I have always loved build-around-me cards: cards that scream for you to take them and build decks that revolve around them. The first card that did this for me was Tooth and Nail. I had my play set before Gabriel Nassif made them cool. I just thought there had to be something awesome you could do by being able to grab any two creatures from your deck and put them into play. At the time, the best we could do was a combination of Darksteel Colossuses, Sundering Titans, and Eternal Witnesses, which in its own right is nothing to scoff at. However, by today’s standards of casting Tooth and Nail and winning the game, it seems a little unimpressive.

Champion of the Parish’s build-around-me flavor is specific to its tribal nature, which means it can only be as good as the other cards of its tribe in the format. For reference, anyone who is familiar with Legacy knows that one of the Goblins deck’s best weapons is Goblin Ringleader for its ability to keep the deck running on all cylinders. When Goblin Ringleader debuted in Apocalypse, there were only seven Goblins in all of Invasion block, so it wasn’t until Scourge was printed—and there was a large influx of Goblins into what was then Extended—that there were enough reasonably powerful Goblins to accommodate Goblin Ringleader.

Fortunately for us, Champion of the Parish does not suffer from lack of friends. There were one hundred twelve Humans in Innistrad block, and there are one hundred fifty in Standard currently. This means we just need to find his closest companions and see what comes out. Most people—and I happen to be one of them—feel that W/U is the best place to be with Humans right now. This is mostly thanks to Moorland haunt and the no-longer-Human Geist of Saint Traft.

With that in mind, this week, I want to look at Ryan Dampf’s take on W/U Humans, priced out at the time of me writing this article according to CoolStuffInc.com:

A total of $529.16

This has all the typical characteristics you would see in a Humans deck in the current metagame: hard-hitting, aggressively priced creatures with enough light disruption to put the opponent on the back foot and push him over the edge. Sublime Archangel should be the final nail in the coffin for most opponents, as leaving her unanswered for a few turns will spell certain doom.

While I did not like Faith's Shield in last week’s Esper tokens list, I do think it fits much better in this style of deck, where it can help push one large creature thought the defenses for the killing stroke.

The rest of the deck seems pretty standard in that it consists of the most aggressively costed Humans that white has to offer.

The sideboard seems to be a little all over the place. That isn’t to say that every card doesn’t have a purpose, but I am generally wary of such strange numbers in an aggressive deck. In decks like this, I like to see sideboards full of threes and fours since you want to end the game quickly—you aren’t going to have a lot of time to find your sideboarded cards. Also, specific to this deck, we don’t have any card-draw or deck manipulation, so there is no way to find your answers other than naturally drawing them. Give yourself the most chances of seeing the cards you need to see.

With that, these are the changes that I decided to make:

For a new total of $188.81

The cuts out of the main deck are straightforward. I cut Geist of Saint Traft and Sublime Archangel due to their price tag alone. They are powerful cards, and I believe they can be lynchpins to winning certain games, but they just cost too much to justify. If you have access to these cards, you should be playing with them. I would want to acquire the Geists before the Angels because I expect the Geists to hold their value better over the long term. Geist is played in Modern and Legacy, so he will be in demand for years to come, while Sublime Archangel probably won’t make it out of Standard.

Let’s talk about what we added to the deck. For the Sublime Archangels and Geist of Saint Trafts, I added four New Prahv Guildmage, three Thraben Doomsayer, and one Mikaeus, the Lunarch. The Guildmages may be too cute in practice, but the idea behind them was to give your Champions access to some evasion and start pounding through the air, with the fringe benefit of shutting off an important creature in the late game. The Doomsayers and Mikaeus are something of a package, in that the Doomsayer creates more inevitability for the deck and Mikaeus can speed up that process.

If the Guildmages end up not being as good as I want them to be, they could easily become Gather the Townsfolk, which would allow you to throw another Mikaeus or two into the deck to build on the growing-your-small-creatures theme.

The thing that I like most about this new version of the deck is that it makes Champion of the Parish more powerful. Now the only non-Human in the deck is War Falcon, meaning the Champion should grow larger in this version of the deck, which is what led me down the path of the New Prahv Guildmages initially. I just want to give our Champions the best chance of connecting with our opponent’s chin.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments, and if you have a deck you want me to review, send it to me at JRRRsDecks at gmail dot com.

Thanks!

JR Wade

@THEJRRR