A Tribe Called Changeling
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What on earth have you done? (Introduction)
...MOVING ON!
I'll be going over this manifestation of my own insanity in the form of a pile of cardboard in painstaking detail, walking through pretty much every single card, both in the deck list itself and not, because trust me, there's a LOT of cards you can potentially run in this deck. Paring it down to 100 was literal torture, so let me spare you that experience, and you can benefit from my personal trauma!
You might like this deck if:
- You like heavily creature based strategies and/or unorthodox playstyles.
- You prefer a deck that's flexible, adaptable, and plays differently from game to game.
- You find the idea of Didgeridoo unironically being one of the best cards in the deck incredibly hilarious (and rightfully so).
- You're one of those weird people with a slime fetish.
- You prefer consistency in your decks, ensuring that they do one thing really well and do it well every single game.
- You think creatures are for filthy peasants and you spend your purely on the finest instants and sorceries money can buy. Quite literally.
- You can't afford/don't want to shell out for a five color deck that's suuuuuuper janky. Building this deck on a tight budget is possible but I wouldn't really recommend it, you kind of need the consistency and power provided by better cards to make it actually work.
- You were scarred for life as a little kid by that Monster Blood episode of Goosebumps. .....God I feel old now.
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The Goo Daddy
WRONG! (well, not entirely, but also shut up and let me finish)
There's a couple of nuanced reasons why I picked Morophon so lets take a peek at him to refresh our memories and I'll go over them one by one:
"Ah yes, the majestic whatever-the-heck-that-is, in it's natural habitat"
Lets tackle his most mundane aspect first. You name a type and he becomes a Lord for that type. This isn't a bad effect per se, but it's a tad underwhelming. Except Anthem effects are actually extremely important in this deck for reasons I'll get into later. Right now just take my word for it, having an Anthem effect in the Command Zone is really good for this deck.
Next is the spicy bit. The reason 99% of people who build Morophon do so because of this little gem: "Spells you cast of the chosen type cost less to cast." this is HUGE in the right deck and it's definitely a big thing here, but it's not why we play him really. There's several multicolored cards in the deck that benefit from this cost reduction and there's no "right" creature type to name every time. I usually name a type based off of my hand and current board state when I initially cast him and just sort of work from there. (Protip: Naming Human can be a pretty good if you've got nothing better to do since there's a good chunk of them in the deck and it lets you cast Jodah for which is an easy way to get approximately every creature in the deck onto the battlefield in a single turn.)
So it's not because he's a tribal lord, and it's not because he cheats on mana costs, so why are we running him? Easy: He's a Changeling. That's right, all those pretty words in that packed text box and I was sold on him by literally the very first one. Real talk though, having your commander be a Changeling is actually incredibly useful with how I built this deck. You can run into an issue from time to time where you draw a bunch of Lords and tribal support cards, but haven't hit any substantial amount of Changelings to get the ball rolling. Morophon lets you take tribal synergies which is almost universally a "go wide" strategy and turn it into a pseudo voltron deck, where all of your random creatures are making your commander an 11/11 indestructible, flying, hexproof monstrosity.
Lastly. As much as I was singing his praises literally a second ago, you really don't need to use Morophon as the commander of this deck. Any 5 color tribal commander will do (well, maybe not Atogatog) and I do it myself pretty regularly just to mix things up, I have five other WUBRG legendaries in the deck that I can switch with Morophon basically whenever I feel like it, and the deck works just fine. I'll touch on them briefly:
- Reaper King|sld: The original commander of the deck actually. Good if you're feeling vindictive and want to show those Elfball hippies what you really think of their Gaea's Cradle.
- Najeela, the Blade-Blossom: If you want to focus more on combos then Najeela is your girl. The deck already has a few ways to use her to make infinite mana/tokens/combat phases baked in, and if that's what you're into putting her in the Command Zone makes that a lot more consistent.
- The First Sliver: This thing is bonkers. Don't believe me? Play it. You'll see. It took me a single game after slotting him into the deck to realize he immediately became one of the strongest cards in the deck. (She? There's eggs in the pic, idk, Sliver biology is weird)
- The Ur-Dragon|sld: Kind of similar to Morophon actually. His cost reduction is weaker, but works without even having to cast him, and if you do cast him then the game is about to end. That triggered ability is no joke.
- Sliver Overlord|sld: This is the only one I actually haven't tried in a real game yet. In theory it would still work since you can tutor up all manner of Changelings whenever you want, and he does funny things with Amoeboid Changeling and Shields of Velis Vel. Honestly I don't know why you would pick this when The First Sliver is a thing, but you do you.
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Deck History/Who are you? How did you get in my house?
Feel free to skip this if you find it boring or just don't care. It don't matter, none of this matters.
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Who am I? No one really. I've been playing Magic for most of my life at this point, starting around Odyssey block when I was a wee lad and one of my older cousins gave me an ancient deck box with the art of Juzám Djinn on it filled with the stuff (I really miss that box). I had no idea what I was doing but quickly fell in love with the game and as I got better at it and my tiny weak child brain matured I started going to LGS events like prereleases and limited/draft events before I fell out of it between Time Spiral block and Innistrad. When I got back into the game it was at the tail end of Innistrad block and I had discovered EDH which completely revitalized my interest in playing Magic both at actual events and with friends over some beers. I now have 8 EDH decks that I love to bits and probably think about the game a bit more than is healthy for someone with semi-limited income.
As for the deck. I mentioned above that this list originated as a Reaper King|sld deck. To extrapolate on that a bit, that deck actually started as WUBRG Affinity, mainly just using Reaper King for its colors and the fact that it was an artifact creature. I loved the commander though (seriously, that flavor text, unf) and eventually decided I wanted to have a deck that really capitalized on him so I converted the existing artifact deck into Breya and started crafting what would eventually become this deck.
Annoyingly, approximately half way through working on the list Modern Horizons started getting spoiled and promptly blew my mind so I basically had to start over from scratch with the new influx of Changelings to the game. It was like a sign from above that this was meant to be, and even though I set out to build this deck because of Reaper King, the second I saw Morophon I knew he was destined to be the head of this deck, something something Serendipity something something Divine Providence something something, you get the point.
As for the deck. I mentioned above that this list originated as a Reaper King|sld deck. To extrapolate on that a bit, that deck actually started as WUBRG Affinity, mainly just using Reaper King for its colors and the fact that it was an artifact creature. I loved the commander though (seriously, that flavor text, unf) and eventually decided I wanted to have a deck that really capitalized on him so I converted the existing artifact deck into Breya and started crafting what would eventually become this deck.
Annoyingly, approximately half way through working on the list Modern Horizons started getting spoiled and promptly blew my mind so I basically had to start over from scratch with the new influx of Changelings to the game. It was like a sign from above that this was meant to be, and even though I set out to build this deck because of Reaper King, the second I saw Morophon I knew he was destined to be the head of this deck, something something Serendipity something something Divine Providence something something, you get the point.
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The Decklist
This is the deck as it exists in it's current state IRL. Consider it a glimpse into the MC Escher stairway that is my mind. I'll go over individual card choices below as well as alternatives that you can swap in and out of the list to find a balance that works for you and your meta. But if you think you're better than me and don't need to read the ravings of a lunatic my well thought out arguments and justifications for the deck as is, then by all means, just take a gander and be gone with you.
A Tribe Called Changeling
Approximate Total Cost:
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Card Choice Discussion
Changelings- Why I'm running the ones I am, why I'm running the exact amount of them I am, and a more in-depth analysis of the ones that deserve it, they know who they are.
Tribal Payoffs- The meaty stuff, I'm going to go over all of the lords I'm playing in here, why they're here. I'm also going to point out which ones I think are more or less mandatory and which ones are more of a preference thing and can be cut in favor of whatever other payoffs you'd rather run in their stead.
Generic Goodstuff- I probably don't really need to go over these cards because they should be pretty self-explanatory, but it's also the smallest portion of the deck, and I've come this far so I might as well. This is your odd mana rocks, ramp spells, card draw and stuff that rewards you playing creatures in general, but isn't really tied to tribal shenanigans.
The Mana Base- A pretty important thing for a five color deck to get right, and just like the rest of this deck, it's janky as hell, so I'm gonna cover it here.
Sideboard Construction- Why I think it's important to have some form of sideboard for this deck, and a few suggestions on what you could/should run to help you against some popular strategies.
Slimy, Yet Satisfying
Changelings
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Mirror Entity has a lot of utility in this deck for one thing. Using its ability can allow a bunch of disparate Lords to affect each other even when you have no other Changelings on board, which drastically increases your board presence in a way that not many other 3 CMC cards can do. You remember when I said earlier that Anthem effects are really important in this deck? Well Mirror Entity is why. If you have two different things giving all of a type +1/+1, then you can activate Mirror Entity's ability for , meaning that at any moment, you can spread that Indestructibility that Knight Exemplar was giving to all your Changelings to everything on your board, as many times as you want. I cannot possibly understate how valuable this is in a permanent focused deck with limited instant speed interaction.
It's also a win-condition/mana dump all rolled into one. Make infinite mana with Najeela? Well now all of your attacking creatures have 10 million P/T. Did you cast Notorious Throng last turn and get 7 tokens and an extra turn off of it? Well now all those 1/1 Faerie Rogues are 11/11 flyers. Need more mana to play out your combo? Use Entity's ability for now all of your creatures can tap for mana with Gemhide Sliver, or you can tap that Harabaz Druid for (and then pump said mana back into Mirror Entity and kill someone).
Shapesharer is interesting, he has the unique effect of being able to turn any of your Changelings into the best creature on the board until your next turn. Most of the Lords in this deck are legendary, so there's limited targets for this effect on our own field, but plenty of opportunity to generate value based on the kinds of decks you're facing, and there are tricks we can pull with this effect too.
Turning a near-useless Universal Automaton into a second copy of Drogskol Captain or Knight Exemplar lets you protect those creatures from spot removal that might otherwise kill them is great in a pinch. Turning things into Harabaz Druid or Faeburrow Elder is an easy way to generate lots of mana for an explosive turn. You can also sneak in commander damage with Morophon by turning him into a Changeling Outcast then after blockers but before damage turning him into the beefiest thing on the board.
Lastly there's some neat synergy between Shapesharer and Amoeboid Changeling. You can give a token or a card that's served its purpose like a late game Gemhide Sliver every creature type, and then change it into something more useful. You can also give an opponent's threatening creature all types and then turn it into a 1/1 Faerie Rogue or something equally useless, depriving them of the original creature until your next turn. You'd be surprised how often my opponent's simply forget Shapesharer is even on the board before doing something and then getting blown out by it.
Frankly most of the other Changelings aren't much to write home about on their own and there isn't too much to say about them, their main purpose is to turn on the synergies between all of the other cards in the deck, so I'll address them briefly here:
- Amoeboid Changeling poor man's Mirror Entity, it is worth noting though that this does enable you to mess with your opponent's creatures types too, so it can hose opposing tribal decks and also do some funny things with cards like Sliver Overlord|sld and Peer Pressure
- Cairn Wanderer the only abilities he can't get from our creatures are Fear, Landwalk, Reach, Trample, and Protection. Wanderer gets better the longer the game goes on and more and more creatures die. He also gets better when you're playing against other creature focused decks, mill decks, and reanimator decks, but all in all he's a bit pricey for what he does frankly.
- Unsettled Mariner the tax effect is a solid disincentive for your opponents to mess with your stuff. Unless you've become extremely threatening they probably dont wanna bother with your stuff and mess up their curve for it. Worth noting that this and Changeling Outcast are the only Changelings in the deck that get discounted all the way down to by Morophon alone, this makes them significantly more useful in certain situations.
- Graveshifter Gravedigger is a pretty meh card, but this one has Changeling and we can't be too picky. Getting to reuse stuff that we've had to discard or sacrificed to Birthing Pod is pretty decent all things considered.
- Changeling Outcast perfectly sets you up to cast Notorious Throng for its Prowl cost, and also has some really good synergy with Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow. It being only 1 mana means it's a cheap (often free thanks to Morophon) way to get all those juicy ETB triggers too.
- Irregular Cohort double triggers off of anything that goes off when a certain type enters the battlefield, it also double-dips on any anthem effect due to giving you two bodies to work with.
- Taurean Mauler if your opponents let you hang on to this thing for whatever reason it is going to kill someone, I promise you that. It also acts as a decent red herring/lightning rod due to that fact, your opponent is gonna be so scared of Mauler hitting them that they'll point their spot removal at it instead of the Risen Reef that's ramping you and drawing you tons of cards.
- Valiant Changeling a 3/3 with Double strike for is a pretty good deal, similarly to Cohort, this double dips on anthems thanks to double strike, and it can do a lot of damage before your opponents finally get around to answering it.
- Venomous Changeling, Universal Automaton , and Avian Changeling yeah these are pretty mediocre, but we need to reach a certain threshold of Changelings for the deck to work, and I'd rather run these than something like Woodland Changeling or Fire-Belly Changeling.
"Gentlemen, allow me to introduce the triple threat that is Huey, Dewey, and Louie"
These three, the "Champion Changelings" if you will, do a lot of heavy lifting in this deck, but I wanted to talk about all of the others first before I brought these guy up because they tie into our win conditions and all three kind of serve the same purpose, no other cards in the deck can really do what they do.
