A Deck Based On: Varchild's War-Riders

Time for another quirky card to base a deck on! This time I'm using Varchild's War-Riders, which is an old card from the Alliances expansion and re-released in Magic Online's Masters Edition.

A mere two mana nets you a 3/4 creature with trample and rampage 1... but it has a drawback. It keeps giving your opponent 1/1 token creatures, and after a while those survivors are going to come back and get you!

Thankfully, red is already the main color of direct damage, and for good measure we're adding in black as well.

Time to ride into war!

Lands (24)

• 9x Mountain
• 10x Swamp
• 2x Cinder Marsh
• 1x Lantern-Lit Graveyard
• 2x Urborg Volcano

Nothing special about the lands here, I just used what I had lying around. If you have better R/B mana-producing lands, by all means use them!

Creatures (18)

• 3x Blood Seeker
• 2x Deep-Slumber Titan
• 3x Goblin Sharpshooter
• 2x Orzhov Euthanist
• 4x Plague Spitter
• 4x Varchild's War-Riders

This deck is going to be doing a good deal of direct damage to those survivors as well as other creatures. Most of the creatures in the deck focus on taking down those survivor tokens or anything else that gets in the way. I added a couple of Deep-Slumber Titans as they are kind of quirky too and seem to fit the deck - four mana for 7/7 is a good deal here!

Other Spells (18)

• 2x Pestilence
• 3x Rain of Embers
• 3x Sadistic Glee
• 2x Shattering Pulse
• 2x Slice and Dice
• 3x Terminate
• 3x Unearth

The spells here allow for more direct damage, some removal, and retrieval of the War-Riders should they be killed. A sub-theme here is a little cycling for card draw and a huge boost for the War-Riders with Sadistic Glee.

Other possibilities for this deck include substituting cards like Aether Flash to kill the tokens as soon as they enter play or boosting the War-Riders even further through the use of equipment like Nemesis Mask and Fireshrieker.