Wizards of the Kitchentable: Goblins

When I was in college, my friends and I used to come together on Friday evenings and play Magic at the kitchen-table of whoever was hosting that evening. The evenings pretty much always had the same recipe: play some Legacy while drinking beer. After a few beers, the number of misplays became too high, and we'd switch to casual free-for-all multiplayers. Nowadays, we still try to have these Friday nights together, but since real life has caught up, they are unfortunately far less frequent. However, over these past years, we've created a lot of casual multiplayer decks. In this article series, I am going to discuss some of these beautiful abominations we came up with.

In our playgroup, we have a few unwritten rules about our multiplayer decks:

• They should be fun. If a deck it too overpowered or too prison-y, it should be amended.
• We adhere to the Legacy ban list. However, occasionally we do allow a card as 1-off from the Legacy ban list, and there's even one deck where we allow a single Unglued card.

In this article, I am going to talk about a Goblins deck played in our group.

Goblins is a popular tribal in several formats and still is quite competitive in Legacy and Modern. Especially with the new goblins being printed in Guilds of Ravnica we could actually see goblins get some renewed love.

Winconditions

So how does this deck win? It's Goblins... They are usually depicted with low intelligence and poor judgment, but often demonstrate a certain ingenuity and affinity for artifacts. So they either attack in numbers to get the job done, or... you know... they blow themselves up to get the job done.

During the Game

The deck has several ways to win. Like stated above, the most straightforward way is to keep putting goblins onto the battlefield and attack with them. How we do we make sure we keep putting out goblins? This question has already been answered in Legacy goblin decks: by cheating them into play of course!

We do this by playing Goblin Lackey (Mountain, Lackey, Go!) or Warren Instigator. These cheap creatures are perfect, especially in a multiplayer game where it's almost guaranteed that someone doesn't have a one-drop or even a two-drop to stop an attack. The beauty of Warren Instigator is, that is has double strike, meaning its ability triggers twice when it connects. If we need either of them to connect in later turns, we can try to use Goblin Tunneler.

Warren Instigator	Buy on  CardKingdom $5.99
Goblin Lackey	Buy on  CardKingdom $14.99
Warren Instigator	Buy on  CardKingdom $5.99

So, now that we can put some goblins into play, what easier way to expand our army than to find more goblins? In comes the Goblin Ringleader to see if we can find some on top of our library. Remember the Instigator's ability that triggers twice? You can put in Goblin Ringleader with the first trigger, see what's on top of your library and put one of those newly found goblins in with the second trigger. The same trick can be done with Goblin Matron: put it into play with the first trigger, find the goblin you want with the enter the battlefield ability, and put that goblin into play with the second trigger.

When cheating creatures into play, it's usually good practise to put something into play early in the game with a high converted manacost like Siege-Gang Commander and Krenko, Mob Boss. Especially the last one, Krenko, can get out of hand really quickly, netting you a lot of goblins. Especially with Goblin Warchief, to give it haste, it can immediately put quite the creatures on the battlefield ready to attack!

Image a scenario in which we can't attack. Or when an opponent plays something like Platinum Angel or Worship. No worries. We have Skirk Fire Marshal. All we need to do is tap 5 goblins and deal 10 damage to everyone and everything, and this includes Mogg Maniac, whom can then redirect this damage to an opponent instantly dealing 20 damage in total. So you can kill one of your opponents on the spot and clear the board. The downside of this is, that is also clears your board. We can use Goblin Chirurgeon (Foglio) to rescue some of your creatures by sacrificing the tokens we've been creating with Krenko and Siege-Gang Commander.

Furthermore we play Goblin Sharpshooter. Not just to get rid of those pesky token decks, but to be able to ping someone to death. You can tap the sharpshooter for one damage, and then sacrifice one of your tokens to Skirk Prospector, which will untap your sharpshooter and continue your cycle.

One last often overlooked interaction is Gempalm Incinerator's ability to be cycled. Sure, you can get rid of a creature that way, but you can't target a player. Or maybe you can! When we target Mogg Maniac, we can instantly shoot a lot of damage.

Previous versions

The deck has been slightly different, where it used to rely really heavily on Skirk Fire Marshal. This means that a playset was played, and thus the chances of finding one greatly increased. But as soon as the table notices that goblins were entering the battlefield, alarm bells started going off, because chances were a Fire Marshal was about to enter the battlefield soon and needing only five goblins in total to wreck the entire board.

It's not so much that the deck was overpowered, but when four other players immediately start focussing on the goblin-player, it doesn't take long before you're out of the game. So the deck was amended to be more of a toolbox-goblin list.

Competitive Formats

Goblins have been using these kind of tactics to pump out more creatures quickly in Legacy for a long time, and with the printing of cards like Goblin Chainwhirler and Goblin Trashmaster it seems that it's once again gaining more attention.

In Legacy goblin decks, Goblin Piledriver can be a real beating. Since it has protection from blue it can be quite the threat in a format where blue is the most dominant color. Now with the Guilds of Ravnica spoilers in full pursuit, we've already seen new goblins like Goblin Cratermaker and Goblin Banneret being revealed. Since these are both legal in Modern and Legacy, these decks are getting some new toys! I personally would love to see a resurgence of this archetype.

Goblin Chainwhirler	Buy on  CardKingdom $4.99
Goblin Trashmaster	Buy on  CardKingdom $1.29
Goblin Cratermaker	Buy on  CardKingdom $0.49
Goblin Banneret	Buy on  CardKingdom $0.25

What do you think about this deck? Fun? Not fun? Do you think there are better options for future improvements? Let me know on Twitter.