Championing a creature is a good way to reuse an ETB effect like those of Irregular Cohort or Graveshifter. On top of that they can be used to "reset" Morophon, many a game have I dropped Morophon and named "Scarecrow" or "Sliver" to help dump my hand, then Championed him, sacrificed the Champion to Birthing Pod to let me name "Human" or "Dragon" as he comes back in and play more stuff.
They can also be used as a form of board wipe insurance as well. Champion Unesh, Criosphinx Sovereign or some other high value target and once that Rift or Damnation hits, you're still gonna have at least one creature to work with while everyone else rebuilds.
The main reason they get their own section however, is because they come together, like Voltron, to become a win condition for the deck. Basically if you're not aware, you can have all 3 Champions target each other to create a loop and have infinite creatures entering the battlefield. Add Dragon Tempest to burn the table to death, Add Reaper King|sld to destroy everyone else's permanents, Gemhide Sliver or Manaweft Sliver to create infinite mana (thanks to the Berserker innately having haste), Ayula, Queen Among Bears will give all of your other Changelings infinite +1/+1 counters and cause a one sided board wipe with a ton of fight triggers, likely leading to an alpha strike for the win.
So as for the number of Changelings I think you should run. This deck runs 16 Changelings out of 39 Creatures in the deck (17 if you count Morophon himself) and that's not an arbitrary number. One of the things I agonized over when constructing this deck was exactly how many slots I had to dedicate to the goo boys because let's be honest, most of them kind of suck on their own.
The problem is that if you get the ratio wrong, you run into one of two issues, maybe even both depending on the game:
- You end up drawing nothing but Changelings, which like I just said, kinda suck by themselves, and you end up playing a bunch of subpar creatures and have nothing to do with them.
- You end up not drawing any Changelings so you're stuck with a hand full of stuff like Ayula, Queen Among Bears and Reaper King|sld and you begin to regret the life choices that have led you to this point.
There are also other ways to "fix" your creature selection to alleviate this issue. I run Fauna Shaman and Birthing Pod not just because they're generally good cards, but because they allow you to turn any excess of one thing into another. Too many Changelings and not enough payoffs? ditch that useless Amoeboid Changeling for a Risen Reef and you're in business. Trying to get things started but don't have any Changelings to work with? Pitch that Ur-Dragon for your Mirror Entity and you'll be golden.
Basically, the more card draw and tutoring you run, the less Changelings you need to be effective, 17 is the number that works for the deck as it stands currently, but if you don't want to run my exact list you might find it more effective to bump that number up to 19-20, and if you really like shuffling, you could probably go as low as 15-16 (though honestly I'm not sure if I could recommend that).
Tribal Payoffs (WARNING: This section is HUGE)
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God, where do I even begin?
Alright we're gonna talk about the actual creatures that care about our Changelings first, then go into things like Artifacts/Enchantments/Sorceries afterwards, going straight down in alphabetical order:
So Atla Palani is probably the only card where you would want Mirror Entity on the board with no anthem effects, because you can pay to to basically Polymorph your whole board. Outside of that, she makes bodies on her own, and is some serious board wipe insurance. While she's sitting on the field Birthing Pod goes absolutely nuts. I've been trying real hard to find a way to squeeze a reliable, repeatable sac outlet into this deck that isn't just jamming Phyrexian Altar or Ashnod's Altar into the deck because of the interaction between Atla, and Haakon, Stromgald Scourge. I tried Sling-Gang Lieutenant when it first came out, and it just felt pretty underwhelming outside of this one scenario so I had to cut it sadly. If they print a really good tribal sac outlet that's a decent enough card on its own then I'm definitely gonna try it out if just for the Eggy girl here. I'm thinking of testing out General Kudro of Drannith once Ikoria drops for this exact reason
Boy is Ayula great. She's cheap to cast, her ability can target herself, so if for whatever reason you don't want to load counters onto one of your Changelings (like, if you were planning on sacrificing them to Birthing Pod or are going to Champion them) you can have her beef herself up. The single best targets for her abilities in this deck are without a doubt Morophon, Chameleon Colossus, Venomous Changeling, and Changeling Outcast. Commander Damage isn't exactly a focus of this deck, but she can make Morophon big enough to kill someone in one or two hits very quickly. Chameleon Colossus's doubling effect makes stacking counters on it very effective, and it can fight a black creature that it would normally trade with. Venomous Changeling turns into spot removal with Ayula, and with Knight Exemplar on the board, turns all of your Changelings into spot removal. Changeling Outcast is unblockable, do I really need to explain this bit?
Bloodline Keeper is pretty straightforward. He taps to make 2/2 fliers which turn into 4/4's after he flips while simultaneously giving all of your Changelings +2/+2. Flipping him is pretty trivial in this deck, I often manage to flip him either the turn I play him or the turn immediately after. Remember when I said earlier that Shapesharer didn't have too many targets for it's ability in the deck itself? Well this guy is basically the single best one. Okay technically Lord of Lineage is the best one, but you know what I mean. Turning a bunch of Changelings into Lord of Lineage will make your board absolutely massive and allow you to make a stupid amount of vampire tokens. You can also tap Lord of Lineage to make a token, use Mirror Entity or Amoeboid Changeling to make it a Shapeshifter, and then turn the token into another Lord of Lineage, it's janky and dumb and probably not worth doing, but are you really gonna question that now after we've come so far?
In my original draft of the deck I had Sylvia Brightspear and Khorvath Brightflame in the deck, and they were awesome. However once I saw those fateful Modern Horizons spoilers I knew they were being replaced by this little guy. Sure you lose out on the double strike from Sylvia, which kind of sucks, but Cloudshredder Sliver is 4 mana cheaper than Khorvath and only takes up one card slot. When this deck is really starting to pop this card and Gemhide Sliver are actually really important, because you can then do things like tap for mana to play a Changeling to draw a card and then tap said Changeling for mana to play another one and draw another card, etc. etc. and that's not even taking the flying into account. If I manage to stick Sliver Overlord|sld this is the first thing I tutor for if I haven't gotten it already. Giving Flying+Haste to your whole board for and frequently for free thanks to Morophon is actually really, really strong, who would've thought?
Another kind of generic lord, but powerful nonetheless. I've had a lot of people suggest I run Lord of the Unreal instead of this card, but I'm not sure if he's actually much (if at all) better. For one thing they cost exactly the same amount of mana when discounted by Morophon, but in that situation the Captain's cost is actually better because it's instead of . They're both 2/2's but Captain comes with Flying baked in, which means he's substantially better at actually getting through for damage once that becomes relevant, and he's a better blocker too. The main thing Lord of the Unreal has going for it is that it's a Human, which makes that a better type to name with Morophon than it already is, and it's worded in a way that Mirror Entity and Amoeboid Changeling can let it protect itself. All in all, I think that giving your creatures Hexproof is extremely valuable in a creature-focused deck like this with lots of cards that draw removal like fat kids to an ice cream truck in Summer, so I would absolutely run one or the other, but I think it's pretty much personal preference here.
I'm gonna talk about both this card and Manaweft Sliver here because let's be real, they're the exact same card. The fact that I'm running two versions of the exact same card in this deck that's already extremely tight on space should tell you how important it is alone. Color fixing is obviously supremely important for any five color deck, and ramping is important for any EDH deck. These two are so much more than just mana dorks, they turn more than half your board into mana dorks, anyone who's played a Sliver deck or a deck that runs Cryptolith Rite should know exactly how powerful this is. Half of the time this deck starts going insane is because one of these two are letting me pump out absurd amounts of mana, and that mana gets me more creatures, that then tap for more mana, and before you know it you've played almost every card in the deck.
Okay now we're getting into the spicy stuff. Haakon's effect is extremely powerful, being able to just straight up cast our creatures out of the graveyard is insane, at that point the only removal that can really hurt you is Cyclonic Rift or something like Terminus. But there's an issue, how do we get him on the board to begin with if we can't cast him from our hand? There's 3 (reliable) options available to us: Fauna Shaman can discard him, using Birthing Pod on a 2 drop can cheat him in, and we can tutor him straight into the graveyard with Buried Alive. It's certainly possible to hit him with something like Kindred Summons too but that's usually just a happy accident. It's important to note that he says "Knight cards" and not "Knight creature cards" too, meaning that you can use him to repeatedly cast Crib Swap from your graveyard, combine this with Morophon and Jodah (or Unesh) and Crib Swap costs to cast, meaning you can cast it infinitely. Not only does this let you exile all of your opponents' creatures, but it's a wincon in that you get infinite Changeling ETB's, exile one of your creatures to get a Changeling token, cast it again targeting the token to exile it and get another token, rinse and repeat.
Another dork. This one's not quite as good as the Slivers, but it can do things that they can't. For one thing it can tap for a TON of mana all by itself, you don't have to tap down 3/4 of your creatures to cast something like you do with Gemhide Sliver, and it also benefits from cloning via Shapesharer unlike the Slivers which are redundant. Speaking of that, if you can tap Harabaz Druid for at least 4 mana, you actually gain mana every time you turn something into her with Shapesharer, with enough creatures and enough mana to get started this can lead to infinite mana with Najeela. Outside of that her main purpose is color fixing early, and powering out big expensive stuff in the mid game like Rooftop Storm or Kindred Summons. Mirror Entity is her BFF, I mentioned it in the section talking about that card but I'll repeat it here: You can activate Mirror Entity for 1, then tap Harabaz Druid for X mana where X=the number of creatures you control, then activate Mirror Entity for X to make everything gigantic and game ending.
Honestly this is another pretty straightforward one, so like with Drogskol Captain I'm gonna talk more about why I'm using this card and not any of the other options more than the card itself. When I originally built the deck this was Crested Sunmare because "lol funny Horse tribal card" but it always felt mediocre because there was no substantial lifegain in the deck to take advantage of its token production. Then I switched it to Timber Protector because at the time I was trying to make Treefolk Harbinger work. Well once I cut the Harbinger and decided I was going to put Haakon in the deck this seemed like the right answer, it was cheaper, had a decent body for the early game thanks to first strike, and it synergizes wonderfully with Haakon. The weakness of this card is that it's not indestructible itself, but with Haakon if someone kills her and doesn't immediately wipe the board before my next turn, she's just gonna come right back. This is one of the biggest groan inducing cards in the deck now in my meta because of how resilient and hard to deal with it makes my board.
Everyone knows Najeela by now, and they know what she does, and she does all those same things here. This deck runs a lot of creatures, and it makes a lot of tokens, and it can make all those creatures and tokens very large. Najeela takes that recipe and amplifies it by nearly doubling our token production, letting everything attack twice and giving them all Lifelink and Trample and thats not even getting into comboing with her. As far as combos with her goes, the main method of going infinite with Najeela is with her, Gemhide/Manaweft Sliver, and Mirror Entity and at least available (this needs to be generated by things you're not going to attack with by the by and you can skip out on the if you can activate Entity for ) you attack with at least 3 Changelings, Najeela will make 3 Warrior tokens, spend the to use Mirror Entity to make everything a 1/1 Changeling, then spend the to use Najeela, from there you can tap the Changelings you attacked with and the tokens Najeela made that are now Changelings as well to make 6 mana, rinse and repeat, then dump a million mana into Mirror Entity and kill everyone. You can do this very easily with Faeburrow Elder+Harabaz Druid instead of one of the Slivers too.
My baby boy. Easily my favorite card in the deck, and I was so pleased when they revealed the Kaleidoscopic Killers set with the first round of Secret Lairs, it's like it was made expressly for this deck. Reaper King is a win condition, but he's also our only real method of dealing with artifacts and enchantments, I will name Scarecrow with Morophon if he's in my hand even if it's a bad idea overall because slapping down this bad boy for free is a huge game changer. Everything in the deck that cheats cards into play, makes tokens, blinks things, it all gets 10x better when he's in play. Your opponents are likely to not let you keep him on the field for long, so try to get as much mileage out of Reaper King as you can the same turn you play him (or, alternatively, if you don't mind everyone hating you forever: use that first turn to blow up a bunch of their lands and make it harder for them to remove him to begin with). He wins you the game pretty much outright with the Champion Loop I outlined in the last section, and the Haakon+Crib Swap loop I talked about a minute ago, but he can effectively win you the game in a non-infinite manner with Arcane Adaptation naming Scarecrow and enough things to trigger him in a single turn to completely wipe out your opponents' mana.
You should keep almost any starting hand that contains this card, a Changeling, and enough mana to play them both. For the low price of 3 mana this card turns all of your Changelings into Coiling Oracle it can and will ramp you like crazy and draw you TONS of cards. The drawing cards bit is what keeps it relevant all the way through the game as well, getting extra lands into play early is fantastic but the gas late game is where this bugger really shines, I run several other cards that draw when a Changeling enters the battlefield, but none of them can come down on turn 2 like this thing can. I severely underestimated this card when it first came out, don't repeat my mistake, run this card, I implore you.
Can you say "one-sided boardwipe on a stick"? Yes? Good. For a 6 mana creature this thing is a bit more defensively statted then I would prefer, especially for something that gives you such a huge incentive to attack with lots of "Dragons" but it's hardly the end of the world. Silumgar doesn't care about Indestructible, it doesn't care about Shroud, and it doesn't care about Hexproof. Speaking of Hexproof, this thing is gonna be a royal PITA for your opponents to get rid of thanks to that totally unnecessary ability they kinda just slapped on this bad boy, enjoy abuse it while it lasts. If your opponents have some big scary dudes on their fields and you've got a bunch of weak little goobers sitting there well then Silumgar will eat those big beatsticks for lunch. God help any poor token decks that have spent half the game making 374 tokens and durdling with them when this card hits the field, you wanna know what it sounds like when 374 Goblins all simultaneously crap their pants? Play Silumgar.
