MTGNexus

Does anyone out there play or even have a rainbow deck? I love rainbow decks, myself, I have four of them.

My elemental tribal (all lands, creatures, nothing else) goes for total creature synergy. Featuring mostly elementals from Lorwyn block, it adds Thunderkin Awakener with Incandescent Soulstoke and Reveillark to keep stuff cycling in and out and back into play, with Nova Chaser as the heavy-hitter. I destroy creatures, draw cards, direct damage creatures, gain life, destroy artifacts and enchantments, buff creatures, mana dork ramp, tutor, graveyard manipulate, force opponents to discard, and abuse the heck out of etb/ltb effects. My friend likes to call it "the machine". It is common to see it swing for 15-25 pts per turn without tokens.

Another one I actually call Skittles, using all five Alara shard 3-pip creatures like Naya Hushblade, bigs are Maelstrom Archangel and Fusion Elemental, all so that Knight of New Alara can pump them to ridiculous size. Pernicious Deed, Bant Charm, and Crackling Doom handle permanent wrangling while All Suns' Dawn and Kiss of the Amesha keep my hand and life full, and my graveyard as a second hand.

A third rainbow is a token matters deck, and the 4th is the Dungeons and Dragons deck I recently made and posted.

What do you wield when you taste the rainbow?

Despite having a landbase with nearly all the trimmings (save OG duals), I've never been able to build a 5c deck with any degree of satisfaction. I get decision paralysis with so many cards and strategies to choose from and I'm bad at self-limitation. The last time I tried was a 5c Lands deck built around field of the dead, but the landbase was too crowded and I found that it was basically a green deck with a splash of everything instead of the true five color pile of my intentions.

What I really want is a 5c control deck a la the 5c control decks of the lorwyn-shards era of standard. That deck was so cool and finding a way to properly port it into EDH is a dragon I will chase for years yet.

TheAmericanSpirit wrote: ↑

2 months ago

Despite having a landbase with nearly all the trimmings (save OG duals), I've never been able to build a 5c deck with any degree of satisfaction. I get decision paralysis with so many cards and strategies to choose from and I'm bad at self-limitation. The last time I tried was a 5c Lands deck built around field of the dead, but the landbase was too crowded and I found that it was basically a green deck with a splash of everything instead of the true five color pile of my intentions.

What I really want is a 5c control deck a la the 5c control decks of the lorwyn-shards era of standard. That deck was so cool and finding a way to properly port it into EDH is a dragon I will chase for years yet.

I have built many 5-color decks, and I have experienced everything you note. Quite a bit, actually. When I build one that sticks, it usually is because I build within a block with something that intrigues me. For Lorwyn, that was Horde of Notions, and the obvious synergy with the tribal elementals of that set. The Horde was so slick back in the day. Using Smokebraider, I could get it jamming turn 3 and bring stuff back late-game. The addition of Thunderkin Awakener changed the resiliency of the deck in a huge positive direction (meaning I wasn't dependent on keeping the Horde alive), and largely made the Horde expendable.

The Alara intrigue was the 2 mana 3 pip "blades" cycle, that and the shard charms. The twenty blade creatures and twenty charms did okay, but often suffered from mana issues and couldn't recover fast, post-sweeper. When Knight of New Alara came out, though, along with the two rainbow big critters, and the All Suns' Dawn, that settled into a fun, free-for-all deck that is still together today.

The D&D set hook was Tiamat and D&D-based chromatic dragons. I wanted to make a dragon deck that wasn't about the biggest-dragon-legendary-death-combo-thingamajig.

The token matters deck is simply the 65-card singleton distilled from the Sliver Queen edh I just disbanded. It was built as a token deck with Sliver Queen as the anchor, kind of like the Horde. <Interestingly, I do have Horde of Notions in an edh as Commander, so I still get to play it.> But, the 5-color token deck is still focused on one topic. So, yeah, every time I've sat down to design a 5-color deck without that initial hook that catches my fancy, nope, doesn't work. 40k+ cards will do that you!

I have a similar 5 color deck based around Knight of New Alara. I think mine also has an alternate win con of Coalition Victory.

I have another deck based around the Seer cycle in Urza's Destiny. The fact that the creatures cost 4 to play and 3 to activate make it a challenge but I try to take advantage of the fact that gold cards work well with them.

And last but not least, I have a deck based around the familiar cycle in Planeshift. Did you know that if you cast a 3 color spell with allied colors like Lavalanche, all 5 familiars reduce the cost?

I don't like to go more than 2-3 colors in my Casual-60 decks; I can't afford reasonable manabases for that many colors, nor would I find it worth it for a Casual-60 deck. :p

Yeah, I get that. Only one other guy in my group even tries to make rainbow.

Here is my all-creature elemental deck. It is all-creatures and goes all-in for creature synergy. Lorwyn elementals were just, in a word, stupid. Which makes for a great tribal deck. The Banneret gets the Smokebraider more often than any other card. The Thunderkin Awakener, along with the Reveillark, is the recycling element that gets stronger when Incandescent Soulstoke is in play, increasing what I can bring out. Nova Chaser is both heavy-hitter and setter-offer of shenanigans with etb/ltb/champion mechanics. The rest is simple beatdown and toolbox effects stapled to cards. Capable of common swings for 15-25 points, it goes explosive from relatively sedate in a very short period, sometimes in the same turn.

And, a note on lands. There is a lot of stupidly, costly land in here. I get that, they were all affordable when they went in, and have gone up since then. Well, Karakas was under $100 at the time, but I had that in my collection, so why not? There are budget ways to do rainbow, and it's just a case of seeing what can work for the cards you play.