Magic the Gathering

Casual

Rainbow Stairwell — I’ll Take Mine Monocolored Please

By Ben Mcdole ⋅ January 5, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

I am very for­tu­nate in my cur­rent position.

Before mov­ing to Tampa I lived in a small town in Florida called Fort Myers where the Magic scene is stag­nant at best. From what I under­stand a few stores are look­ing to turn things around, and I sin­cerely hope they’re suc­cess­ful because there are a good num­ber of loyal play­ers there.

That being said, Tampa has a bustling tour­na­ment scene. There are mul­ti­ple good stores to play at but most impor­tantly if you go to Armada games you will find an event run­ning six days a week! Fur­ther­more the events vary in for­mat, every­thing from a basic draft to legacy.

The great vari­a­tion in for­mat isn’t just restricted to the com­mon for­mats. There have been peas­ant events, pack wars night, and of course EDH league. Rain­bow Stair­well is also a for­mat that’s being played at the store, though not quite as heav­ily. Shel­don brought the for­mat to the owner’s atten­tion and Aaron and Michael (Fortino, the store own­ers) were imme­di­ately onboard.

I hope to show­case Aaron’s deck next week, but in the mean­time I’ll just have to make one of my own! One of the biggest issues in rain­bow stair­well can be mana con­sis­tency. Unless you want to ded­i­cate your entire green suite to mana fix­ing you’re prob­a­bly going to have some issues. Even with the abil­ity to run 2 duals (10 orig­i­nal and 10 Ravnica) you still need to draw the right col­ors. Since fetch lands have an acti­vated abil­ity that’s not a mana abil­ity they’re out as well.

One way around that is to build a mono-colored deck! I’ve had the idea for a mono-black rain­bow stair­well list for a while now. Remem­ber that with hybrid mana cards can count as either color. If we use hybrid cards for each color then we can ‘count” them as being of the other color but still cast them how­ever we would like. It’s an inter­est­ing way to skirt the mana incon­sis­ten­cies that usu­ally occur.

There are a few sit­u­a­tions here where the card is in a par­tic­u­lar spot because it was the only option, though I hon­estly don’t think that’s hap­pened to the detri­ment of any par­tic­u­lar mana slot. One notice­able omis­sion is Demigod of Revenge in favor of Kul­rath Knight. The rea­son is that aside from some­one coun­ter­ing Demigod at the wrong time odds are pretty good he won’t be com­ing back from his trig­gered abil­ity. Kul­rath Knight just ends up being bet­ter in that slot.

Most of the other choices are fairly self explana­tory, but I think it is worth detail­ing the choices I made for black itself and per­haps the arti­fact slots. Black is a fairly deep color and I will allow that some of the deci­sions I made might seem odd at first.

Dark Rit­ual just seems par­tic­u­larly pow­er­ful when it excels every card in the deck so it gets the nod (if one were to put Vam­piric Tutor there I cer­tainly couldn’t fault you)! Tak­ing some of the per­sist crea­tures into account it wouldn’t be out of the ques­tion to run inno­cent blood, or another type of card to answer pro­tec­tion from black creatures.

The two drop is usu­ally the realm of Demonic Tutor but I went a lit­tle off the wall for Over­sold Cemetary. This deck is rife with enters the bat­tle­field abil­i­ties and crea­tures with per­sist. Forc­ing your oppo­nent into a two-for-one sit­u­a­tion sev­eral times only to have them recur again is just such card advan­tage that it can often take the game home.

Along that same vein the three drop could eas­ily go to Yawgmoth’s Will but I like Recur­ring Night­mare instead. Recur­ring Night­mare plus Mur­der­ous Red­cap or Grief Tyrant could eas­ily wipe your opponent’s board and if you’re sac­ri­fic­ing the red­cap then you’re not down any board posi­tion! The nightmare’s good enough to get banned in EDH which means it should prob­a­bly hit play here.

Nekrataal sits in our four drop because it kills nearly half of every deck you’re going to sit down and play against all the while pro­vid­ing card advan­tage. Fur­ther­more it has more inter­ac­tion with your black two and three drops!

Shriek­maw helped dom­i­nate stan­dard in man­nequin style decks and it falls under the same head­ing as Nekrataal most of the time. Shriek­maw also pro­vides a lit­tle late game eva­sion and in a pinch can even cheat the mana curve by being evoked! If you don’t feel Shriek­maw is for you by all means try some­thing dif­fer­ent (per­haps Lil­iana Vess).