Man, you will get the dirtiest looks from anyone you're playing against with an actual Sliver deck when you drop this card. to tutor any Changeling we want or need is pretty nice, it's an easy way to assemble the pieces for the Champion loop, grab Mirror Entity so you can combo out with Najeela, you get the idea, I don't need to explain why tutors are good. If you play Arcane Adaptation and name Sliver this lets you tutor any creature in your deck as well, which yeah, it's dumb. As far as its other ability goes it's only real practical use (other than the trolly scenario I already suggested) is with Amoeboid Changeling, you can turn an opponent's big scary thing into a Changeling, and then snatch it because that means it's now a Sliver too. Oh and I suppose you could steal a Changeling token you gave to someone with Crib Swap but that seems kinda pointless and a waste of mana.
Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. This card is already gross in its natural habitat in a Sliver deck, but thanks to this deck's penchant for making all of its creatures basically free and drawing tons of cards, this thing becomes completely broken. I guarantee you, with the right cards in play, dropping The First Sliver and then casting a Changeling will end up with you casting 80% of the cards in your deck, mostly for free, probably netting an extra turn, and most likely killing everyone. A couple of specifics that I should note: If you hit a Changeling or another Sliver off of TFS' own Cascade trigger you will not get another Cascade trigger off of that cast because TFS is still on the stack and not on the field. Note that Valiant Changeling has a CMC of 7, even though it rarely actually costs that much mana, so you can hit some pretty big spells off of him for just . And if you stick an Arcane Adaptation naming Sliver with TFS in play, every single creature you cast will Cascade so yeah, pretty nuts.
The beefiest creature in the deck by a pretty substantial margin. Hitting this off of something like Call to the Kindred early on in the game feels really dirty. Getting to slap down any permanent from your hand is really nice, but really it's just the MASSIVE amount of cards you can draw off of this guy that's the main appeal. Nine mana is a lot, but this guy is worth that investment. Of course when I say "worth that investment" I mean "worth naming Dragon with Morophon and casting him as a 4 mana 10/10 with flying that draws you cards and gives you free stuff when it attacks". Worth noting too that just like Haakon, The Ur Dragon's Eminence doesn't specify Dragon creature spells, in this deck that only applies to Crib Swap, but there are other Tribal - Shapeshifter spells you could run in this deck like Wings of Velis Vel that this could apply too, there's also some nonsense you could pull with Artificial Evolution too, but this deck doesn't really recur spells, and I'm not sure using Evolution on this card for something like that is worth it.
Free Fact or Fiction every time a Changeling enters the battlefield will quickly draw you through 90% of your deck. The cost reduction is great too, the most expensive Changelings get in this deck is 5 mana, this alone cuts most of them down to 1 or 2 mana, with Morophon in play almost half of them cost nothing, add in Urza's Incubator and there's only three in the whole deck that don't cost because of double pips in their mana costs. What this means is that Unesh can dig 4 cards deep off of one trigger, and as long as you hit a single Changeling you just pick that pile and you can cast it for free and do it again. This is a great way to dig for a specific card you need, just keep it going as long as you can or until you hit that last combo piece, pick that pile and proceed to win. I do feel like I need to warn you however, resolving Unesh's trigger several times can lead to the dreaded 25 minute turn, so if you hate that sort of thing, or your playgroup heavily frowns upon it, I would suggest running something else in this spot.
There's a good chunk of average to high costed cards in this deck (in particular, Reaper King is a 10 drop and The Ur Dragon is a 9 drop, which hurts) and you can get a LOT of triggers in this deck. Her main purpose is to draw us cards, but that damage can really add up super quick. Especially if you sneak that damage in on everyone using Ninjutsu, your opponent might think he's just getting attacked by 6 tiny Faerie Rogue tokens, but one Ninjutsu and a Mirror Entity activation later and suddenly everyone is losing 26 life. Changeling Outcast can guarantee Yuriko slips in this way, but if you named Human with Morophon it can honestly be better to just cast her for and even though it kind of broadcasts your intention it can sometimes mean the difference between casting 3 cards that turn or going off and casting 35. Lastly she can be used to get back something you've Championed via Ninjutsu, you can also use it to bounce Morophon and recast him to change his assigned type.
Okay, existential crisis over, getting back to the topic at hand. This card's mileage can vary pretty wildly, if you play against a lot of other tribal decks pretty regularly I would probably not run it and opt for a more boring and traditional board wipe, but the only tribal decks I run into frequently are an Edgar Vampires deck and a Sliver deck so it does wonders for me. Every type chosen applies to every player's board so you should be naming something like Squirrel or Oyster, not just because it's incredibly funny to say out loud, but because then your opponents have one less chance to save any of their creatures, whatever types get chosen doesn't matter to you because all of your Changelings have those types.
Gives you a ton of tokens to mess around with, and then most likely gives you an extra turn to then kill everyone with said tokens. Worst case scenario you smack someone with Changeling Outcast for 1-2 damage and take an extra turn, which is still pretty good. The big thing is the extra turn obviously, but those tokens are nothing to sneeze at either honestly, Shared Animosity can make getting 10+ Faeries immediately lethal, dropping this with Arcane Adaptation and something like Reaper King or Dragon Tempest is also a real gut punch to your opponents. Also, if you have Haakon in play and target him with Artificial Evolution (and don't worry, I'm gonna get to THAT card in a minute) you can replace the word "Knight" with the word "Rogue" and then all of a sudden so long as you can make and have a way to connect for damage with a Changeling (hello again Changeling Outcast) you've got infinite turns on your hand.
This, like Harsh Mercy, varies wildly in power from game to game, but in reverse. It can be good against other tribal decks depending on who's ahead and how wide their deck goes. For instance you're not likely going to be able to use this against a Krenko deck for instance, but you might just ruin a Syr Gwyn player's night entirely (get it? night?), because this deck can make lots of tokens and homogenize their types so this actually hoses less token based tribes pretty hard. If your opponents aren't playing tribal but still run a creature focused build like your Aleshas or Marchesas then you can usually still take a bunch of their stuff by naming common types like Human, Wizard, or Soldier. Also this doesn't wear off at the end of the turn, so sometimes it can be worth it use this as a better Control Magic by naming the type of some big bomb your opponent dropped like Construct to take a Blightsteel Colossus or Sphinx to nab a Consecrated Sphinx.
Unlike Harsh Mercy this is an unconditional, one-sided board wipe. Unless you play in some weird meta where everyone has an Arixmethes Sea Monster tribal deck, if so.... where are you? That sounds like my kind of meta. This card can effortlessly set you up to hit someone for lethal and have a really big turn in general, and it can also save you and everyone else from being overrun by someone else (that's OUR job damn it!) and buy enough time for you and everyone else (but mostly you) to stabilize while they have to rebuild their board. There really isn't too much to say about this card, sure it bounces all of our lords back to our hand too, but how many times am I going to have to type the words "Mirror Entity" before you people start figuring it out on your own?
This card is awesome. Like, SO awesome. I know I've said that a lot by now, but seriously, there is no other card in all of Magic that can do what Artificial Evolution does. It affects not only the card's type line (if it's a creature or a Tribal card) but also every instance of that word in the creature's whole text box. For instance, if I cast Artificial Evolution targeting a Sliver Overlord|sld and chose to replace "Sliver" with "Squirrel" then he would become an Squirrel Mutant with ": Search your library for a Squirrel, reveal that card and put it into your hand. Then shuffle your library" and ": Gain control of target Squirrel" (I did exactly that to someone playing him as their commander and it was exactly as hilarious and cruel as it sounds). This can even target spells on the stack, so you can preemptively change something's type and effect before it even hits the field or alter an instant or sorcery that affects particular types of creatures. However you can only replace words that are printed on the cards themselves, so anything that says "choose a creature type" or similar cannot be altered this way sadly.
This spell basically doubles your board state. Usually it's the best call to just name whatever creature type is prevalent on your board at the time to hit as many creatures as possible, but if you want something specific it can't hurt to just name Dragon or Shaman in an attempt to get those specific cards, but at that point you're kind of just rolling the dice. Mirror Entity maximizes the number of creatures you'll pull by making everything Changelings, and Arcane Adaptation makes it so you can pull any creatures you hit so long as you name the same type you did for that. I know this is an Instant, and it's extremely valuable that it is, allowing you to get a bunch of creatures right before your turn so you can untap with them, or generate a lot of bodies out of nowhere to muck up combat, but it's often the right call to cast this on your own turn I think, given this deck's ability to steamroll card advantage the way it does, being able to cast Kindred Summoning and then follow it up with more stuff based off of what it gave you can often lead to winning the game.
Slap this bad boy on a Changeling and with the density of creatures in this deck you're pretty much guaranteed something off of your top 5 every single turn which I'm sure I don't have to tell you, gets real dumb real quick (bonus points if you drop it on a Chameleon Colossus so they can't Murder it). I was considering squeezing Worldly Tutor and/or Congregation at Dawn into the deck at one point because of their general usefulness and synergy with this card, but ultimately I think it's unnecessary. Most of the time it doesn't matter what you hit, just that you hit something, if you're trying to trigger tribal synergies any Changeling will do the job, and if you're looking to get more Lords onto the field this isn't the right card to do that, it's too inconsistent, any big bomby Lord you hit like Reaper King or Ur Dragon is just a happy coincidence. All in all I think this card really shines in this deck, but you don't need to run it, especially if Auras are particularly fragile in your meta, you could pretty easily take this card out to make room for something else, I just have a personal soft spot for it because it's one of the few surviving cards from the original original draft of this deck.
Win conditions for 2 mana are pretty good I think. The haste effect is a tad useless, I mean, don't get me wrong it's nice to give haste to guys like Ur Dragon, Silumgar, and Unesh, but the only way 99% of our Changelings are going to benefit from it is with Cloudshredder Sliver, which already gives them haste anyways. It's Scourge of Valkas effect on the other hand... hoo boy can this get out of hand real quick. It's not unheard of for this deck to be able to dome players for 30+ damage after a Kindred Summons or some other such shenanigans like Notorious Throng+Arcane Adaptation. Also note that the creature that triggers Tempest is the one that does the damage, not the enchantment itself, so triggering it with Venomous Changeling kills something even if it's the only Changeling you have on board, and you can potentially gain a ton of life off of Changeling Hero, I'm sure there are a lot of other ways to abuse this particular aspect of the card if you really wanted to, but these are the only ones I've come across with the deck in it's current state.
This card is SOOOOO busted, seriously, oh my GOD is it dumb, there's absolutely a reason that it's shot up to around $20, I hate spending that kind of money on individual cards and I STILL think this was worth it. Every time I've managed to play this card I've won that game, you will draw 10-15 cards off of this thing easily if it's not answered immediately. That being said, much like Reaper King|sld a smart player will NOT let you sit on this card so be prepared to get as much value out of it the turn you play it as possible, there's no guarantee you'll have it after that turn. Not much I can really say about this thing, OP cards are OP and you should play them. If budget is a concern I suppose you could replace it with something like Coastal Piracy or Bident of Thassa but it's really not the same, this deck abuses the attack trigger and the ETB trigger equally so those card are really only giving you half the value. I should warn you though, this deck frequently wins by generating infinite ETB triggers, so be careful that this card isn't on the board when you do that, blow it up with Reaper King or something, because that draw trigger isn't a "may" so you're probably gonna deck yourself before you kill everyone, it's possible with the amount of damage churned out by Dragon Tempest that you won't, but then you have to do math and that's even worse.
Draw 4 lose 4 would already been worth running without any of the other text on the card, but then they had to go ahead and add those four magical words at the end: "you win the game". Getting 4 "Demons" with different names into play in this deck is an absolute joke of a prerequisite, if you're opponents aren't prepared for it this can just straight up steal the game from under everyone's noses. This card will (rightfully so) stress your opponents out as long as it's on the field, so be prepared to take some heat because of it if they can't kill the enchantment, you might end up seeing a lot of removal being pointed at your creatures, or a board wipe getting dropped. Thankfully since you can anticipate that reaction you can plan for it: if you know one of your opponents is sitting on a wipe and you want to force it out of their hand, Liliana's Contract is a great way to do that. Even if it's blown up immediately it's still card advantage, so just think of it as a draw spell with huge potential upside, and not as an actual win condition and you're golden.
Even without messing with creature types this card is good. It effectively ramps you into Morophon since you can drop Storm for and then immediately cast Morophon for free after. You can cast Haakon from your graveyard for free with this and get that ball rolling. Naming Zombie with Arcane Adaptation is gross. This + Haakon + a Changeling + a sac outlet goes infinite barring any Rule of Law or Leyline of the Void shenanigans. The only things I don't like about this card is A) it's expensive, even in this deck 6 mana for a non-creature is kind of awkward, and B) this and Jodah, Archmage Eternal kind of make each other feel superfluous since they both kind of serve the same purpose, but hey, the effect is THAT strong so I'm not gonna complain, and I certainly don't ever really feel bad to draw the card unless it's like turn 2.
