Welcome, discerning readers, as we throw off the shackles of oppressive land costs and stride forward in a cheap mana revolution. You don't need to spend an absolute fortune to power out your creations: It may help, but there are ways to turn almost any liability into an opponent-destroying asset. This week's column was inspired by one of last weeks' anonymous comments, admittedly for a more mana-intensive format, but pointing out that the lands for some of those decks racked up at over $100. I've been gradually accumulating lands over the years I've been playing MTGO, but still, it helps to sometimes stop and think about accessibility. Expensive lands are a good, reliable, safe and boring investment: They will rarely win you the game, manlands excepted, but they will make it possible to do so. On the other hand, when over a third of your deck is clocking in at 5-10 tickets apiece, that's a pretty significant barrier to entry. 

Welcome to Magic. Got a spare $350 for a playset of these? You can foil them for just $2,200!

If we want new blood to come into the game, and to start taking up the interesting fringe formats that help showcase the edges of the possible, we need to show that there are games to be won without having to invest twice as much into the manabase as we do into the main deck. Today's decks will not be budget decks per se, but the mana will be: No rare lands, no lands that coat a ticket for a playset or more, and mostly the basics that everyone can easily obtain.

No, Tarmogoyf costs too much.

There's a creature type that has only shown up in five places over time: Its debut in Ice Age, the Core Set, a 5-card cycle in Odyssey block, a hoser in Planar Chaos and a one-off futureprint in Future Sight. They've proven surprisingly popular on the tournament circuit: The hasty red one that feeds off sorceries was an archetype, the cheap trampler that makes a point of surviving Wildfire effects was pretty big, and the 2-mana one that goes by all card types? Yeah, that one didn't do too badly. The original card was iconic, if only for its legendary flavor text, which launched a handful of tributes and shout outs, even an Un-set appearance.

Lhurgoyf tribal has one critical problem: You start the game with a handful of 3- and 4-mana 0/0s and 0/1s.  You need to get stuff into the graveyard, and lots of stuff at that. The next problem is that every Lhurgoyf except the one still making a big splash in Classic and Extended has two colored mana symbols in the top corner. Excluding the $60-a-playset allstar, we then need to hit 2 mana in at least 3 colors. Also, each 'Goyf has a different land preference. We can pair up to some extent: Mortivore and Lhurgoyf both live off creatures, which in Tribal we can guarantee at least a third of each deck. Terravore and its more discerning cousin Detritivore live off the fat of the land, although we can't guarantee our opponent has nonbasics for the latter. Still, aside from the occasional insane johnny trying to do landless tribal, we can usually say there will be quite a few of these on each side of the table. This leaves Magnivore, Cantivore and Cognivore. Sorceries and instants are easier to send to the graveyard than enchantments, as they go there with no effort on our part in the course of use, and Magnivore is half the CMC of Cognivore, and shares a color with one on those we paired off earlier.

Our opponents have the run of the early game as we set up our monsters for the mid-to-late game. We need to get those early creatures in the graveyard to feed our goyfs rather than eat our lifetotal, and so to that end we play a lot of cheap but powerful sweepers, namely Firespout and Devastating Dreams. With the former, we kill anything with less than 3 toughness, and get a sorcery in the 'yard. With the latter, we randomly dump a large chunk of our hand into the 'yard, sacrifice a lot of lands and kill anything that doesn't get more powerful as stuff is dumped and has less toughness than the number of cards we ditched. The problem then becomes rebuilding. How do we get from no lands, no creatures and no hand against no lands, no creatures and anything held back from overextending? We don't. We get that dumped in the graveyard as well and reload with a fresh 7 cards. Wheel of Fate sets us up nicely, and ditching our hand to a Devastating Dreams the turn before we'll lose it anyway has a certain neatness to it. But what about mana? How do we run something that requires land sacrifice and still hit double green, double red and double black?

The Alara Reborn Borderposts require basics to fully exploit, and can effectively function in a manner akin to the Shivan Oasis cycle. On top of that, if you have the mana, you can pay retail for a small measure of acceleration. Using both red-based ones gives us the vital Devastating Dreams or Firespout mana more consistently, and we can effectively sub them in on a one for one basis with lands, giving us more room for the meat of the deck. Unleashing a Devastating Dreams scaled to wipe our opponent's lands whilst retaining borderpost mana on the board can be nasty, but the backbreaker is following it up with a Far Wanderings with threshold. With a variety of ways to fill our own grave in order to pump our Lhurgoyfs, going from 2 borderposts and a land to having 6 mana the turn after a Dreams can put our opponent in a position from which they can't recover. 6 mana is significant because between the two kinds of borderposts and selecting basics, that should enable us to cast our entire deck, and if our opponent is trying to rebuild with nonbasics, we can suspend Detritivore to put him under a Destructive Flow lock for a couple more turns. The ideal circumstance is dropping a fat, unstoppable and efficient beater or two and killing your opponent before he can recover.
 

