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Main » Articles » Commanding Tribal: Chulane, Teller of Tales

Commanding Tribal: Chulane, Teller of Tales

Mark Wischkaemper
Posted on May 10, 2022
 Reddit

As much as we enjoy building and playing our own decks, I want to encourage you to look at other people's decks. Take them home and goldfish them. Play them in a real pod. Get to know them and how they work. I especially recommend this with other players you admire; you can learn a lot about how deck-building can improve or different angles can be approached just by looking at someone else's pile of 100 cards.

In that spirit, I'm going to attempt to have three of the next four decks in this series be someone else's deck (we'll get to one of mine). We're going to look at their deck, talk through the choices they made, then I may put my own spin on it. Do be aware: I will not be making upgrades or attempting any sort of deck-tech. I'll use their deck as inspiration to demonstrate the kinds of personalization and flexibility we have in such a wide format.

And to keep a theme, we're going to look only at tribal decks this time around. I'm going to try to avoid all the "normal" tribes - Elves, Goblins, Zombies, Dragons, etc. - but no promises!

Stephen Johnson is a fellow writer and friend here on CoolStuffInc. He's gotten me to think about Commander in ways I never had before, and has been a great help for me in learning more about cEDH - despite my lack of interest in ever playing a cEDH game. He plays at a lot of different tables and slides between the cEDH players and casual tables with ease, often building decks which can handle both of those things without making anyone's night miserable. I like the articles he writes and the decks he builds. So, let's take a look at his not-quite-tuned-but-still-really-powerful Chulane, Teller of Tales Druid Tribal deck.

Chulane Druid Tribal | Commander | Stephen Johnson

The first thing I notice going through this list are some cards which I simply don't ever play - Tooth and Nail primary among them. Putting Tooth and Nail in a deck with Avenger of Zendikar and Craterhoof Behemoth is, well, really nasty, and super effective. My guess is he wins a lot of games with that.

But a closer look reveals several more ways of winning the game. Jazal Goldmane (who, like Avenger and Craterhoof isn't a Druid) can take all those Druids and make them awfully big. With the sheer amount of Landfall in the deck, mostly due to Chulane, Rampaging Baloths can get out of hand rather quickly as well. And probably the most fun way to win the game, which he shared with me, was the ultimate goal of the deck when it was built: get seven Druids out with Gilt-Leaf Archdruid, then add Seedborn Muse to the package. Untap all our stuff at the same time they do, then tap seven Druids and take all their lands. Going around the table and doing that is a quick way to get people to not want to play that game anymore. That's marvelous.

He runs fewer lands than I would, but he makes up for it with a metric ton of dudes who tap for mana (turns out Llanowar Elves being a Druid was a bit of a precedent, because the ability to make a dude and tap it for mana seems to lay solidly with the Druids). Combine that with the Commander's innate ability to drop extra lands and I doubt mana is much of a problem in this deck. Oh! He's also got Gaea's Cradle, plus a number of ways to bounce it back to his hand (Simic Growth Chamber, Kor Skyfisher). So, he can tap it for a lot, bounce it, replay it, and tap it for a lot again, making a whole lot.

I love Swan Song here; it's so efficient, and we really don't care about the Bird they get. Heroic Intervention keeps our whole team alive in the face of Wrath of God, and Pongify and Rapid Hybridization both deal with problematic large dudes. Retreat to Coralheim works well with all those land drops and can be interaction if we want, or it can just untap a dude that's tapping for three mana to make more mana.

Since most of our dudes are so cheap, Aluren makes good sense here, and of course Kindred Summons is perfect since it'll dump a bunch of dudes all at once. We can Idyllic Tutor for Concordant Crossroads or Survival of the Fittest and Eladamri's Call for Craterhoof or Druid of Purification. Lots of options.

Stephen's description is dead on, I think. He says it's strong but not-quite-fully tuned, and it allows for different lines of play: he knows he can win with Avenger/Craterhoof, but if he sees a way to push for another win, he'll go for it.

He also suggested going a much more strictly-Tribal route (as in only Druids) might be a fun way to reduce the power level to a more casual deck but still win games. Let's see what we can come up with to cut.

That's 11 non-Druids. Since the Gilt-Leaf Archdruid steal-everyone's-lands combo thing is so very Druid-y (it's the most non-violent way of getting someone to quit a game of Magic I can think of), we're going to call Seedborn Muse our honorary Druid, which means we need to replace 10 creatures. Here are my suggestions.

We lose win conditions, card draw, and ways to return creatures to our hand by losing our non-Druids; the replacements are an attempt to make up for those losses. Noble Hierarch is just good, but otherwise, we gain straight-up card draw (Coiling Oracle, Gretchen Titchwillow) or other card advantage (Rashmi, Eternities Crafter, Augur of Autumns), plus a few win conditions with things like Earthshaker Giant and Kamahl, Heart of Krosa.

Given the sheer number of mana dorks in the deck, I'm okay with leaving it at 37 lands, but there are a few other changes I'd like to make. I don't have a Gaea's Cradle and don't intend to buy one, so I'd switch that out for something else. I'd consider cutting Triumph of the Hordes if for no other reason than it doesn't seem very Druid-y. Something like Overwhelming Stampede could take its place, but I think I want to leave it to Kamahl or Earthshaker Giant. I like Voice of Many and Rishkar, Peema Renegade here. I'd like a sweeper or two, just because having the option to hard reset is, I think, fairly useful. Creeping Renaissance would help us recover if the board gets swept, especially since we no longer have Rampaging Baloths and Avenger to rely on to make a bunch of creatures. I like the idea of Finale of Revelation as a replacement for Consecrated Sphinx, and with the sheer amount of mana the deck can make, X should be more than 10 fairly often. Druid Class seems appropriate. Finally, I'd like to add a trio of Planeswalkers: one of them makes Druids, one of them cares about how many creatures we have, and one of them lets us cast our creatures as if they have Flash.

To get there, I cut Triumph, the tutors (since we're no longer looking for Avenger/Craterhoof), the land tutors (since we don't have a Cradle to fetch), and The Great Henge, just because I think the deck can handle the loss of the giant mana rock. The card draw is a loss, though; it's possible it should stay. Here's where I wound up!

Chulane Druid Tribal | Commander | Mark Wischkaemper

Once again, I didn't "upgrade" the deck. If anything, I downgraded it, because I assure you Stephen's version will win more games at more tables! But this is a neat way to look at deck-building. Stephen and I play in different metas; my group is much more casual, and players in my group will routinely take a deck apart because it's too strong or wins too often. For my meta, something like what I built would be much more likely to be welcome at the table; getting Avenger-'Hoofed via Tooth and Nail would be kind of a bummer. On the other hand, something trying as hard as mine to be all-Druids-all-the-time would probably get run over at one of Stephen's tables. All these factors come to play in how we put together decks, even with a deck I likely wouldn't have even thought to build.

Thanks to Stephen for sharing his deck and thoughts. If you don't read his columns, go check them out. He's got a lot of great ideas, plus he does some really nifty art mashups at the beginning of each article. And if you have any thoughts on how you'd build Chulane or Druid Tribal, please share them in the comments!

Thanks for reading.

TAGS articles, casual, edh, bant, series, commander, decklist, tribal, mark wischkaemper, stephen johnson, chulane teller of tales, 05102022, commanding tribal, druid

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