Wizards of the Kitchentable: Treefolk

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 new article series, I am going to discuss some of these decks. Previous month, I posted the first instance as trial, and am glad that people enjoyed it, especially since this article is non-finance related. Still, any kind of feedback is greatly appreciated!

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.

This article, I am going to talk about a Treefolk deck played in our group. I always found this a fun deck, especially when the dreaded Timber Protector came into play. Before I get into this, lets look at the deck!

Tribal decks are usually fun in casual play. So, naturally, there are a lot of Treefolk in this deck. The idea is to play them, build a board state and attack.

Acceleration and mana fixing

Most Treefolk are quite expensive to cast, but the huge power/toughness is usually worth it. If we would play a land every turn and not do any ramping, it would take too long to play the good stuff. For this reason, the deck plays 4 Sakura-Tribe Elder, the only non-Treefolk creature in the deck. Bosk Banneret is basically not ramping, but it does play a vital role in making sure you're able to quickly play more creatures. Funnily enough, Treefolk Harbinger can also be used to make sure you keep making land drops. Once it enters the battlefield, the trigger can be used to find a forest and put that on top of your library.

Murmuring Bosk is used to fix mana colors in this deck. It gives you the ability to put or in your pool. In this deck, we especially care about the white mana.

The last part of acceleration is Leaf-Crowned Elder. This creature does not progress your mana, but does give you the chance every turn to put a creature into play for free. Chances of hitting a creature can be guaranteed with Treefolk Harbinger and Worldly Tutor. A nice interaction is when you have multiples of Leaf-Crowned Elder in play, you can cast Worldly Tutor in response to the first trigger, put a Treefolk Harbinger on top, put that into play, and then search for another Treefolk to put into play wit the second trigger. This has more or less become the most important engine of the deck.

Winconditions

Winning with this deck goes through old-school beats. Big creatures like Timber Protector, Dauntless Dourbark and Dungrove Elder are must-blocks. The Trample on Dauntless Dourbark makes sure you can also try to get some damage through against decks that play a lot of creatures.

An important combo to have in this deck is casting multiples of Timber Protector. If you have one of them in play, you can safely play Armageddon and wipe out your opponents' lands, while keeping your own. If you have a second Timber Protector in play, you can also cast Oblivion Stone, killing your opponents' other permanents and keeping your own. However, if you are unable to find your second Timber Protector, you could still use Oblivion Stone to put a Fate counter on it, and do it that way.

Orchard Warden can make you gain insane amounts of life, and be able to survive counterattacks. Being able to recur Reach of Branches makes sure that you always have a few nice blockers.

Past versions

This deck hasn't always been like this and has used different cards to be able to pump out Treefolk. One of the phased out cards is Urza's Incubator, which is a good card to have in the early game, but if drawn in the late game, it simply doesn't do sufficiently anymore. At some point, Birds of Paradise has had a spot ramp, but fell out of favor since of its lack of synergy with the rest of the deck.

Even though Oblivion Stone and Armageddon are still part of the list, they used to have a greater role in the strategy. The Oblivion Stone is a more recent addition, since this used to be Wrath of God. The main idea of the deck used to be playing Timber Protectors and wiping the board consistently. Because this wasn't very fun to play against, the deck is now more centered around creatures, with the occasional wipe. One of the cards that used to see play in that iteration is Bifurcate. Whenever a Protector was already in play, you can use the card to tutor up a second one.

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. Also, I'd love to get feedback on this article and whether you would like to see it turned into a monthly series.