Vore than meets the eye

Lhurgoyf Tribal deck on a budget manabse

Creatures 4 Terravore 4 Mortivore 4 Lhurgoyf 4 Detritivore 4 Magnivore 20 cards Other Spells 4 Wheel of Fate 4 Devastating Dreams 4 Firespout 4 Far Wanderings 4 Veinfire Borderpost 4 Firewild Borderpost 24 cards

Lands 4 Forest 4 Mountain 4 Swamp 4 Terramorphic Expanse 16 cards

The deck is not without its flaws and drawbacks: Artifact hate, particularly repeatable, makes lunchmeat of your borderposts. Protection from red nullifies your sweepers. Any deck that kills you before you draw and/or play a sweeper is a bad matchup. There will be games where your opponent has just the right card to thwart you, although that card could be different each time. The counterbalance to that is being able to play multiple 10-power monsters up against an empty board: Shades of Ernhamgeddon if you can Devastating Dreams with lethal creatures on the battlefield. If you can afford Tarmogoyf, you can either sub out Mortivore for color consistency or Detritivore, which all too often is a dead card.

Warriors, come out to play-ay

Finest Hour helps to showcase the Exalted mechanic, one I've not yet really touched upon in the context of a Tribal article. It appears on soldiers, wizards and knights, archers, humans, rhino and an angel, but I'd like to take it in a different direction. Alara has been remerged, after all: let's shift the mechanic a few demiplanes to the left. There are quite a few 'trigger on attack' abilities in the Warrior tribe, which also has a couple of cheap and reliable double strikers to eke out every ounce of benefit from the attack bonus. A creature which gets bigger whenever it goes on the offensive is going to get extra value out of Finest Hour, so let's see what happens when we put these three stalwarts together:

If you attack with a Hungry Spriggan under a Finest Hour, you start out with a 5/5 untapped trampler. If it survives, it can come crashing in again, this time as a 9/9 trampler. 14 points of trample damage in one turn, all from one 3-mana 1/1 and a 5 mana enchantment. Stonebrow, Krosan Hero is as unpleasant, a 7/7 on the first attack, a 9/9 on the second. Even the otherwise fairly middling Lunk Errant goes in as a 6/6 trampler on the first hit and an 8/8 on the second, and all three benefit from Stonebrow's ability. If we throw in a few Ardent Plea, we can up the damage still further, and have a decent chance of cascading into a double-striking Viashino Slaughtermaster.  Anyone who has seen Rafiq of the Many under a Finest Hour knows the value of an exalted double striker, and the slaughtermasters can also play a very convincing defence. We round out our tribe with another, Marisi's Twinclaws.

We're looking at four out of the five colors in the casting costs, and another in a nice-to-have activated ability. The main body of our tribe is red and green, with blue and white needed for Ardent Plea and Finest Hour. Sticking to our budget constraints, we'll fix our mana with Terramorphic Expanse, Fieldmist Borderpost, Rupture Spire and a set of Kodama's Reach, a single island and plains to tutor up. For removal, we'll go for Savage Twister: More than half our tribe has a native 4 toughness, the Spriggans have that post-attack, and the Slaughtermasters can be pumped once as well, with any of the fragile creatures made less so on an exalted attack. 
 

Lunchtime, Doubly So.

Warrior Tribal deck on a budget manabase

Creatures 4 Viashino Slaughtermaster 4 Hungry Spriggan 4 Marisi's Twinclaws 4 Stonebrow, Krosan Hero 4 Lunk Errant 20 cards Other Spells 4 Kodama's Reach 4 Fieldmist Borderpost 4 Ardent Plea 4 Finest Hour 4 Savage Twister 20 cards

Lands 5 Forest 5 Mountain 1 Island 1 Plains 4 Terramorphic Expanse 4 Rupture Spire 20 cards

This is a fairly resilient deck, but aside from trampling over them with huge and ever-growing monstrosities, it can be weak against evasion, with Savage Twister the only out there. The best defence for this deck is a good offence, backed up by a line of double-striking monsters to kill the opposition before they get a hit in.

