What are your favorite tribes of all time? What sends you to the happy trail and begs you to really play them? Spirits is one of my favorite tribes of all time, and I adore them.

My friends and I had this competition once, way back when, and we required that every deck had a strong tribal theme. You could only play cards that were your creature type—or that evoked it. We had a huge tournament and pitted the various tribes up against each other, with random pairings. And I knew that I wanted Spirits.

This was during the closing days of Urza’s block, and green and Elves were very strong, and you had powerful cards like Priest of Titania running around. But I had chosen Spirits, and I really thought they were deeper than many realized. Here was a basic approximation of my Spirit control deck:

Spirits of Death ? Casual | Abe Sargent

• Creatures (26)
• 2 Cloud Spirit
• 2 Sibilant Spirit
• 3 Angelic Page
• 3 Karmic Guide
• 4 Blinking Spirit
• 4 Sky Spirit
• 4 Spirit en-Kor
• 4 Tradewind Rider

• Spells (10)
• 4 Afterlife
• 4 Remove Soul
• 2 Spirit Shield

• Lands (24)
• 12 Island
• 12 Plains

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The Remove Soul, Afterlife, and Spirit Shield were all deemed appropriate Spirit-themed support cards. And then, after random pairings, it happened. I was paired against the Elf deck, piloted by a guy who would win the States Championship. Ben Visnic. And Ben loved Elves and their acceleration. He had it all.

And I blew out Elves in the first round without dropping a game. Go, Spirits!

Ever since then, I’ve had a serious mad-on for all things Spirit. I adore Spirits!

Last week, I flipped over Hikari, Twilight Guardian for a random Commander challenge, and it reminded me of how much I love the Spirits. So let’s count down some of my favorites!

So what are the best Spirits running around? How about the Top 10 Spirits of all time? (Of course, that includes some pets of mine on the list, too.)

Let’s take a gander at my personal choices for the best Spirits of all time!

10 — Crypt Ghast

I like duplicating mana, and I like extort. Generating double mana from your Swamps is great, and doing so is one of a handful of accelerants for your black ways. Meanwhile, you have a built-in engine to invest extra mana from your Swamp-tapping ways with extort, and it’s a clock as well. Crypt Ghast is solid.

9 — Brago, King Eternal

“I’m sorry, but I have to admit that I, Abe Sargent, like blinking.” Everyone else in the room responds in unison, “Hi, Abe!” Hey, I’m a casual player. I like it when I can exile something and then bring it back into play. I like playing permanents that have various triggers when they enter the battlefield and then gain the permanent benefit of having something out and doing stuff like attacking and blocking. And you can Flicker that card all over again. Swinging in and getting a hit from Brago is a great way to reload a ton of triggers all at once, and you can focus on cards like Act of Authority or Mycosynth Wellspring as well as the normal stuff like Mulldrifter and Solemn Simulacrum. And not just Brago can blink . . . 

8 — Deadeye Navigator

 . . . and so can this guy. Now I know that a ton of people out there abuse stuff like this too much, and I get it, but I like running these engines for lesser treasures. There are a ton of cards like Wall of Blossoms or Merchant of Secrets. Paying 3 mana for a card with Merchant of Secrets is just a 1-mana discount off Treasure Trove, so it’s not as though it’ll be overpowered as compared to abusing nastier stuff like Sun Titan. It’s a great adjunct to a lot of decks, and it is certainly is powerful enough to make the list.

7 — Patron of the Kitsune

Who doesn’t like gaining life? Who doesn’t like big creatures with enough size to matter in the red zone? Staying alive unlocks the key to winning. Swinging with big creatures is key to winning. Having both is double-key fun. Living at the crossroads of Stay Alive Boulevard and Beats Street is the Patron of all things Foxy. We get a creature that can swing and win, as well as life-gain that triggers anytime someone attacks (not just when someone attacks you). Note that key difference. Gain life. Smash faces. Repeat.

6 — Kokusho, the Evening Star

Duh. I mean, a card is sometimes so obvious I wonder if I need to even talk about it in an article like this. If you haven’t played it, get some, and learn just why the only thing needed here is, “Duh!”

5 — Tradewind Rider

Sending a creature back to the owner’s hand is a fun way to alleviate pressure, to create an open lane of attackage, or to just generally keep someone down. Bounce away. And since this bounce only requires tapping down some stuff, not using mana, you’ll always be on the plus side of mana spent when your foe replays it, creating a nice mana-centric way to keep someone down. It teams well with decks that have a lot of cheaper stuff or things with bodies that already went off. A good example is a common tag-team partner from the era, Wall of Blossoms. You already drew a card off it, you used it for defense while setting up, and now you use it to bounce stuff and activate the Rider. There’re a ton of similar cards that are awesome with Riders. Riders for everyone! (Don’t forget that you can use them to powerful effect with cards like Awakening or . . . )

4 — Seedborn Muse (perhaps Windborn Muse and Graveborn Muse)

If you like untapping all of your stuff over and over again, you probably already know all about our good Muse friend. From the Muse cycle in Legions, it’s one of multiple pseudo-effects that were printed to make sense in an all-creature set. You need creatures that acted like pseudo-spells (like cycling triggers), and the Muse cycle was part of a group of cards that were enchantments that would be hard-pressed to normally put on a creature. But here they are, and Seedborn Muse still leads the pack as the best of the cycle, and it’s seeing some more press in the wake of a certain Prophet of Kruphix being banned in Commander.

3 — Karmic Guide

Karmic Guide arrives on the battlefield and brings back your best dead creature for free. It’s among the stalwart Sprits of all time. It’s awesome. It works. You know how great it is. From smashing it down the first time to keep on some pressure, to a play after a Wrath of God that brings two bodies to the table, and to a utility creature that can give you a nice enters-the battlefield trigger, its sheer flexibility for the (relatively) cheap price of 5 mana. From Momentary Blink to Cloudstone Curio to Teneb, the Harvester, it’s a powerhouse that plays well in a ton of different styles of decks.

2 — Eternal Dragon

Ever since Eternal Dragon debuted, I’ve used it heavily in a variety of decks. It’s become one of my go-to cards for a variety of needs. It can fetch up a Plains from your deck, which also will flex into multiple colors in a deck with dual lands of any sort, such as Temple Garden and Savannah. You can use it to head back to your hand for more and more land-fetching to give you a slow way to make some card advantage in a color that needs it. Plus, you can recover it later to play, recur post-death, and keep on coming. It has a lot to offer folks, and I’ve run it in anything from creature-light control builds to mana-hungry ramp ones.

1 — Bloodghast / Nether Shadow / Nether Traitor / Krovikan Horror

When Nether Shadow debuted alongside all of the other cards in Limited Edition Alpha, black began a long relationship with creatures that owned self-recursion triggers of various sorts. Now since the Nether Shadow was feared for its time, its ability to only recur when you have enough dead stuff on top to make it happen was really clunky. Ever since then, we’ve had a variety of similar-styled cards, many of which have been pretty good. The best, like Bloodghast, have made serious indentations in the tournament scene while all have various things to bring them to the kitchen table. And since they were following in the shadow of the Shadow, many of the have rocked a simpler Spirit creature type to boot!

And there we have it. “We’ve. Got. Spirit. S. P. I. R. I. T. Spirit, let’s hear it!” (That was a common cheer four our cheerleaders in high school). What are your top ten Spirits? Did I miss any that you’d have added?