Takes a medium sized boardstate and makes it hit like Saruman's army at the end of The Two Towers (if you don't get that reference we can't be friends and you need to go educate yourself). This card doesn't really need any direct combos to go nuts, it just kind of does thanks to how the deck is constructed. Having said that, Mirror Entity maximizes the benefit you get from this card, like it does with every other card in the deck (seeing a pattern yet?). Casting this on the extra turn given to you by Notorious Throng after getting like 10 Faerie tokens almost guarantees at least ONE person is going to die. This is also a good way to ensure that Najeela can kill off the table if you don't have Mirror Entity or a way to make her go actually infinite, note that the Warrior tokens she makes DO count towards the bonus your other Warriors get, but they won't get the buff themselves until the next combat step because they didn't attack, they were put in attacking instead.
This lets you put any Changeling into play for at instant speed, that should speak for itself. This card has kind of a low floor but a very high ceiling. On one hand cheating in stuff like Changeling Outcast with nothing to really capitalize on it feels pretty weak BUT paying the same amount of mana to flash in The Ur Dragon|sld thanks to naming Minotaur with Arcane Adaptation is insane. Cards like this are why draw power is so important in the deck, a lot of pieces in the deck depend on having the right options available to capitalize on them in order to steamroll that card advantage into a win. Worst case scenario, Didgeridoo only costs to actually cast, so even if you can't capitalize on it right away, you can pretty much just drop it in play and if it eats removal, well then that's one less card your opponents have that could have blown up your other artifacts, and if they let it sit there then two turns later you could be using it to flash a combo into play on your opponent's end step.
Think of this card as a turbo mana rock in this deck. SO many important cards become completely free when you've got Incubator and Morophon in play, importantly it also drops Morophon's cast from to which means with the right starting hand you can get Morophon into play as early as turn 3. Like so many other cards in this deck that say "choose a creature type" the type you want to name is pretty contextual, name what will let you vomit the most things onto the field in the shortest amount of time. For what it's worth, unless I'm trying to use Incubator to combo I would probably only name Dragon, Scarecrow, or Sphinx with this card because thats where you get the most value from the cost reduction. The Slivers and Humans in the deck mostly only cost colored pips and obviously our Changelings don't care. Human isn't terrible to name mind you because there's a sizable chunk of them in the deck, but the only one you get the full discount for is Najeela.
Rewards you with yet more card draw for playing Changelings, this isn't quite as strong as things like Kindred Discovery or Risen Reef because it's only on cast and not on ETB, but that's hardly the worst thing in the world, in fact it's sometimes a bonus since you don't need to worry about decking yourself with this when doing the Changeling loop and things like that. The anthem effect on this is actually quite nice since it's not actually on a creature too. This means that Banner allows you to activate Mirror Entity for without having to have another anthem effect in play since Banner won't become a 0/0 and die like the creature based anthems do. All in all it's a solid card so I would recommend running it, but it's hardly vital in any way so if you feel you have enough card draw then feel free to cut this in favor of something else if you feel you need space.
Alright we're gonna talk about the actual creatures that care about our Changelings first, then go into things like Artifacts/Enchantments/Sorceries afterwards, going straight down in alphabetical order:
So Atla Palani is probably the only card where you would want Mirror Entity on the board with no anthem effects, because you can pay to to basically Polymorph your whole board. Outside of that, she makes bodies on her own, and is some serious board wipe insurance. While she's sitting on the field Birthing Pod goes absolutely nuts. I've been trying real hard to find a way to squeeze a reliable, repeatable sac outlet into this deck that isn't just jamming Phyrexian Altar or Ashnod's Altar into the deck because of the interaction between Atla, and Haakon, Stromgald Scourge. I tried Sling-Gang Lieutenant when it first came out, and it just felt pretty underwhelming outside of this one scenario so I had to cut it sadly. If they print a really good tribal sac outlet that's a decent enough card on its own then I'm definitely gonna try it out if just for the Eggy girl here. I'm thinking of testing out General Kudro of Drannith once Ikoria drops for this exact reason
Boy is Ayula great. She's cheap to cast, her ability can target herself, so if for whatever reason you don't want to load counters onto one of your Changelings (like, if you were planning on sacrificing them to Birthing Pod or are going to Champion them) you can have her beef herself up. The single best targets for her abilities in this deck are without a doubt Morophon, Chameleon Colossus, Venomous Changeling, and Changeling Outcast. Commander Damage isn't exactly a focus of this deck, but she can make Morophon big enough to kill someone in one or two hits very quickly. Chameleon Colossus's doubling effect makes stacking counters on it very effective, and it can fight a black creature that it would normally trade with. Venomous Changeling turns into spot removal with Ayula, and with Knight Exemplar on the board, turns all of your Changelings into spot removal. Changeling Outcast is unblockable, do I really need to explain this bit?
Bloodline Keeper is pretty straightforward. He taps to make 2/2 fliers which turn into 4/4's after he flips while simultaneously giving all of your Changelings +2/+2. Flipping him is pretty trivial in this deck, I often manage to flip him either the turn I play him or the turn immediately after. Remember when I said earlier that Shapesharer didn't have too many targets for it's ability in the deck itself? Well this guy is basically the single best one. Okay technically Lord of Lineage is the best one, but you know what I mean. Turning a bunch of Changelings into Lord of Lineage will make your board absolutely massive and allow you to make a stupid amount of vampire tokens. You can also tap Lord of Lineage to make a token, use Mirror Entity or Amoeboid Changeling to make it a Shapeshifter, and then turn the token into another Lord of Lineage, it's janky and dumb and probably not worth doing, but are you really gonna question that now after we've come so far?
In my original draft of the deck I had Sylvia Brightspear and Khorvath Brightflame in the deck, and they were awesome. However once I saw those fateful Modern Horizons spoilers I knew they were being replaced by this little guy. Sure you lose out on the double strike from Sylvia, which kind of sucks, but Cloudshredder Sliver is 4 mana cheaper than Khorvath and only takes up one card slot. When this deck is really starting to pop this card and Gemhide Sliver are actually really important, because you can then do things like tap for mana to play a Changeling to draw a card and then tap said Changeling for mana to play another one and draw another card, etc. etc. and that's not even taking the flying into account. If I manage to stick Sliver Overlord|sld this is the first thing I tutor for if I haven't gotten it already. Giving Flying+Haste to your whole board for and frequently for free thanks to Morophon is actually really, really strong, who would've thought?
Another kind of generic lord, but powerful nonetheless. I've had a lot of people suggest I run Lord of the Unreal instead of this card, but I'm not sure if he's actually much (if at all) better. For one thing they cost exactly the same amount of mana when discounted by Morophon, but in that situation the Captain's cost is actually better because it's instead of . They're both 2/2's but Captain comes with Flying baked in, which means he's substantially better at actually getting through for damage once that becomes relevant, and he's a better blocker too. The main thing Lord of the Unreal has going for it is that it's a Human, which makes that a better type to name with Morophon than it already is, and it's worded in a way that Mirror Entity and Amoeboid Changeling can let it protect itself. All in all, I think that giving your creatures Hexproof is extremely valuable in a creature-focused deck like this with lots of cards that draw removal like fat kids to an ice cream truck in Summer, so I would absolutely run one or the other, but I think it's pretty much personal preference here.
I'm gonna talk about both this card and Manaweft Sliver here because let's be real, they're the exact same card. The fact that I'm running two versions of the exact same card in this deck that's already extremely tight on space should tell you how important it is alone. Color fixing is obviously supremely important for any five color deck, and ramping is important for any EDH deck. These two are so much more than just mana dorks, they turn more than half your board into mana dorks, anyone who's played a Sliver deck or a deck that runs Cryptolith Rite should know exactly how powerful this is. Half of the time this deck starts going insane is because one of these two are letting me pump out absurd amounts of mana, and that mana gets me more creatures, that then tap for more mana, and before you know it you've played almost every card in the deck.
Okay now we're getting into the spicy stuff. Haakon's effect is extremely powerful, being able to just straight up cast our creatures out of the graveyard is insane, at that point the only removal that can really hurt you is Cyclonic Rift or something like Terminus. But there's an issue, how do we get him on the board to begin with if we can't cast him from our hand? There's 3 (reliable) options available to us: Fauna Shaman can discard him, using Birthing Pod on a 2 drop can cheat him in, and we can tutor him straight into the graveyard with Buried Alive. It's certainly possible to hit him with something like Kindred Summons too but that's usually just a happy accident. It's important to note that he says "Knight cards" and not "Knight creature cards" too, meaning that you can use him to repeatedly cast Crib Swap from your graveyard, combine this with Morophon and Jodah (or Unesh) and Crib Swap costs to cast, meaning you can cast it infinitely. Not only does this let you exile all of your opponents' creatures, but it's a wincon in that you get infinite Changeling ETB's, exile one of your creatures to get a Changeling token, cast it again targeting the token to exile it and get another token, rinse and repeat.
Another dork. This one's not quite as good as the Slivers, but it can do things that they can't. For one thing it can tap for a TON of mana all by itself, you don't have to tap down 3/4 of your creatures to cast something like you do with Gemhide Sliver, and it also benefits from cloning via Shapesharer unlike the Slivers which are redundant. Speaking of that, if you can tap Harabaz Druid for at least 4 mana, you actually gain mana every time you turn something into her with Shapesharer, with enough creatures and enough mana to get started this can lead to infinite mana with Najeela. Outside of that her main purpose is color fixing early, and powering out big expensive stuff in the mid game like Rooftop Storm or Kindred Summons. Mirror Entity is her BFF, I mentioned it in the section talking about that card but I'll repeat it here: You can activate Mirror Entity for 1, then tap Harabaz Druid for X mana where X=the number of creatures you control, then activate Mirror Entity for X to make everything gigantic and game ending.
Honestly this is another pretty straightforward one, so like with Drogskol Captain I'm gonna talk more about why I'm using this card and not any of the other options more than the card itself. When I originally built the deck this was Crested Sunmare because "lol funny Horse tribal card" but it always felt mediocre because there was no substantial lifegain in the deck to take advantage of its token production. Then I switched it to Timber Protector because at the time I was trying to make Treefolk Harbinger work. Well once I cut the Harbinger and decided I was going to put Haakon in the deck this seemed like the right answer, it was cheaper, had a decent body for the early game thanks to first strike, and it synergizes wonderfully with Haakon. The weakness of this card is that it's not indestructible itself, but with Haakon if someone kills her and doesn't immediately wipe the board before my next turn, she's just gonna come right back. This is one of the biggest groan inducing cards in the deck now in my meta because of how resilient and hard to deal with it makes my board.
Everyone knows Najeela by now, and they know what she does, and she does all those same things here. This deck runs a lot of creatures, and it makes a lot of tokens, and it can make all those creatures and tokens very large. Najeela takes that recipe and amplifies it by nearly doubling our token production, letting everything attack twice and giving them all Lifelink and Trample and thats not even getting into comboing with her. As far as combos with her goes, the main method of going infinite with Najeela is with her, Gemhide/Manaweft Sliver, and Mirror Entity and at least available (this needs to be generated by things you're not going to attack with by the by and you can skip out on the if you can activate Entity for ) you attack with at least 3 Changelings, Najeela will make 3 Warrior tokens, spend the to use Mirror Entity to make everything a 1/1 Changeling, then spend the to use Najeela, from there you can tap the Changelings you attacked with and the tokens Najeela made that are now Changelings as well to make 6 mana, rinse and repeat, then dump a million mana into Mirror Entity and kill everyone. You can do this very easily with Faeburrow Elder+Harabaz Druid instead of one of the Slivers too.
My baby boy. Easily my favorite card in the deck, and I was so pleased when they revealed the Kaleidoscopic Killers set with the first round of Secret Lairs, it's like it was made expressly for this deck. Reaper King is a win condition, but he's also our only real method of dealing with artifacts and enchantments, I will name Scarecrow with Morophon if he's in my hand even if it's a bad idea overall because slapping down this bad boy for free is a huge game changer. Everything in the deck that cheats cards into play, makes tokens, blinks things, it all gets 10x better when he's in play. Your opponents are likely to not let you keep him on the field for long, so try to get as much mileage out of Reaper King as you can the same turn you play him (or, alternatively, if you don't mind everyone hating you forever: use that first turn to blow up a bunch of their lands and make it harder for them to remove him to begin with). He wins you the game pretty much outright with the Champion Loop I outlined in the last section, and the Haakon+Crib Swap loop I talked about a minute ago, but he can effectively win you the game in a non-infinite manner with Arcane Adaptation naming Scarecrow and enough things to trigger him in a single turn to completely wipe out your opponents' mana.
You should keep almost any starting hand that contains this card, a Changeling, and enough mana to play them both. For the low price of 3 mana this card turns all of your Changelings into Coiling Oracle it can and will ramp you like crazy and draw you TONS of cards. The drawing cards bit is what keeps it relevant all the way through the game as well, getting extra lands into play early is fantastic but the gas late game is where this bugger really shines, I run several other cards that draw when a Changeling enters the battlefield, but none of them can come down on turn 2 like this thing can. I severely underestimated this card when it first came out, don't repeat my mistake, run this card, I implore you.
