, I need to play the deck again for a bit and see what's not pulling weight.

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Post by Segrus » 4 years ago

Pretty cool list you've got here! I love dragons, and I have a sorta 'beginner' deck with Lathliss, so I was curious what you'd put together. And after taking a look, you have everything I'd think to put into a Lathliss deck--at least in terms of dragon tribal.

I really only wonder about Kindred Charge. I'm sure it could lead to some cool blowouts with the right cards out, so I'm curious how often you end up doing something like that. How many dragons are you normally able to double up on? 2, 3, 5?

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Post by Dragonlover » 4 years ago

Anywhere between three and eight, if I have many more than that generally I'll win or someone wraths. I'd forgotten Kindred Charge existed, might try it out since it'll make a generic board a bit punchier.

In the context of this deck, a generic board means Lathliss, a couple of tokens and some dragons that have done their thing or just don't have relevant abilities right now beyond the fact they're a big flier.

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Post by Dragonlover » 3 years ago

Another set already? Man time flies.

Not a lot for this since they decided to not have dragons on their big monster plane, a concept I question hard but hey-ho. The tri-colour subtheme would probably have meant anything really cool wouldn't be playable anyway.

From the precons, I'm looking at a couple of cards:

Molten Echoes. I've got enough ETB stuff going on that just having the extra guy come into play will probably be worth it, and a free Dragon to just punt into someones face isn't to be sneezed at. Another one for that enchantment flex slot.

Manascape Refractor: Straight swap for Darksteel Ingot methinks.

As for the main set, there's currently only one card that grabs me: Lukka, Coppercoat Outcast. The first ability is alright, I'm never gonna turn away card draw, but that second ability is nuts. With Lathliss out, that lets me sac a token, get a relevant Dragon and then make a new token to sac next turn. Also the ult is frankly hilarious if I ever pull it off.

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Post by Dragonlover » 3 years ago

Got hold of a Lukka so I've swapped it in for Fireball, since the Fireball is doing very little for me.

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Post by Dragonlover » 3 years ago

So I've submitted this for Primer status given the changes to the guidelines, and have received the first round of feedback. I'm currently working out what to adjust based on the feedback, so figured I'd ask in the thread as well:

What do you think it needs from a purely textual standpoint?

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Post by Toshi » 3 years ago

Dragonlover wrote:
3 years ago
What do you think it needs from a purely textual standpoint?
I would add a page break below your thread title, as it currently "touches" the 3 cards below.
I prefer decklists to show either CMC or mana cost instead of quantity, since we're in a singleton format anyways.
With only eleven $10+ cards, i feel like it wouldn't bloat your box of budget considerations to point them (and alternatives where possible) out.
Personally, i'm not too much of a fan of the saturated blue. A dark red tone would fit this thread perfectly. In case you want to swap its tone and don't feel like sifting for each line, if you copy your text to Word you can easily swap all of them at once with the replace functionality.

Overall it looks good and i really like me some good ol' dragon tribal.

I'd be happy to see you check out my Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle thread reciprocally, but don't feel obliged to, as it's quite a bit to go over.

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Post by Dragonlover » 3 years ago

Toshi wrote:
3 years ago
I'd be happy to see you check out my Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle thread reciprocally, but don't feel obliged to, as it's quite a bit to go over.
Already did yesterday chap!

As to your other points:

Yeah not sure what happened with the formatting at the top, I only noticed that today. Also I remembered I can change the colours from the template the other day while I was at work, red would work a lot better.

The decklist is already able to be toggled to CMC or Mana Cost, but the point is still valid. Can we set a decklist to default to one of the other options?

I'm gonna expand on the budget section a bit I think, possibly also from a perspective of spending more money on the deck what could be added in, although that's likely a project in and of itself.

I'm thinking of adding a section about other ways to do dragon tribal, but again that might be a whole sub-project once I've got the main body of the post sorted out.

Cheers for the feedback!

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Post by Toshi » 3 years ago

Dragonlover wrote:
3 years ago
Toshi wrote:
3 years ago
I'd be happy to see you check out my Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle thread reciprocally, but don't feel obliged to, as it's quite a bit to go over.
Already did yesterday chap!

The decklist is already able to be toggled to CMC or Mana Cost, but the point is still valid. Can we set a decklist to default to one of the other options?
Whoops, i even upvoted your comment! :crazy: Thanks again for reading it, then.

And yes, you can set which "tab" is shown by default.
Just add view="mana" to the base settings of your deck. I haven't found more info on that in the BBCode, but my guess would be that "auto"(board default), "CMC", "prices" and "charts" would be the other options.

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Post by pokken » 3 years ago

Some topics I could see represented:

1. How do you deal with combat hate? You've got just a few ways to deal with stuff like Peacekeeper and Sphere of Safety. Most lathliss decks I've seen play a higher ratio of Pandemonium, Purphoros, God of the Forge and Warstorm Surge type effects. Terror of the Peaks is a hair over the budget threshold but real good. Since you don't have a ton of velocity effects and no real way to tutor for your ETB damage pieces I'd expect to see more of them I think.

