Hello, I’m Jesse Jayne, and welcome to my first article for The Forge Herald! Before we get to the main topic I’d like to just do a quick introduction. I’m a Magic player from Casper, WY, and have been playing since just after the release of Champions of Kamigawa.

Playing in Wyoming has been hassling when it comes to making it to higher caliber tournaments, with the closest city (Denver) being around 300 miles away. However, I do have a small resume with several states and PPTQ top 8s since beginning to play competitively within the last few years.

Most of my Magic time is spent either adding my personal spice to a current top deck, or brewing them myself, so that will be the bulk of what I write about here. I play on MTGO under the name Durinson and can be reached at most social media under my name for comments or suggestions. Thanks for reading through this and now on to business!

One difficult thing about attempting to write or brew a competitive deck at the beginning of a new format is that the format truly doesn’t take shape until the results from the Pro Tour have come in. However, thanks to the glorious return of Innistrad, we have some great tribal foundations to work with that look to be fun and good enough to start with no matter what the metagame ends up looking like.

In the next few weeks I’ll be brewing up a few decks for each tribe featured in the latest block as our starting place in the freshly Siege Rhino free standard!

It’s going to take everything we humans can muster if we’re to defeat all these monsters that have returned along with Innistrad, so we had better start there first. (Maybe with the help of the Eldrazi?!)

W/c Humans

Creatures

4x Dragon Hunter

4x Expedition Envoy

2x Kytheon, Hero of Akros

4x Thalia’s Lieutenant

4x Consul’s Lieutenant

2x Hidden Dragonslayer

3x Eldrazi Displacer

2x Lantern Scout

3x Thought-Knot Seer

2x Reality Smasher

Spells

4x Declaration in Stone

2x Always Watching

Land

4x Battlefield Forge

4x Caves of Koilos

1x Westvale Abbey

15x Plains

So this is obviously just a rough draft, but I would feel comfortable taking this to the first standard FNM of the new format. At first glance it seems similar to the white weenie decks from the old days, but it has a few tricks to it.

With a plethora of one drop creatures and the pump effects from both Thalia’s Lieutenant and Always Watching, this deck can truly race with the best of them. Every rotation the fast decks come out in full force, and this is no different, but it also has some great late game synergy to give it some edge against any bigger decks that may pop up.

There are a few great combos with Eldrazi Displacer that can help in many situations. The displacer can obviously bounce opposing attacking creatures to swing the race in your favor, but can also continuously flicker your lantern scouts and other ally creatures for non-stop lifelink on your army.

The best, though, is with Thalia’s Lieutenant flickering, turning it into the modern staple Gavony Township, putting a +1/+1 counter on all your humans every time it gets activated. Flickering Thought-knot Seer can also help to get annoying board wipes or problem cards out of the opponent’s hand.

With everyone experimenting with new manabases and combinations, this is a perfect time to strike with the classic white aggro. While everyone else experiments with new manabases and combinations of new cards, you can strike fast with both great synergy in the humans, and the well-known power of the Eldrazi.

The speed of the deck also allows for it to play removal that others may not be in the market for. The new spell Declaration in Stone allows us to take out any problematic creature, or horde of tokens, and keep swinging for victory before the opponent even has time to take advantage of the clue token we generate for them.

Now of course this isn’t a traditional version of what one would expect a Humans deck to look like, with the tribe often being both White and Green. There are many viable iterations of the deck, and this is just the first one I imagined for being both consistent, competitive, and fun.

A removal of the eldrazi, and a quick switch of the manabase with the new lands from Shadows over Innistrad, could result in a version playing green for both Collected Company and Den Protector, or even blue for Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy and Reflector Mage.

The possibilities are as endless as the ranks of the dead on Innistrad, and I urge you to do some digging and share your own brew, or comment here with any ideas. Stay up to date on my content here for the next article in this series of Tribal Foundations focusing on G/R Werewolves!

© 2016, Patrick Cossel. All rights reserved.