Can you say "one-sided boardwipe on a stick"? Yes? Good. For a 6 mana creature this thing is a bit more defensively statted then I would prefer, especially for something that gives you such a huge incentive to attack with lots of "Dragons" but it's hardly the end of the world. Silumgar doesn't care about Indestructible, it doesn't care about Shroud, and it doesn't care about Hexproof. Speaking of Hexproof, this thing is gonna be a royal PITA for your opponents to get rid of thanks to that totally unnecessary ability they kinda just slapped on this bad boy, enjoy abuse it while it lasts. If your opponents have some big scary dudes on their fields and you've got a bunch of weak little goobers sitting there well then Silumgar will eat those big beatsticks for lunch. God help any poor token decks that have spent half the game making 374 tokens and durdling with them when this card hits the field, you wanna know what it sounds like when 374 Goblins all simultaneously crap their pants? Play Silumgar.
Man, you will get the dirtiest looks from anyone you're playing against with an actual Sliver deck when you drop this card. to tutor any Changeling we want or need is pretty nice, it's an easy way to assemble the pieces for the Champion loop, grab Mirror Entity so you can combo out with Najeela, you get the idea, I don't need to explain why tutors are good. If you play Arcane Adaptation and name Sliver this lets you tutor any creature in your deck as well, which yeah, it's dumb. As far as its other ability goes it's only real practical use (other than the trolly scenario I already suggested) is with Amoeboid Changeling, you can turn an opponent's big scary thing into a Changeling, and then snatch it because that means it's now a Sliver too. Oh and I suppose you could steal a Changeling token you gave to someone with Crib Swap but that seems kinda pointless and a waste of mana.
Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. This card is already gross in its natural habitat in a Sliver deck, but thanks to this deck's penchant for making all of its creatures basically free and drawing tons of cards, this thing becomes completely broken. I guarantee you, with the right cards in play, dropping The First Sliver and then casting a Changeling will end up with you casting 80% of the cards in your deck, mostly for free, probably netting an extra turn, and most likely killing everyone. A couple of specifics that I should note: If you hit a Changeling or another Sliver off of TFS' own Cascade trigger you will not get another Cascade trigger off of that cast because TFS is still on the stack and not on the field. Note that Valiant Changeling has a CMC of 7, even though it rarely actually costs that much mana, so you can hit some pretty big spells off of him for just . And if you stick an Arcane Adaptation naming Sliver with TFS in play, every single creature you cast will Cascade so yeah, pretty nuts.
The beefiest creature in the deck by a pretty substantial margin. Hitting this off of something like Call to the Kindred early on in the game feels really dirty. Getting to slap down any permanent from your hand is really nice, but really it's just the MASSIVE amount of cards you can draw off of this guy that's the main appeal. Nine mana is a lot, but this guy is worth that investment. Of course when I say "worth that investment" I mean "worth naming Dragon with Morophon and casting him as a 4 mana 10/10 with flying that draws you cards and gives you free stuff when it attacks". Worth noting too that just like Haakon, The Ur Dragon's Eminence doesn't specify Dragon creature spells, in this deck that only applies to Crib Swap, but there are other Tribal - Shapeshifter spells you could run in this deck like Wings of Velis Vel that this could apply too, there's also some nonsense you could pull with Artificial Evolution too, but this deck doesn't really recur spells, and I'm not sure using Evolution on this card for something like that is worth it.
Free Fact or Fiction every time a Changeling enters the battlefield will quickly draw you through 90% of your deck. The cost reduction is great too, the most expensive Changelings get in this deck is 5 mana, this alone cuts most of them down to 1 or 2 mana, with Morophon in play almost half of them cost nothing, add in Urza's Incubator and there's only three in the whole deck that don't cost because of double pips in their mana costs. What this means is that Unesh can dig 4 cards deep off of one trigger, and as long as you hit a single Changeling you just pick that pile and you can cast it for free and do it again. This is a great way to dig for a specific card you need, just keep it going as long as you can or until you hit that last combo piece, pick that pile and proceed to win. I do feel like I need to warn you however, resolving Unesh's trigger several times can lead to the dreaded 25 minute turn, so if you hate that sort of thing, or your playgroup heavily frowns upon it, I would suggest running something else in this spot.
There's a good chunk of average to high costed cards in this deck (in particular, Reaper King is a 10 drop and The Ur Dragon is a 9 drop, which hurts) and you can get a LOT of triggers in this deck. Her main purpose is to draw us cards, but that damage can really add up super quick. Especially if you sneak that damage in on everyone using Ninjutsu, your opponent might think he's just getting attacked by 6 tiny Faerie Rogue tokens, but one Ninjutsu and a Mirror Entity activation later and suddenly everyone is losing 26 life. Changeling Outcast can guarantee Yuriko slips in this way, but if you named Human with Morophon it can honestly be better to just cast her for and even though it kind of broadcasts your intention it can sometimes mean the difference between casting 3 cards that turn or going off and casting 35. Lastly she can be used to get back something you've Championed via Ninjutsu, you can also use it to bounce Morophon and recast him to change his assigned type.
Glad that's over and done with. Now I just... have to... talk about... all of the other cards in the deck (why am I doing this to myself again?)
Okay, existential crisis over, getting back to the topic at hand. This card's mileage can vary pretty wildly, if you play against a lot of other tribal decks pretty regularly I would probably not run it and opt for a more boring and traditional board wipe, but the only tribal decks I run into frequently are an Edgar Vampires deck and a Sliver deck so it does wonders for me. Every type chosen applies to every player's board so you should be naming something like Squirrel or Oyster, not just because it's incredibly funny to say out loud, but because then your opponents have one less chance to save any of their creatures, whatever types get chosen doesn't matter to you because all of your Changelings have those types.
Gives you a ton of tokens to mess around with, and then most likely gives you an extra turn to then kill everyone with said tokens. Worst case scenario you smack someone with Changeling Outcast for 1-2 damage and take an extra turn, which is still pretty good. The big thing is the extra turn obviously, but those tokens are nothing to sneeze at either honestly, Shared Animosity can make getting 10+ Faeries immediately lethal, dropping this with Arcane Adaptation and something like Reaper King or Dragon Tempest is also a real gut punch to your opponents. Also, if you have Haakon in play and target him with Artificial Evolution (and don't worry, I'm gonna get to THAT card in a minute) you can replace the word "Knight" with the word "Rogue" and then all of a sudden so long as you can make and have a way to connect for damage with a Changeling (hello again Changeling Outcast) you've got infinite turns on your hand.
This, like Harsh Mercy, varies wildly in power from game to game, but in reverse. It can be good against other tribal decks depending on who's ahead and how wide their deck goes. For instance you're not likely going to be able to use this against a Krenko deck for instance, but you might just ruin a Syr Gwyn player's night entirely (get it? night?), because this deck can make lots of tokens and homogenize their types so this actually hoses less token based tribes pretty hard. If your opponents aren't playing tribal but still run a creature focused build like your Aleshas or Marchesas then you can usually still take a bunch of their stuff by naming common types like Human, Wizard, or Soldier. Also this doesn't wear off at the end of the turn, so sometimes it can be worth it use this as a better Control Magic by naming the type of some big bomb your opponent dropped like Construct to take a Blightsteel Colossus or Sphinx to nab a Consecrated Sphinx.
Unlike Harsh Mercy this is an unconditional, one-sided board wipe. Unless you play in some weird meta where everyone has an Arixmethes Sea Monster tribal deck, if so.... where are you? That sounds like my kind of meta. This card can effortlessly set you up to hit someone for lethal and have a really big turn in general, and it can also save you and everyone else from being overrun by someone else (that's OUR job damn it!) and buy enough time for you and everyone else (but mostly you) to stabilize while they have to rebuild their board. There really isn't too much to say about this card, sure it bounces all of our lords back to our hand too, but how many times am I going to have to type the words "Mirror Entity" before you people start figuring it out on your own?
This card is awesome. Like, SO awesome. I know I've said that a lot by now, but seriously, there is no other card in all of Magic that can do what Artificial Evolution does. It affects not only the card's type line (if it's a creature or a Tribal card) but also every instance of that word in the creature's whole text box. For instance, if I cast Artificial Evolution targeting a Sliver Overlord|sld and chose to replace "Sliver" with "Squirrel" then he would become an Squirrel Mutant with ": Search your library for a Squirrel, reveal that card and put it into your hand. Then shuffle your library" and ": Gain control of target Squirrel" (I did exactly that to someone playing him as their commander and it was exactly as hilarious and cruel as it sounds). This can even target spells on the stack, so you can preemptively change something's type and effect before it even hits the field or alter an instant or sorcery that affects particular types of creatures. However you can only replace words that are printed on the cards themselves, so anything that says "choose a creature type" or similar cannot be altered this way sadly.
This spell basically doubles your board state. Usually it's the best call to just name whatever creature type is prevalent on your board at the time to hit as many creatures as possible, but if you want something specific it can't hurt to just name Dragon or Shaman in an attempt to get those specific cards, but at that point you're kind of just rolling the dice. Mirror Entity maximizes the number of creatures you'll pull by making everything Changelings, and Arcane Adaptation makes it so you can pull any creatures you hit so long as you name the same type you did for that. I know this is an Instant, and it's extremely valuable that it is, allowing you to get a bunch of creatures right before your turn so you can untap with them, or generate a lot of bodies out of nowhere to muck up combat, but it's often the right call to cast this on your own turn I think, given this deck's ability to steamroll card advantage the way it does, being able to cast Kindred Summoning and then follow it up with more stuff based off of what it gave you can often lead to winning the game.
Slap this bad boy on a Changeling and with the density of creatures in this deck you're pretty much guaranteed something off of your top 5 every single turn which I'm sure I don't have to tell you, gets real dumb real quick (bonus points if you drop it on a Chameleon Colossus so they can't Murder it). I was considering squeezing Worldly Tutor and/or Congregation at Dawn into the deck at one point because of their general usefulness and synergy with this card, but ultimately I think it's unnecessary. Most of the time it doesn't matter what you hit, just that you hit something, if you're trying to trigger tribal synergies any Changeling will do the job, and if you're looking to get more Lords onto the field this isn't the right card to do that, it's too inconsistent, any big bomby Lord you hit like Reaper King or Ur Dragon is just a happy coincidence. All in all I think this card really shines in this deck, but you don't need to run it, especially if Auras are particularly fragile in your meta, you could pretty easily take this card out to make room for something else, I just have a personal soft spot for it because it's one of the few surviving cards from the original original draft of this deck.
Win conditions for 2 mana are pretty good I think. The haste effect is a tad useless, I mean, don't get me wrong it's nice to give haste to guys like Ur Dragon, Silumgar, and Unesh, but the only way 99% of our Changelings are going to benefit from it is with Cloudshredder Sliver, which already gives them haste anyways. It's Scourge of Valkas effect on the other hand... hoo boy can this get out of hand real quick. It's not unheard of for this deck to be able to dome players for 30+ damage after a Kindred Summons or some other such shenanigans like Notorious Throng+Arcane Adaptation. Also note that the creature that triggers Tempest is the one that does the damage, not the enchantment itself, so triggering it with Venomous Changeling kills something even if it's the only Changeling you have on board, and you can potentially gain a ton of life off of Changeling Hero, I'm sure there are a lot of other ways to abuse this particular aspect of the card if you really wanted to, but these are the only ones I've come across with the deck in it's current state.
This card is SOOOOO busted, seriously, oh my GOD is it dumb, there's absolutely a reason that it's shot up to around $20, I hate spending that kind of money on individual cards and I STILL think this was worth it. Every time I've managed to play this card I've won that game, you will draw 10-15 cards off of this thing easily if it's not answered immediately. That being said, much like Reaper King|sld a smart player will NOT let you sit on this card so be prepared to get as much value out of it the turn you play it as possible, there's no guarantee you'll have it after that turn. Not much I can really say about this thing, OP cards are OP and you should play them. If budget is a concern I suppose you could replace it with something like Coastal Piracy or Bident of Thassa but it's really not the same, this deck abuses the attack trigger and the ETB trigger equally so those card are really only giving you half the value. I should warn you though, this deck frequently wins by generating infinite ETB triggers, so be careful that this card isn't on the board when you do that, blow it up with Reaper King or something, because that draw trigger isn't a "may" so you're probably gonna deck yourself before you kill everyone, it's possible with the amount of damage churned out by Dragon Tempest that you won't, but then you have to do math and that's even worse.
Draw 4 lose 4 would already been worth running without any of the other text on the card, but then they had to go ahead and add those four magical words at the end: "you win the game". Getting 4 "Demons" with different names into play in this deck is an absolute joke of a prerequisite, if you're opponents aren't prepared for it this can just straight up steal the game from under everyone's noses. This card will (rightfully so) stress your opponents out as long as it's on the field, so be prepared to take some heat because of it if they can't kill the enchantment, you might end up seeing a lot of removal being pointed at your creatures, or a board wipe getting dropped. Thankfully since you can anticipate that reaction you can plan for it: if you know one of your opponents is sitting on a wipe and you want to force it out of their hand, Liliana's Contract is a great way to do that. Even if it's blown up immediately it's still card advantage, so just think of it as a draw spell with huge potential upside, and not as an actual win condition and you're golden.
