Wizards of the Kitchentable: Rebels '99

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 Rebels deck played in our group. This deck has been put together more than 15 years ago, and has, in its core, stayed the same. Of course new cards have found their way into the deck along the way.

What are we looking at? Basically a Rebel tribal deck. Several rebels have the ability to find other rebels. For example, Ramosian Sergeant has as ability:

, : Search your library for a Rebel permanent card with converted mana cost 2 or less and put it onto the battlefield. Then shuffle your library.

With these abilities, we can search for others rebels that may come in handy for a certain board state.

Winconditions

How do we win with this deck? Good old fashioned beatings! The idea isn't to get in early damage with small creatures, but to finish the game with a lot of HUGE creatures due to Mirror Entity. Since Mirror Entity is a Changeling it has all creature types, including Rebel. This means that we can tutor it up when we want to go big!

During the game

This deck has several interactions it can follow. The first more obvious thing is that rebels can find slightly stronger rebels. Ramosian Sergeant is , but can find a Rebel with converted mana cost 2. So it can find Ramosian Lieutenant, which in turn can find rebels with cmc 3. Since we don't have any rebels with a higher converted mana cost than that in the deck, we are now easily able to find every creature we want.

Using the Rebel ability to find these creatures is quite mana intensive, so if we want to search a creature AND play it in the same turn, we would need to invest about 5 or 6 mana. To solve this problem, Thran Turbine was added to the deck. So in our upkeep we have to spend on searching for each Turbine we control.

Since all our creatures are basically white weenies, we can use Meekstone safely. All our opponents can only swing with their bigger creatures once. But if we're afraid that they might attack us with one of these creatures, we can use Whipcorder to tap them down before they have a chance to attack us. Have fun with your big tapped fatty!

When we think its time, we can tutor up our Mirror Entity, which we want to pump as much mana in as we can spare. In comes the Thran Turbine again to help us. It would surprise you how many wins you can squeeze out with huge flying Thermal Gliders and Nightwind Gliders. Not only do they have flying as evasive ability, but they also have a protection from either red or black.

If we encounter any problematic permanents, we have Disenchant and Oblivion Ring to take care of it. The single Mistveil Plains makes sure that when one of our creatures dies, we can put them on the bottom of our library and tutor them up again! Because rebels can find each other, we can dedicate a few spots in our 60 for removal. There have been iterations of this deck, where there are less creatures and more removal, simply because you only need 1 or 2 creatures to find the rest.

Rebels in Legacy

Occasionally, (very occasionally) Rebels have made an appearance in Legacy tournaments. These decks somewhat have the same strategy as this casual version, but it splashes blue to play Training Grounds to make searching cheaper.

Of course blue also comes with Brainstorm and a counter-package. The beauty with Brainstorm in this deck is, that you can simply put back Rebels in your library, and then use the search ability to shuffle and find the rebel you just put on top.

The land package of the Legacy version is a bit more expensive than our casual version though. /s

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.