That's the spirit!

We finally turn our attentions to a tribe that was obscure and patchwork for many years before getting an entire block devoted to it. I refer to the Spirits, Kamigawa's premier tribe. One of the better ones to come out of that block was Tallowisp, an aura-friendly card advantage engine just perfect for a tribal deck. Recently, we got another Aura-loving spirit, this one a large, exalted wrecking ball. Sovereigns of Lost Alara gives us a nice curve-topper, able to stick an aura on a lone attacker the turn it comes into play. Like, say, Elder Mastery. Now, we need some resilient or lethal attacking spirits as pants targets: Either hard to kill or nasty when they hit. Phantom Nomad gives us a tough early drop that can be made immortal with Bolas' blessing, Guardian of the Guildpact is untouchable by monocolored tribes or monocolored removal, and Dimir Cutpurse generates a two-card swing every time it makes contact.

Now, while both the Wisp and the Sovereigns can tutor up auras, in the case of the Sovereigns they need to be ones you want on your own creatures. Given relatively limited deck space, this means we're less able to include cards such as Pillory of the Sleepless. Fortunately, there are beneficial enchantments that also allow us to do mean things to the opposition. A full set of Galvanic Arc gives us a nice amount of tutorable removal, as well as a nasty surprise for the defending player with the Sovereign in play. Both Flight of Fancy and Pentarch Ward give us card draw and evasion, with the Ward also shutting down monocolor strategies. In one game against Elves, setting it to white and sticking one on each of the Taunting Elf my opponent played was enough to render them useless and steal the win. Finally, a brace of Arcane Teachings and the aforementioned Elder Mastery can both make Phantom Nomad immune to damage, with the former useful if you want to start using the exalted bonuses of the Sovereigns on another creature, and the latter granting evasion.

The mana base is where things get interesting: We are heavy white, but also need blue and black early on for the cutpurses, and red for our removal suite. On the other hand, we don't need more than one mana of any one color. Red we can cheat on with the Sovereigns, but that won't see play early on. Terramorphic Expanse nets us any land and Grixis Panorama any of our support colors, with Rupture Spire as the cheapest multiland. We weight our basics: Two each of the support colors and the rest in plains, netting us 14 sources for any one color. You can easily obtain this manabase for under two tickets: It isn't one hundred per cent reliable but it does well enough for the deck to win with it.
 

Sovereigns of the phantom guildpact

Spirit Tribal deck on a budget manabase

Creatures 4 Phantom Nomad 4 Tallowisp 4 Dimir Cutpurse 4 Guardian of the Guildpact 4 Sovereigns of Lost Alara 20 cards Other Spells 4 Galvanic Arc 4 Pentarch Ward 2 Flight of Fancy 2 Arcane Teachings 4 Elder Mastery 16 cards

Lands 2 Island 2 Mountain 2 Swamp 6 Plains 4 Grixis Panorama 4 Rupture Spire 4 Terramorphic Expanse 24 cards

The deck could do with a sweeper, and I was tempted by Bloodfire Infusion, but Tallowisp can't tutor it, and it relies on high power creatures, which the deck is short on. Relying so much on auras puts the deck at a risk of card disadvantage, but this is mitigated by the Sovereigns. The resilient creatures the deck runs are well suited to holding the fort in the single combat style the Sovereigns invite, and swinging with a Guardian laden with multiple Elder Mastery against a monocolored deck is painful but mercifully brief for your opponent. The deck is vulnerable to sweepers, at least non-damage-dependent ones, and there have been games where I've tutored up most of the relevant Auras. This is a double edged sword: You won't get much further use out of your wisps, but you've drawn a large chunk of your deck.

That just about wraps it up for this week. Mana consistency is one of the most important and least interesting aspects of a deck when you're playing it: The in-game question of 'Do I have the mana to pay for these spells and abilities?' is one that starts being answered in deckbuilding. Reflecting Pool is less valuable than Rupture Spire when the latter is untapped on the battlefield in front of you and the former is buried in your library, despite the disparity of ticket costs. Lands are tools that do a simple job, and an expensive tool can make things easier for a novice, just as a master craftsman can get the best out of a mediocre one. Until next week, may you be able to play your spells, whatever your budget.