Even without messing with creature types this card is good. It effectively ramps you into Morophon since you can drop Storm for and then immediately cast Morophon for free after. You can cast Haakon from your graveyard for free with this and get that ball rolling. Naming Zombie with Arcane Adaptation is gross. This + Haakon + a Changeling + a sac outlet goes infinite barring any Rule of Law or Leyline of the Void shenanigans. The only things I don't like about this card is A) it's expensive, even in this deck 6 mana for a non-creature is kind of awkward, and B) this and Jodah, Archmage Eternal kind of make each other feel superfluous since they both kind of serve the same purpose, but hey, the effect is THAT strong so I'm not gonna complain, and I certainly don't ever really feel bad to draw the card unless it's like turn 2.
Takes a medium sized boardstate and makes it hit like Saruman's army at the end of The Two Towers (if you don't get that reference we can't be friends and you need to go educate yourself). This card doesn't really need any direct combos to go nuts, it just kind of does thanks to how the deck is constructed. Having said that, Mirror Entity maximizes the benefit you get from this card, like it does with every other card in the deck (seeing a pattern yet?). Casting this on the extra turn given to you by Notorious Throng after getting like 10 Faerie tokens almost guarantees at least ONE person is going to die. This is also a good way to ensure that Najeela can kill off the table if you don't have Mirror Entity or a way to make her go actually infinite, note that the Warrior tokens she makes DO count towards the bonus your other Warriors get, but they won't get the buff themselves until the next combat step because they didn't attack, they were put in attacking instead.
This lets you put any Changeling into play for at instant speed, that should speak for itself. This card has kind of a low floor but a very high ceiling. On one hand cheating in stuff like Changeling Outcast with nothing to really capitalize on it feels pretty weak BUT paying the same amount of mana to flash in The Ur Dragon|sld thanks to naming Minotaur with Arcane Adaptation is insane. Cards like this are why draw power is so important in the deck, a lot of pieces in the deck depend on having the right options available to capitalize on them in order to steamroll that card advantage into a win. Worst case scenario, Didgeridoo only costs to actually cast, so even if you can't capitalize on it right away, you can pretty much just drop it in play and if it eats removal, well then that's one less card your opponents have that could have blown up your other artifacts, and if they let it sit there then two turns later you could be using it to flash a combo into play on your opponent's end step.
Think of this card as a turbo mana rock in this deck. SO many important cards become completely free when you've got Incubator and Morophon in play, importantly it also drops Morophon's cast from to which means with the right starting hand you can get Morophon into play as early as turn 3. Like so many other cards in this deck that say "choose a creature type" the type you want to name is pretty contextual, name what will let you vomit the most things onto the field in the shortest amount of time. For what it's worth, unless I'm trying to use Incubator to combo I would probably only name Dragon, Scarecrow, or Sphinx with this card because thats where you get the most value from the cost reduction. The Slivers and Humans in the deck mostly only cost colored pips and obviously our Changelings don't care. Human isn't terrible to name mind you because there's a sizable chunk of them in the deck, but the only one you get the full discount for is Najeela.
Rewards you with yet more card draw for playing Changelings, this isn't quite as strong as things like Kindred Discovery or Risen Reef because it's only on cast and not on ETB, but that's hardly the worst thing in the world, in fact it's sometimes a bonus since you don't need to worry about decking yourself with this when doing the Changeling loop and things like that. The anthem effect on this is actually quite nice since it's not actually on a creature too. This means that Banner allows you to activate Mirror Entity for without having to have another anthem effect in play since Banner won't become a 0/0 and die like the creature based anthems do. All in all it's a solid card so I would recommend running it, but it's hardly vital in any way so if you feel you have enough card draw then feel free to cut this in favor of something else if you feel you need space.
Generic Goodstuff
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I'm not gonna get as fancy with the next two sections as I did with the last two since most of these cards are utilitarian in nature and should be pretty self-explanatory, also formatting that last section killed my soul and I just want this over with now, so here goes nothing:
Faeburrow Elder- Honestly, this should just be Bloom Tender, but that card is hella expensive and I don't have one (yet). Morophon costs 7 mana, and there's a lot of cards with multicolored pips in their mana costs in this deck, that makes something like Elder and Bloom Tender significantly more powerful, but also much, much more crucial to getting our stuff out in time.
Fauna Shaman- I alluded in the section on the Changelings that it's really important to strike a balance between goo boys and various lords so you don't run out of steam as the game goes on, well Fauna Shaman helps to facilitate that beautifully, a turn 2 Shaman can set you up to have a really good time. (Protip: Pitch a Changeling to get Haakon, then pitch Haakon the next turn to grab Risen Reef and you'll be riding that gooey gravy train in no time.)
Arcane Adaptation- This card is great for really amplifying the effects of a particular tribal lord. This card is really not something you want to play right away, hold onto it until you know exactly how you're going to generate the most value possible out of it with the other cards at your disposal. For example: you can apply Morophon's discount to all of your creatures by naming the same type with both, you can absolutely brutalize the board with Reaper King by naming Scarecrow, tutor whatever you want and Cascade all the things by naming Sliver, or make your creatures nigh-unassailable by naming Knight thanks to Haakon and Knight Exemplar.
Guardian Project- This card is dumb in EDH, but I like dumb, and so should you. It doesn't care about creature types whatsoever, but since we're a creature focused deck and constantly abusing ETB triggers it would be foolish not to use this to our advantage.
Birthing Pod- Pod is love, Pod is life. Much like Fauna Shaman, this card helps to keep us from spinning our wheels too much once we get to mid game, and you can really get an engine going by Podding a 2 drop Changeling into Haakon, and then casting it and every other Changeling you Pod into and out of from your graveyard. Make a note what your creature curve is like and always be aware of what your options are with this card.
Chromatic Lantern- Kind of a wonky mana rock, but in a 5 color deck with a suboptimal mana base this thing does some really nice heavy lifting.
Dragon's Hoard- This honestly should have been in the last section, but there isn't much for me to say about it, it's a decent rock, and it will draw you cards when you don't need the mana, and it will always have a Gold counter on it in this deck, what's not to love?
Sol Ring- I'm not gonna sit here and tell you why you should run Sol Ring, that would just be condescending.
Buried Alive- This is mainly used to dump Haakon into our yard, but you get another two creatures alongside him, use those two choices situationally to help you adapt to what's going on in the game. If you've already got Haakon through Pod or something, use this to grab the Champions and try to combo off, if you've got Arcane Adaptation set to Knight you can grab whatever the hell you want. Go nuts!
Skyshroud Claim- Solid ramp, it's the whole reason we're running every Forest/X shock in the deck we can since it practically guarantees we'll have all 5 colors on the next turn, outside of the shocks Murmuring Bosk is a solid card to grab with this too. I'll be trying out the new Ikoria Triome lands soon enough to see how they fit in this deck since they naturally synergize with Claim as well.
The Mana Base
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Ancient Amphitheater/Auntie's Hovel/Gilt-Leaf Palace/Murmuring Bosk/Primal Beyond/Secluded Glen/Wanderwine Hub- These cards are cheap as hell (for the most part, Gilt-Leaf Palace was stupidly expensive until recently) and almost always come in untapped in this deck. You should be drawing tons of cards with this deck, and if you don't have any Changelings in your hand after that then you have bigger problems than a tapland.
Ally Encampment/Haven of the Spirit Dragon/Sliver Hive/Unclaimed Territory- These can sometimes be frustrating when you need the colored mana to cast weird stuff like Ayula or Unesh, but 80% of the time it's not a problem and the upside of these lands are huge. They don't enter tapped, they make any color of mana, the former two can act as recursion for our Changelings in a pinch, and Sliver Hive makes tokens which I shouldn't need to explain why that's relevant at this point.
Command Tower/Cascading Cataracts/Exotic Orchard/Forbidden Orchard- These are pretty self explanatory, there's almost no reason why you wouldn't want to run these in a 5 color deck, and if you don't play Command Tower then you're either a hipster or an idiot.
Breeding Pool/Overgrown Tomb/Stomping Ground/Temple Garden- This should ideally be a set of all ten shocks, but I'm not made out of money alright? Like I said earlier, Forest/X shocks are great with Skyshroud Claim and they're more important in general than the other shocks because we need green to be able to play almost all of our other ramp, so getting a land that can make green and another color is a priority here.
Mutavault- It's a land that turns into a Changeling, how cool is that? It can often be worth it to tap it for a colorless and use that colorless to turn it into a Changeling just to pump up certain effects by 1 like Kindred Summons or Harabaz Druid (which is effectively just filtering the colorless of this land into colored mana), and as long as you didn't play Mutavault that turn you can tap a land like Sliver Hive, use the colorless to make Mutavault a creature, then tap it for any color thanks to Gemhide Sliver, effectively using Mutavault as a middleman to filter mana too.
Path of Ancestry- Since our commander is every creature type, this will Scry off of any creature you play with it, every Morophon deck should absolutely be running this card.
Swarmyard- I don't care what it does, it says "Insect, Rat, Spider, or Squirrel" on it, that's just awesome. Real talk though, ": Regenerate half of the cards in your deck including your commander" is crazy strong.
Sideboard Construction
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So you may have noticed a little oddity in the decklist, there's a sideboard listed with only five cards. This is a little disingenuous, my "actual" sideboard is closer to 30 cards, comprised mostly of cards I cut from the deck in earlier stages of its construction, since there's still scenarios where they could be useful, and I still occasionally want to play with them from time to time. We're gonna put a pin in the five cards I have listed for now, I'll get back to them later I promise, but for now I want to specifically talk about why I think you really should have a sideboard for this deck.
I'm not generally one to use sideboards in EDH, I prefer for my decks to be flexible enough that I can adjust to pretty much any matchup without having to slot things in and out between games, not only does this lead to less time between games but also tends to make your decks stronger overall. That being said, this deck has to go so all-in on what it's trying to do that it leaves very little room for the typical "silver bullets" that I would include in one of my normal lists, so having a handful of interchangeable slots to help diversify your list can go a very long way. Not only that, but there are SO many cards you can run in this deck that having a sideboard lets you more freely switch things in and out both to test out new inclusions, and to simply diversify your experience playing the deck.
I'm not going to tell you exactly what your sideboard should be, it's extremely subjective because everyone's meta is different, but I'll give you a few suggestions of things you might want to consider depending on the kinds of decks you're running into:
- General Kudro of Drannith: If you find yourself running into a lot of reanimator decks, this guy basically punches them right in the nads if they're not careful, he's a little slow in that he only exiles two cards for every Human you have ETB, so he won't help that much against mass reanimation strategies like Living Death but his low CMC, anthem effect, and activated ability that's both a sac outlet and targeted removal means he'll still be useful 99% of the time. Honestly he's close to mainboard material, but I'm just not that sold on him yet because he's still so new.
- Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet: This can definitely hose reanimator similarly to Kudro, but he doesn't stop your opponent from milling or discarding creatures, I'm mostly mentioning him here as a counter to Aristocrats decks. Since his ability is a replacement effect, the creatures will never hit the graveyard, so you don't need to worry about things like Blood Artist or Child of Alara while he's in play, which is really, really useful. He's also a sac outlet like Kudro, but the effect you get is pretty underwhelming in this list, it's kind of just a nice little cherry on top.
- Arachnogenesis: If you face down a lot of aggro or voltron decks this can really make those players heads spin at the right time. Arachnogenesis is one of those cards that is already okay on its own, but becomes downright broken in this deck thanks to things like Arcane Adaptation and Mirror Entity. An ill-advised attack can lead to a total blowout with this card, something like Adaptation+Reaper King or Adaptation+Dragon Tempest can lead to a one sided boardwipe, or you just outright killing one or more players respectively. Mirror Entity with enough mana means you can probably kill everything they attacked you with as well. It's not gonna help you against those pesky Thantis decks though!
- Tuktuk Scrapper: This little guy can absolutely brutalize Artifact decks, destroying them is already good, but that damage trigger on top of it means that you can probably kill that player with just 3-4 triggers as well. Hell, there are enough rocks and Treasures in the format now that this could probably be considered for the mainboard too, I just personally think it's overkill for me, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't consider it for yourself!
- Qasali Slingers: Similarly to the above, Slingers is a great way to give any Enchantress decks the middle finger (well... until they play Replenish at least, but I have an answer to that below). I'm not too thrilled with it being a five drop, but at least you get a decent body alongside the effect for that mana. Slinger's effect being a "may" is a really big deal too, I don't really like Harmonic Sliver for that exact reason since we actually run a decent number of critical artifacts and enchantments and being forced to blow them up would just feel horrible.
- Lullmage Mentor: If you play a lot of decks that aim to cast a bunch of big swingy spells like Genesis Wave or Exsanguinate to win the game, then this is the perfect answer for you. My deck as-is can have a hard time directly dealing with Spellslinger decks outside of becoming immune to their removal via indestructible or hexproof and just, well... murdering them, so a tribal card that can counter spells is just the bees knees if this is a big concern for you. I was torn between suggesting this and Voidmage Prodigy but I think it largely comes down to personal preference and how you've constructed the deck, so use whichever one you think is best, or both, do whatever you want I'm not your mom.
I mentioned at the very top of this guide that I occasionally switch Morophon for one of the other WUBRG legendaries in the deck when I feel like it. Well after the first time I did this, I realized that when Morophon wasn't the acting commander of the deck, Jodah felt extremely underwhelming. This gave me the idea of having a selection of cards that I can swap Jodah out for for each potential commander I have in the deck to help capitalize on their particular effects.