2. What's your rebuilding strategy beyond sandbagging dragons and casting Lathliss? It seems to me like if you eat a Akroma's Vengeance and it hits your mana doubler that you're going to be basically out of most games because of lacking velocity and land ramp

3. Your early game seems to rely a lot on the tender mercies of hitting your land drops. Why not any velocity stuff like Light Up the Stage, Gamble, Faithless Looting, maybe even Cathartic Reunion or Thrill of Possibility ? I tend to run Thaumatic Compass // Spires of Orazca and even Armillary Sphere in some mono decks to help smooth out those games where I just need to hit land drops.

It seems like you're pretty balanced to probably ramp and cast dragons, so my guess is you're basically planning on the combination of recasting Lathliss and whatever dragon you topdeck to put 15+ power on the board, which kinda makes sense why you've got the ratio of dragons so high. But might be worth covering that in a little more detail.

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Post by RxPhantom » 3 years ago

May I make a suggestion? How about swapping in Bonders' Enclave for Reliquary Tower? I can't envision this deck often being so flush with cards that it becomes relevant, but drawing a card when you've got some mana around? It's been good in my stompy deck.
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Post by weltkrieg » 3 years ago

I enjoy a good mono red tribal deck. However, there are things I note here.

Spit Flame fire seems like a good inclusion. So many commanders are low to the ground these days. Repeatable dragon based removal seems good.

Cloudstone Curio would be a first rate choice if you get a dragon of some kind out with lathliss. the token returning your cheapest dragon would be great! That said, you did set a budget limit so I think Flameshadow Conjuring would do equally well. I would run both if you can swing it.

I found that in general, vanquisher's banner is awesome in low curve decks that constantly spam 2 or 3 creatures a turn. Elves, goblins, dwarves, zombies, etc. However, it's downright miserable in a deck with 6 cmc dragons (or equally highly costed giants if you had such a deck like I do). If you have the mana, you're better off with Mind's Eye , Endless Atlas ,Book of Rass ,Staff of Nin , etc. You will only draw one each turn most likely, but the banner will be about the same and none of these options depends on casting a dragon.

Similar to the comment about vanquisher's banner, I think that a lot of the cost reduction is underwhelming. Sure, it lets you cheat on the mana cost of a dragon which is expensive. However, you're still playing cmc 6 or better dragons most of the time. This means you're probably playing at most 2 dragons a turn, which puts a straight up mana producer ahead of the cost reduction afforded by Ruby Medallion and similar.

Similarly, unless there's a good reason, why darksteel ingot? I think there are myriad cmc 2 rocks that I would play over this. Fire Diamond , Coldsteel Heart , Star Compass , Fellwar Stone , and Arcane Signet should all be budget and rate higher slots than ingot. If considering there, then I would run Worn Powerstone or Commander's Sphere before any other (see argument regarding reduction for reasoning) . There is a powerful argument to be made for the armillary sphere and other straight up land fetch too.

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Post by Dragonlover » 3 years ago

RxPhantom wrote:
3 years ago
May I make a suggestion? How about swapping in Bonders' Enclave for Reliquary Tower? I can't envision this deck often being so flush with cards that it becomes relevant, but drawing a card when you've got some mana around? It's been good in my stompy deck.
Yeah that seems solid, I've been meaning to cut the Tower from my decks anyway. Also I'll never not consider a suggestion, if I didn't want them I wouldn't post the decklists up.
weltkrieg wrote:
3 years ago
I enjoy a good mono red tribal deck. However, there are things I note here.

Spit Flame fire seems like a good inclusion. So many commanders are low to the ground these days. Repeatable dragon based removal seems good.

Cloudstone Curio would be a first rate choice if you get a dragon of some kind out with lathliss. the token returning your cheapest dragon would be great! That said, you did set a budget limit so I think Flameshadow Conjuring would do equally well. I would run both if you can swing it.

I found that in general, vanquisher's banner is awesome in low curve decks that constantly spam 2 or 3 creatures a turn. Elves, goblins, dwarves, zombies, etc. However, it's downright miserable in a deck with 6 cmc dragons (or equally highly costed giants if you had such a deck like I do). If you have the mana, you're better off with Mind's Eye , Endless Atlas ,Book of Rass ,Staff of Nin , etc. You will only draw one each turn most likely, but the banner will be about the same and none of these options depends on casting a dragon.

Similar to the comment about vanquisher's banner, I think that a lot of the cost reduction is underwhelming. Sure, it lets you cheat on the mana cost of a dragon which is expensive. However, you're still playing cmc 6 or better dragons most of the time. This means you're probably playing at most 2 dragons a turn, which puts a straight up mana producer ahead of the cost reduction afforded by Ruby Medallion and similar.

Similarly, unless there's a good reason, why darksteel ingot? I think there are myriad cmc 2 rocks that I would play over this. Fire Diamond , Coldsteel Heart , Star Compass , Fellwar Stone , and Arcane Signet should all be budget and rate higher slots than ingot. If considering there, then I would run Worn Powerstone or Commander's Sphere before any other (see argument regarding reduction for reasoning) . There is a powerful argument to be made for the armillary sphere and other straight up land fetch too.
I don't think I knew Spit Flame existed. Might try and find a spot for it, cause that will deal with a lot of commanders for very little investment.