Last but not least we have our six drop and prob­a­bly my most con­tro­ver­sial choice. In my expe­ri­ence the major­ity of the games I’ve played ended up being drawn out crea­ture bat­tles. The abil­ity to cast a one sided wrath for just your oppo­nent seemed unfair at best and that’s why I went with Hex. Never be afraid to kill one of your crea­tures in order to kill five of theirs, espe­cially if you’re killing an evoke crea­ture! There are cer­tainly other avenues for card advan­tage and Sorin Markov also tested well, though he is con­sid­er­ably less pow­er­ful in this for­mat than in EDH.

Hav­ing detailed the black slots let’s take a look at the arti­facts! I lead things off with Expe­di­tion Map instead of Sol Ring or Sensei’s Divin­ing Top and there are a few rea­sons why. Sol Ring is great but a good por­tion of the crea­tures in this deck are heavy into black mana and Sol Ring might not always accel the way we want it to. Top can help smooth clunky draws but Expe­di­tion Map can find Cabal Cof­fers or Urborg, giv­ing us a Sol Ring on steroids!

The two drop arti­fact is Umezawa’s Jitte, a choice which really shouldn’t sur­prise any­one! If you played dur­ing Kami­gawa block it was really hard to lose a draft where you opened a Jitte as long as you could find crea­tures to charge into bat­tle with it. Jitte + crea­ture was often con­sid­ered the best two card combo in magic that year. Jitte can be a lit­tle pricey but with the announce­ment that it will be the GP card next year hope­fully the prices will go down enough to make them worth running.

The three drop is Grafted Wargear for a few rea­sons. The first rea­son is because it makes your crea­tures a very aggres­sive early threat. The sec­ond rea­son is because you usu­ally don’t care if your crea­tures die. The third rea­son is because it seemed to fit the over­all theme of the deck. The last rea­son is because it gives you a sac out­let if you really want one! There are prob­a­bly other cards that could go in this slot and I wouldn’t be opposed to suggestions.

The four drop is a card that makes per­fect sense to me, Night­mare Lash. The Lash is pretty self explana­tory I think, every crea­ture is a threat that needs to be dealt with or it could quickly become lethal.

The last two slots are up for some debate. I opted for Gaunt­let of Power and Mind­slaver though there are a cou­ple of other fit­ting choices. Gaunt­let of Power ramps us up but that might not really be nec­es­sary. The def­i­nite upside is that it pumps the team (almost) which is a very solid upside. If you feel like card draw­ing is needed you could also go with Mind’s Eye, I just decided to keep the pedal to the metal so to speak. As for the six drop if, pro­tec­tion from black crea­tures start to be a prob­lem then you might want to add a tutor pack­age and include Dupli­cant. Dupli­cant com­bined with Recur­ring Night­mare can really be headaches on oppo­nents, espe­cially if they had hoped for some sort of recursion.

With­out any fur­ther delay, let’s take a look at the list I’ve prepared!

There’s one card that sticks out like a sore thumb, Dead­wood Treefolk! There is no black/green hybrid that sits at the six mana slot. I chose the Treefolk because he’s easy to splash and has worth­while enters and leaves the bat­tle­field abil­i­ties. Like all the other cards he plays very well with our over­all theme!

Rel­a­tively cheap (Bayou aside), every­thing counts as a swamp so Cabal Cof­fers should always hit for a great amount.

If you want a fun Rain­bow Stair­well deck with­out all the mana incon­sis­ten­cies then you’ve come to the right place! For next week I’m going to show­case a combo deck I’ve been work­ing on that’s also a Rain­bow Stair­well con­coc­tion. Shel­don chal­lenged me to try and come up with some­thing combo for the for­mat and I think I’ve done it. Until then give this deck a shot and let me know what you think.

Tune in next week for another Stair­well deck and a good descrip­tion of pos­si­bly my favorite for­mat, pack wars (with a fun vari­a­tion I play with the other judges!)

Until next time this is Ben­jamin McDole giv­ing you (slightly less) than a hun­dred rea­sons to play magic!

My name is Benjamin McDole and I’m a level 2 judge from Tampa, Florida. When I’m not teaching math at a local college or spending time with my wife I’m usually playing EDH at Armada Games or running some events. My long term goal is to make sure everyone enjoys Magic and especially EDH as much as I do. I’m a member of a few organizations, Team Lives in the Red Zone and the American Association for the Advancement of Pie (I’m the only member!)

Useful Author Links Read more by this Writer! Subscribe to this Writer's RSS Feed

Last 4 posts I'm just going to borrow that… Layer 1/layer 2 with a kick! Rainbow Stairwell - Yawgmoth's Storm Rainbow Stairwell Explored