- Boldwyr Intimidator: Kind of obviously this is meant to go with Najeela. If you wanted a slightly more serious card that would help you win games then something like Nature's Will would probably be better, but lets be real, getting to run cards that say wacky stuff like "Cowards can't block Warriors" is the whole reason I built this deck, so it's an obvious choice for me. Ironically this makes you extremely weak to actual Najeela decks because changelings are all Cowards too, so just be aware that that's a thing.
- Shields of Velis Vel: This card is hilarious with Sliver Overlord|sld. For just you get a one-time Mirror Entity activation minus the pump effect which is already pretty good, but the interesting part is that you can target your opponents with it. Suddenly all of your opponents critters are Slivers, so for every extra you have the turn you play this, you get to steal one of them. It's also a Tribal instant, so you can do this repeatedly with Haakon in play. Theoretically you can infinitely pump your whole board if you can cast both this and Nameless Inversion for free with Haakon too, just cast Shields a trillion times, then cast Inversion on each of your critters a thousand times, then cast Shields one more time to make them all Changelings again and boom.
- Wheel of Fate: So if you've ever played with The First Sliver before, you know that it's actually pretty common to Cascade chain all the way down to 1 on a good turn. Wheel of Fate being a 0 drop means that the first time that happens you also get to refill your hand, which will probably lead to you putting another 15 creatures into play via Cascade and winning the game. Depending on how your deck is built you might prefer to run Living End in lieu of this though.
- Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre: I mentioned it up top, but you can Birthing Pod Reaper King|sld into Ulamog as early as turn 4-5 with the right opening hand, and that's really just gonna end the game right then and there if your opponent doesn't have something like Swords to Plowshares already in their hand. Need I say more? If Ulamog is too pricey for you, then Rite of Replication is always hilarious with Reaper King.
- Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind: This deck can draw tons of cards all at once, OG Niv turns that into creature removal (or player removal). He directly synergizes with The Ur-Dragon|sld since Ur-daddy draws you boatloads of cards with his trigger, and Niv is a Dragon, so he benefits from the cost-reduction and can contribute to his effect by attacking, which is way better than tapping him to ping someone. Niv-Mizzet, Parun is better in a vacuum I think, but good luck casting that in a 5 color deck. Something like Utvara Hellkite would probably be a good alternative as well, but I already run that in Prossh.
Strategy Schmategy
As atypical as this deck is on a surface level, the early to mid-game stuff you're looking to do is fairly innocuous and in line with what a lot of other decks do, ramp early, draw as much as you can, start setting down pieces and stabilizing the board, then keep digging until you can establish some form of engine to dig for a wincon. For discussion on early game we're primarily going to talk about things you want to look for in an opening hand as well as card sequencing for maximum efficiency. As far as midgame goes I want to go over how you establish synergies and how you should build on what the deck has given you to start steamrolling advantage. When it comes to late-game we're going to discuss our combos as well as non-infinite but nonetheless game-ending synergies you should look for. However before we get into all of that, there's something I want to discuss that is relevant to all stages of the game first.
Lions! and Tigers! and Bears!- and Slivers, and Dragons, and Sphinxes, and Ninjas, and... you get the idea.
So in looking over the deck list (you did do that right?) you may have noticed a particular line of text pop up several times on a lot of different cards:
"As [REDACTED] enters the battlefield, choose a creature type"
Well what creature type do you choose? When half of your stuff has every type, and the other half has next to no uniformity whatsoever, what on earth should you name? Warrior? Dragon? Oyster? The actual answer to this is highly subjective and involves a lot of factors that change from game to game. Depending on how you built the deck, what decks you're playing against, where you're at in said game, and what card in particular we're talking about the answer may change at almost any moment. In light of this, I'm going to discuss how you should approach these cards categorically instead of going over them one-by-one, because there's a good amount of them, and even more that I didn't include in my list that you may include in your own.
Lastly I want to go over the most nebulous and situational category, cards that you want to name specific types for, but not always the same one. These are some of the best cards in the deck bar none, stuff like Arcane Adaptation and Kindred Discovery, but knowing when to play them and what type to name can easily mean the difference between winning and losing a game. When it comes to these cards it's imperative that you consider not only what the card itself does but also, what cards are in your deck, what you have available at the moment, and what you're looking to get out of it in the long run.
That being said, sometimes you don't have the option of picking optimally, sometimes you need to eke as much benefit from the card as immediately as you can, whether that's to try and dig for an answer with Discovery, or protecting your board from a wipe with Arcane Adaptation, don't get so hung up on the optimal use cases for these cards to the point that you're afraid to cast them until it's too late, naming Warrior with Discovery might be better 90% of the time, but if I need to draw cards and all I have are Spirits, then I'm going to name Spirit. Arcane Adaptation is the supreme example of this. This deck can use it to do game-winning combos very easily, but it doesn't need to do that to win. Sometimes plopping down Adaptation and naming Egg to abuse Atla Palani, Nest Tender or naming Bear so you can pump Morophon to lethal size or wipe the opponent's board can be just as game winning as using Adaptation to combo is.
Like I said at the top of this section though, this is all largely subjective. It's something you're going to have to consider for yourself based on your meta, what "choose" cards you include, and what creature types you're actively using in your deck. I recommend just looking over your final list, thinking about which types of lords you're running and how your cards interact with one another. Knowing what types to name and when for what cards is extremely important, but you can only really figure out the answer for yourself through actually playing the deck, I can only guide you so far on this.
Early Game: Starting hands and how to play them
So Ideally your starting hand should have a few things:
- Ramp: the single best cards to get in our opening hand are easily Risen Reef, Gemhide Sliver (or its brother), Harabaz Druid, rocks, and situationally, Skyshroud Claim this lets us start amassing mana and fixing our colors, which as a five-color deck with a commander, is hands down the most important thing to do early on.
- Lands: Pretty self-explanatory, you need lands to play stuff, but how many? What colors do you need the most? Well in terms of quantity I think 3-4 is pretty spot-on depending on the context of the rest of your hand, if you have a bunch of ramp you don't need as much, and if you're gonna get to drawing cards early and you can play the things that will do that with what you have, you don't need as many. In terms of colors Green is paramount since it lets us cast all of our ramp cards that aren't artifacts, and the other colors are only really important in the context of what's in your hand that you need to cast (i.e. don't keep an opener containing Drogskol Captain and Kindred Discovery with no Islands or ways to get them) but do try to get your colors online as fast as you can to avoid those awkward turns.
- Card Draw: Once you've solved the mana problem, card draw is next on the list, that being said not all card draw is created equal, and early game you're primarly looking for cheap, low costed stuff that'll get the ball rolling: Risen Reef, Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow, and Dragon's Hoard are great for this because they can come into play early and are relatively low maintenance for what they provide.
So what did I mean up there when I said "card sequencing"? Well, let me give you a hypothetical opening hand to serve as an example:
Looks kinda weird right? Well this is actually a great opener if you play it right, if you play these cards in the wrong order you could end up slowing yourself down. I'm going to give you two different sequences up to turn 4 as examples:
Example 1:
- Turn 1: Sliver Hive → tap Hive for to cast Changeling Outcast
- Turn 2: Mutavault → tap Hive and Mutavault for to cast Manaweft Sliver
- Turn 3: Wanderwine Hub (tapped) → Tap Sliver Hive to animate Mutavault → Swing with Outcast → Tap Manaweft+Mutavault for to Ninjutsu Yuriko
- Turn 4: Tap Hub+Manaweft+Mutavault for to cast Reef → Tap Hive for to cast Outcast.
- Turn 1: Wanderwine Hub (revealing Outcast) → Pass
- Turn 2: Sliver Hive → tap Hive+Hub for to cast Manaweft Sliver
- Turn 3: Mutavault → Tap Mutavault+Manaweft+Hub for to cast Reef → Tap Hive for to cast Outcast
- Turn 4: Swing with Outcast → Tap Manaweft+Hub for to Ninjutsu in Yuriko → Main Phase 2 tap Sliver Hive for to recast Outcast.
- In Example 1 we dropped Outcast immediately thanks to Sliver Hive, Manaweft turns Outcast into a dork so we can tap him as early as Turn 2 to make mana, and has us going into Turn 3 with 4 mana available. However playing Outcast Turn 1 means that Wanderwine Hub has to come into play tapped now, and we had to filter mana through Mutavault in order to play Yuriko on Turn 3.
- In Example 2 we did nothing on Turn 1 purely to get Wanderwine Hub into play untapped. We still get 4 mana on Turn 3 thanks to not being forced to play a tapland, and we get to play both Risen Reef and Outcast on that same turn, netting 2 triggers of Reef's ability a full turn earlier. Then using Ninjutsu on Yuriko Turn 4 means that not only do we get her trigger, but we get to recast Outcast and trigger Reef again.
Obviously this is something that applies to the whole game, not just your opening moves, and it applies to pretty much every deck, not just this one, BUT it's crucially important to think about when playing this deck because it has so many different moving pieces and synergies you have to constantly be aware of.
Think about the order you play your cards in all the time, but be doubly aware of it at the beginning of the game because it can mean the difference between rocketing ahead of the table or falling behind.
Mid-Game: Turning Shenanigans into Strategy
So you've gotten some ramp out, drawn a few cards, maybe you got lucky and stuck a turn 4 Morophon or something, so where do you go from here?
Well the goal of this deck is to take all of the disparate pieces you've gotten thus far and coalesce them into an engine that can propel you into the late game. You're gonna be taking a bunch of square pegs and sanding them down until they fit in those round holes (innuendo fully intended).
The idea is to look at what you've gotten so far, and see how you can start to squeeze as much advantage from them as possible, like blood from a stone. This generally comes in the form of either becoming extremely aggressive or defensive depending on what you have to work with:
If you've got cards like Yuriko, Najeela, or Ayula, you want to go on the offensive, so look to play things that complement that like Shared Animosity to deal big boy damage or Whelming Wave to get a clean hit in on an opponent. If you can get swinging with stuff like this early enough then by the time your opponents are able to stabilize against it it could very well be too late. This deck's ability to cheat mana costs and vomit tons of creatures into play in the blink of an eye means that aggro is actually a feasible wincon because you can go from 5 power worth of creatures on the board to 35 in a single turn and catch people off guard surprisingly easy.
If you don't have anything that encourages you to attack your opponents, or you're worried about a crack-back then your goal is to compound your card advantage engines together to try and draw into a combo as fast as you can. This is when the more defensive lords like Haakon, Drogskol Captain, and Knight Exemplar shine, because you'll be playing lots of creatures and you want to protect your board as much as you can while you dig for a combo. Try to draw as many cards as you can, getting something like Birthing Pod, The First Sliver, or Call to the Kindred to stick can rocket you way ahead while you do this.
There's some crucially important creatures in this deck at 3 mana: Najeela, Mirror Entity, Yuriko, Risen Reef, and Haakon to name a few, 3 of which are combo pieces as well. Getting one or several of these into play can make a big difference in how the game goes for you. Unless I know I'm sitting down against a deck with substantial grave hate like an Anafenza deck or something I know is running Rest in Peace then almost always my first grab is Haakon, since he needs to be cheated into play anyways and he lets me recycle 2 and 3 CMC Changelings to Pod into multiple 3 and 4 drops.
The 4 mana spot is more utilitarian, but no less important. Podding a 3 drop can get you Atla Palani as a boardwipe deterrent, or just to start double-dipping on value with subsequent Pod activations. You can Pod a 3 drop into Changeling Berserker, then Pod Berserker into either Changeling Hero or Changeling Titan, which can be an easy way to assemble that combo. And most importantly, Podding a 3 drop will let you fetch Jodah, with Morophon out that's a one-way ticket to valuetown.
Lastly I wanted to mention the subtle synergy Pod has with Shapesharer. With Shapesharer you can turn any of your Changelings into a copy of something else, and whatever it copies the Changeling will then have that card's CMC, meaning you could potentially turn your Universal Automaton into a copy of an opponent's 5 drop, then Pod it into Silumgar or Unesh out of nowhere. This also lets you do something like turn an Amoeboid Changeling into a copy of your Bloodline Keeper so you can Pod for a 5 drop without actually losing your Bloodline Keeper. It's not something that comes up all the time, but it's definitely something to be aware of.
Late-Game: Combos, Winning Synergies, and the Art of Turning Things Sideways
Okay, so how do we actually win the game? Well, as this section's title might suggest, it's usually via combat damage, powerful synergies, or an infinite combo, so we'll go over them in that order:
Winning via combat damage: This comes in two flavors, commander damage or creature swarms. Morophon starts as a 6/6 which while not the beefiest thing around, it only takes one anthem effect to make him kill in 3 hits, and it's not terribly difficult to get him up to 11 power with things like Shared Animosity. Oftentimes if you've just cleared the board with Whelming Wave or Harsh Mercy you can kill two players at once by pointing Morophon at the one with the highest life total, and everything else at the one with the lowest life. The most frequent ways you'll win via combat is thanks to Shared Animosity or pumping a bunch of mana into Mirror Entity (or both). Winning via combat damage isn't exactly the goal of this deck, but since we frequently end up with 10+ creatures on the board by this point sometimes it just, happens, and it's always a good idea to check if you've got enough power on the board to knock someone out without having to assemble a combo.