So I've actually been thinking about Curio recently, as I'm convinced there's a combo build of this deck that I'm just not Johnny enough to spot, but I hadn't realised it triggered off tokens. I've got one somewhere I think, definitely worth a look. Flameshadow Conjuring is one of those cool red enchantments I mentioned that I keep wanting to add, I think I need to go through, take out about the ten worst dragons and just give their slots to some of this other stuff.

I see what you're saying on the Vanquisher's Banner, but I've found it just keeps me ticking over nicely. If I do end up cutting a bunch of dragons though I'll look into another option, since that'll probably drop the trigger frequency enough that something a bit more non-conditional will be more relevant.

I feel like the rocks v reducers is a bit six of one, half a dozen of the other. 10 land and a rock gets me a 6 drop and a 5 drop, 10 land and a 1 mana reducer gets me two 6 drops. The rocks admittedly have more utility in the case of non-Dragons, which again if I find myself upping the count of those may mean I take another look at them.

I'm pretty sure Darksteel Ingot was just the mana rock I could see while building the deck, it's getting swapped for Arcane Signet when I bother to open the Commander precons I bought last year.

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Post by pokken » 3 years ago

Cloudstone Curio Mana Echoes Phyrexian Altar probably enables something, but that's quite a handful :p

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Post by weltkrieg » 3 years ago

I don't know about combo, but I was thinking any of the cheaper "dragons" like dragon hatchling with lathliss and curio means 1R, make a 5/5 flying dragon token. It works even better with Slumbering Dragon . It's not infinite, but it sure makes a lot of flying lizards!

If you want to combo, then the new Birgi, God of Storytelling // Harnfel, Horn of Bounty works pretty well for this too. Curio, birgi, slumbering dragon, and lathliss is infinite dragon tokens and infinite etb triggers.

Note that if you do combo, then disregard what I said about cost reduction. Spamming cheap dragons makes cost reduction extremely good.

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Post by Dragonlover » 2 years ago

So, I got probably 95% of the way through Primerising the deck, then lost all interest through a combination of general Covid slump and having to justify why I'm not running a bunch of tribal stuff that I didn't actually know about when building the deck cause it's all old as hell and I'd forgotten it existed. Once I'm playing more regularly I'll probably track some of those cards down and take them for a whirl.

In the meantime, I added Obsidian Charmaw today, taking out Demanding Dragon for it. The slow improvement of the dragon base continues!

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Post by Dragonlover » 1 year ago

There's been a surprising lack of really cool mono-r Dragons that also fit the deck this past year. Luckily, there's a few in Baldurs Gate.

However, there's also Miirym, Sentinel Wyrm. This is just Lathliss but turbo charged. I'm 99.9% sure I'm just changing the deck to Miirym, I get proper ramp, some card draw, access to sweet stuff like Atarka, World Render and Dragonlord Atarka, and I'm pretty sure I can still keep about 50% of what's currently in the deck, so it's an overhaul rather than a totally new deck. So no set review here, other than to say I'll be getting Ganax, Astral Hunter regardless, that card is bonkers. As is Wrathful Red Dragon.

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Post by Dragonlover » 1 year ago

So I changed my mind, and that 0.1% chance happened. This is staying as Lathliss. I'm not particularly enthused about building a more complicated manabase to do the same thing as this does, but with better tokens. I'd rather just make this deck work better within the restrictions of being mono red and getting very erratic upgrades to its creatures.

Got hold of Ganax, Astral Hunter and Wrathful Red Dragon over the weekend though, and someones gonna give me a Carnelian Orb of Dragonkind which can go in for the Darksteel Ingot that I am somehow still running.

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Post by Dragonlover » 1 year ago

Ok, been playing the deck a bit more over the last few weeks, time to give it a much needed overhaul. I am taking out the following cards:

Tyrant of Valakut
Skyline Despot
Knollspine Dragon
Scourge of Kher Ridges
Kilnmouth Dragon
Ancient Hellkite
Dream Pillager
Drakuseth, Maw of Flames
Spawn of Thraxes

It's basically most of the dragons that cost more than Lathliss. I kept Utvara Hellkite because its a deeply silly card, and Balefire Dragon because sometimes all of someones creatures need to die.

In their places, I'm gonna incorporate some of the stuff that's been mentioned upthread. Current contenders looks roughly like this:

Cryptic Gateway
Carnelian Orb of Dragonkind
Spit Flame
Sunbird's Invocation
Terror of the Peaks
Flameshadow Conjuring
Icon of Ancestry
Atsushi, the Blazing Sky
Armillary Sphere

Currently deciding against the combo package, but that's largely cause I have no idea where my Curio went and I don't fancy dropping roughly 60 quid on a single card right now. Although I just checked MKM and they're a lot cheaper than that on there... hmm, one to rethink maybe.

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