Winning with powerful synergies: a.k.a. "non-infinite combos". This is usually the result of a single blowout turn in which two or three of your cards do so much damage they kill people outright. The most frequent causes of this are due to Reaper King or Dragon Tempest being in play when you put a ton of creatures out all at once, usually via Kindred Summons, The First Sliver, or Notorious Throng+Arcane Adaptation. Casting Peer Pressure against another tribal deck when you have even slightly more creatures than them can lead to a blowout too, just make sure you kill the person you stole all those creatures from last (and hope they're not salty and just scoop to deny you their board). I'll mention Liliana's Contract here too since it doesn't really fit in either of the other two categories, sometimes you just stick this card at the right time with 4 Changelings out and your opponent's can't answer it before your next turn, against finely-tuned decks it's rare, but it happens Combos: I touched on most of these in the Card Analysis Section, but I'll compile them here for those that didn't want to read that monstrosity:
- Changeling Hero+Changeling Berserker+Changeling Titan: Infinite ETB triggers of any creature type, just have each Changeling Champion another one as it comes in over and over and over. Blows up all of your opponents' permanents with Reaper King|sld. Lets you infinitely pump all of your other Changelings with Ayula and beat the crap out of all their creatures to clear the way for them. Straight up burns everyone to death with Dragon Tempest. Generates infinite mana if you have Manaweft Sliver or Gemhide Sliver (again, thanks to Changeling Berserker) in play which can: let you pump all your stuff infinitely with Mirror Entity, pull all of your other Changelings out of your deck and cast them with Sliver Overlord|sld, and if you somehow did this after the declare attackers step, get infinite combat steps with Najeela.
- Haakon, Stromgald Scourge+Crib Swap+Morophon, the Boundless+Jodah, Archmage Eternal OR Unesh, Criosphinx Sovereign: Similarly to the above combo, this gives you infinite ETB triggers of any creature type, and as such, it becomes lethal with all of the same outlets as the Champion loop. Morophon+Unesh/Jodah lets us cast Crib Swap for free, and Haakon lets us cast it from our graveyard, meaning we can cast it as much as we want, so you target some useless dinky Changeling or mana dork like Universal Automaton or Harabaz Druid, exile it, get a Changeling token, then cast it again targeting the token to exile it and get another token, etc. etc. etc.
- Haakon, Stromgald Scourge+Artificial Evolution+Notorious Throng: Infinite turns and a boatload of 1/1 Faerie Rogue tokens. You cast Evolution targeting Haakon and replace the word 'Knight' with 'Rogue', which then lets you cast Throng from your graveyard, so as long as you can connect for damage with a Rogue (hello there Changeling Outcast) and can make at least then you're good to go. If for some reason you can't kill everyone just with the tokens doing this gives you, then you can just take extra turns until you draw into another combo and kill them all that way instead.
- Najeela, the Blade-Blossom+Mirror Entity+Manaweft Sliver+ 6 mana: There's lots of variations on how exactly to do this combo, but this is the most compact version. You just need these 3 creatures and a way to make that doesn't involve tapping these 3 to start it. You pump into Entity, making everything a Changeling, swing with Entity, Najeela, and Manaweft Sliver, Najeela makes 3 1/1 Warrior tokens, then you use the remaining to activate Najeela, untap those 6 creatures, then tap one of the 3 Changelings you just attacked with to pump into Mirror Entity again so the 3 Warrior tokens are now Changeling tokens too, then you tap the 3 tokens and the remaining 2 Changelings you attacked with to activate Najeela again, rinse and repeat until you've got 10k mana, spend 10k mana on Mirror Entity to make all of them huge and then swing for lethal with however many combat phases and extra tokens you need at that point.
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Potential Inclusions and Notable Exclusions
I'm largely doing this so that I can start the Changelog with a clean slate from here on out, but also to stop people from asking "But why don't you run 'XYZ'?" When chances are, I've either considered it, or already tried it and moved on.
For Your Consideration:
Other Lords
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Admiral Beckett Brass- Not bad by any means, but I found that often when this deck does enter the red zone it's either with one creature, or with fifteen creatures, the former won't trigger this card, and the latter is usually lethal. It also can whiff against spellslinger decks, giving you less targets worth stealing. If you want to gear this deck more towards theft effects and/or combat though, I think Beckett is worth testing out at least.
Gishath, Sun's Avatar- I'm probably going to test this card soon-ish, it being an 8 drop means that not only can we Pod Morophon into it, but we can Pod Gishath into The Ur Dragon, which is great. Unfortunately Gishath's triggered ability, while still good, is actually a bit weaker in this deck then it is in an actual Dinosaur tribal deck since there's more chance you'll whiff hitting other lords and our goo boys are soft and squishy compared to a bunch of dinos. Still a 7/6 with Trample, Vigilance, Haste and a relevant triggered ability is pretty good, especially when you cast it for or cheat it into play for free.
Azami, Lady of Scrolls- I want to use this card so bad. Azami can draw a stupid amount of cards really easily and quickly, but that is brutal in a 5 color deck, plus I have enough ways to draw cards in the list as is that I don't really think she's mandatory in any way. If you have a better mana base then I do and don't think it'll be a problem go ahead and run her if you want to draw all the cards.
Krenko, Mob Boss- I ended up cutting Krenko out of my list pretty quickly unfortunately. I found that he ate removal pretty quickly most of the time because people are scared of him, and a lot of the time I either got him too early, when he only makes a handful of tokens before biting it, or I got him too late, when I want to be making things go infinite, not just get 10 Goblins. That being said, he definitely can do some work, so if you've got a meta that frowns on infinite combos, Krenko can be a good substitute for one, or if you want to go more in on the token route for your version of the deck definitely abuse the crap out of him.
Priest of Titania/Elvish Archdruid- I just don't see why you would run these over Harabaz Druid, sure this deck loves its green mana, but it also needs to be able to make other colors too
Gilt-Leaf Archdruid- This card is hilarious, but it will make you a lot of enemies. If you can't use this right away then expect a boardwipe to likely occur before your next turn. It's a great card, but I found it drew too much negative hate towards the deck in general.
Crested Sunmare- Actually pretty damn good, but it's overcosted compared to Knight Exemplar, and the deck doesn't have enough consistent lifegain to have it generate Horse tokens. If you wanted to also run something like Regal Caracal then you might want to consider this too. Speaking of Cats...
Hungry Lynx- God it hurt to cut this from my deck, "Cats you control have protection from Rats" is exactly the kind of goofy text that inspired me to make this deck in the first place. Unfortunately I think Ayula is just better all-around, but you could definitely make a case for running this alongside her, there's definitely some cool stuff you can do with Hungry Lynx. And speaking of Rats...
Ogre Slumlord- Giving all of our Changelings deathtouch and replacing them with a Rat token when they die is pretty nice. I just don't think there's enough ways for the deck to abuse it as is, and it's hard to justify cuts for cards that are just "cool" at this point.
Marrow-Gnawer- See Krenko. Giving Rats fear is a nice touch, but I don't think it's worth the extra mana or money this costs over Krenko. That being said, if you end up running the last two cards I mentioned this becomes significantly better so it could be worth consideration.
Horde of Notions- Really fantastic card, another one that hurt to cut from my initial list, but it felt superfluous after I added Haakon to the deck. Horde's ability doesn't benefit from Morophon at all, and is a lot more mana-intensive than Haakon because of it. It is a significantly better creature as a whole though. Probably would work great as a potential commander for the deck over Morophon honestly.
Soulcatchers' Aerie- This can be a HUGE buff to your whole board, I just don't personally like it because you need your Changelings to die while it's out to reap the rewards later and even then your opponents can just blow it up before you get to do any damage, I would probably just run Coat of Arms instead of this, it is pretty cute though.
Herald's Horn- This card is really good, I just opted to run Urza's Incubator over it for the heftier discount. This deck doesn't have enough topdeck manipulation to make the second ability hit consistently enough, if you decided to put something like Scroll Rack in this deck I could see Horn being a lot more valuable though.
Descendants' Path- Similar to Herald's Horn, I feel this just gets outclassed by Call to the Kindred. Yes it's an aura so it's a lot more fragile, but it also digs 4 cards deeper every turn. Path is definitely something to consider if you're worried about spot removal and getting 2-for-1'd though.
'Hurr durr, why you no run Rhystic Study?'
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This section is going to be comprised of two things: Stuff I think you shouldn't run, and stuff I would run, but don't due to budgetary reasons, both are rather small lists so I'm compounding them here
Conspiracy- You would think this card would be great in this deck, and you would be wrong. Unfortunately Conspiracy is a big ol nonbo with Changeling, as it overrides the ability entirely and makes everything the type you name. You can overwrite this with Mirror Entity, but it's just not worth it.
Xenograft- Just like Conspiracy, you would think this card is really good here, it's not actively bad like Conspiracy is, it's just "meh". This effect is most useful when it affects cards in other zones like your hand, deck, and graveyard like its strictly superior cousin Arcane Adaptation does. Unfortunately Xenograft only affects things on your board, and if I wanted to do that, I would just use Mirror Entity: It's cheaper, more easily tutorable, and has all the synergies naturally being a Changeling and a creature in general brings with it in this deck.
Mikaeus, the Unhallowed- This is nothing against Mikaeus in general, I'm just using him to represent all of these "types" of cards since there's a lot of them now thanks to Eldraine and Ikoria. Basically, anything that says "non-Human creature you control" is worthless because all of our Changelings are also Humans (which makes me so sad that's a thing Wizards is doing right now).
Jegantha, the Wellspring- I made a point of mentioning how important Faeburrow Elder and Bloom Tender are in a deck like this, Jegantha seems almost perfect until you actually start to think about it. It taps for , but you can't spend that mana on generic costs, meaning it doesn't help you cast Morophon whatsoever, and speaking of Goo Daddy, he takes the color requirements out of mana costs, meaning that frequently all you're left with IS the generic cost of the card. I would honestly overlook these things if I could run it as a Companion, but there's some extremely good cards in this deck with double pips that I would never cut just to do that.
Bloom Tender, Cavern of Souls, Patriarch's Bidding- I would absolutely run every single one of these in a heartbeat if I had them, but these are expensive cards, and often hard to find on top of that. These are upgrades I'm keeping my eye on in the long run, waiting to see if I can ever get a good deal on them or if the prices drop for one reason or another. If you've got them run them.
Cyclonic Rift, Scroll Rack, Rhystic Study, Demonic Tutor, Gaea's Cradle, Teferi's Protection, etc.- There's room for some goodstuff cards in this deck, and they can no doubt be useful, but I have 7 other decks I try to keep on par with each other, and I simply can't and don't want to spend the money to put these kinds of cards in every single one of them. If you want to put some more stuff like this in the deck then by all means do so, the pros certainly outweigh the cons for most of these.
Conspiracy- You would think this card would be great in this deck, and you would be wrong. Unfortunately Conspiracy is a big ol nonbo with Changeling, as it overrides the ability entirely and makes everything the type you name. You can overwrite this with Mirror Entity, but it's just not worth it.
Xenograft- Just like Conspiracy, you would think this card is really good here, it's not actively bad like Conspiracy is, it's just "meh". This effect is most useful when it affects cards in other zones like your hand, deck, and graveyard like its strictly superior cousin Arcane Adaptation does. Unfortunately Xenograft only affects things on your board, and if I wanted to do that, I would just use Mirror Entity: It's cheaper, more easily tutorable, and has all the synergies naturally being a Changeling and a creature in general brings with it in this deck.
Mikaeus, the Unhallowed- This is nothing against Mikaeus in general, I'm just using him to represent all of these "types" of cards since there's a lot of them now thanks to Eldraine and Ikoria. Basically, anything that says "non-Human creature you control" is worthless because all of our Changelings are also Humans (which makes me so sad that's a thing Wizards is doing right now).
Jegantha, the Wellspring- I made a point of mentioning how important Faeburrow Elder and Bloom Tender are in a deck like this, Jegantha seems almost perfect until you actually start to think about it. It taps for , but you can't spend that mana on generic costs, meaning it doesn't help you cast Morophon whatsoever, and speaking of Goo Daddy, he takes the color requirements out of mana costs, meaning that frequently all you're left with IS the generic cost of the card. I would honestly overlook these things if I could run it as a Companion, but there's some extremely good cards in this deck with double pips that I would never cut just to do that.
Bloom Tender, Cavern of Souls, Patriarch's Bidding- I would absolutely run every single one of these in a heartbeat if I had them, but these are expensive cards, and often hard to find on top of that. These are upgrades I'm keeping my eye on in the long run, waiting to see if I can ever get a good deal on them or if the prices drop for one reason or another. If you've got them run them.
Cyclonic Rift, Scroll Rack, Rhystic Study, Demonic Tutor, Gaea's Cradle, Teferi's Protection, etc.- There's room for some goodstuff cards in this deck, and they can no doubt be useful, but I have 7 other decks I try to keep on par with each other, and I simply can't and don't want to spend the money to put these kinds of cards in every single one of them. If you want to put some more stuff like this in the deck then by all means do so, the pros certainly outweigh the cons for most of these.
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Changelog
Changelog
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04/29/2020- Deck Posted
05/07/2020-
IN:
Rattlechains
Nameless Inversion
OUT:
Chameleon Colossus
Eerie Interlude
05/07/2020-
IN:
Rattlechains
Nameless Inversion
OUT:
Chameleon Colossus
Eerie Interlude
Cards to be tested
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Zacama
