Loaner Deck

[Tormod]

It's time for me to put together a new loaner deck. My other loaner decks have gotten a little less relevant.

Criteria

The deck should be somewhat easy to play, the borrower would be an experienced player, but not necessarily familiar with the format.

The deck should be powerful, do enough cool things to draw the player into the format.

The deck should be able to recover from minor misplays.

Right now I'm thinking something like shardless bug would be a cool choice. The deck draws a lot of cards, attacks with creatures, runs a variety of card types. It also can reward a more creative player but can also play a simple linear game.

Looking for thoughts and suggestions.

[(nameless one)]

MUD is a good one.

Doesn't needs duals. The only expensive land is Wasteland though it doesn't need it.

Most of the cards needed on the deck are EDH bombs, so its a 2 for 1 deal.

Lets see if the following is answered:


The deck should be somewhat easy to play, the borrower would be an experienced player, but not necessarily familiar with the format.

All plays are straightforward. Play Chalice at 1 (this is actually the hardest since the number of counters on Chalice matters from deck to deck), resolve a Trinisphere, Resolve a threat, and nope to win the game. Sequencing matters too although its not that complicated.


The deck should be powerful, do enough cool things to draw the player into the format.

Turn 2 Trinisphere followed by a turn 3 Wurmcoil seems powerful to me.


The deck should be able to recover from minor misplays.

This is the only glaring issue with the deck. If you screw your manabase over by sequencing your City of Traitors wrong or activating Wasteland at the wrong time, you might lock yourself out of the game. There's also the issue of drawing blanks since you don't have card selection.

[Zombie]

Team America would be good, imo. Stable and proactive but more able to rely on the quality of its cards than RUG is. Developing mana is a bit more straightforward than Shardless, too.

[death]

U/G Infect or Food Chain Combo.

[Richard Cheese]

_____ Delver, Miracles.

Maybe not easy to master, but easy to pickup and super forgiving. Not many super-lopsided matchups, and basically none where you just have no interaction.

[Plm]

I don't know if it's well placed in the current meta but sneak & show fills the criteria.

Ease of play : check

Powerful : first turn flying spaghetti monster with force back up, check

forgiveness : well the sheer power makes it relatively nice even if you make some minor misplay.

[TheArchitect]

Really straight forward/simple decks like Shardless BUG, Jund or Show and tell would be nice. Delver decks, or decks where you are consistently the aggressor, are pretty easy to do well with if you are generally good at magic, but are not very forgiving to mistakes.

I would avoid control/prison decks like miracles, lands or D&T require a lot more knowledge of the meta and your decks construction. And alsoavoid decks that have a lot of complex interactions or toolbox effects like elves, maverick or storm.

[CutthroatCasual]

I'll echo SnS as the top "this is what Legacy is capable of" deck.

Next would be BUG Delver IMO.

To Richard Cheese: Miracles is one of the hardest decks to pilot in the format, so while flipping cards with Top/CB seems fun, it's not easy because sometimes you won't have a top and need to set up informed flips with BS and/or Ponder which wouldn't be possible if you aren't moderately familiar with the deck on the other side of the table.

[death]

BUG Delver (Team America), Shardlesz, Show & Tell, MUD, Miraclezzz.. you guys must be boring in bed

[Tammit67]

Miraclezzz.. you guys must be boring in bed

No, we just aren't in a rush to get it over with

[Aggro_zombies]

Infect has the upsides of being cheap, being Modern-playable (relevant if they have experience in that format), and being pretty straightforward. Kind of glass-cannon-y though, so maybe not so good as a loaner deck for people who you consider friends.

Delver decks of various stripes are pretty robust, but pretty boring to play. The upside here is that you don't have to have a ton of format knowledge to make correct counterspelling decisions since you're mostly just looking to stay ahead of your opponent, not control everything they do. The BUG/Team America versions are better here because the amount of disruption means you can just win some games by running your opponent out of usable cards without ever really having to figure out what he's doing.

X Stompy decks, especially Dragon Stompy, are fine loaner decks for small-scale events. They're pretty straightforward, cheap(ish) to build (by the standards of this format, anyway), and theoretically have game against everything. The problem is that the deck is very solidly Tier 2 if not Tier 2.5, so the chances your friend wins prize aren't hot at bigger events.

[Fatal]

Probably Sneak Attack is best choice - you can train someone in minutes, deck is still powerful - not in all formats you have hasty 15/15 anihilator 6 turn 1-2 or Bergain with Legs.

[ceustice]

I highly recommend Punishing Jund. It's straight forward powerful cards. Easy to play with, lots of powerful cards to catch a persons interest into the format.

[aluisiocsantos]

As long as it has brainstorm it should be easy to play with.

[Richard Cheese]

As long as it has brainstorm it should be easy to play with.

Brace yourself, the "skill intensive" arguments are coming.

[Ziveeman]

Sneak and Show or Monored Sneak Attack.

[aluisiocsantos]

Sneak and Show or Monored Sneak Attack.
Ahh, I love Mono R sneak. I used to have a RW Sneak brew, which worked a bit with some MUD weapons such as trinisphere, bloodmoon and grim monolith, but also had white for enlightened tutor so you could get an EOT search for blightsteel colossus, or Sneak Attack. It also had a little more creatures since I had sol lands and monolith, I also ran at least 3 lodestone golems, added to griselbrand and emrakul. It was the nuts, i can get you the list of this.


Brace yourself, the "skill intensive" arguments are coming.

The worst part is that it actually satisfy all 3 pre-requesites.

[kinda]

The Might Quinn! Only had someone borrow it once...but he prized at our local. It's also dirt cheap compared to everything else.

[PirateKing]

Monoblack Pox. Winning is fun, but your opponents losing is even more fun!

[mishima_kazuya]

Another vote for BUG Delver and a vote for UWR Delver.

Bonus points for UG Infect, its an easy combo like Sneak and Show, but it gets bonus points since the deck strategy is comparable to it's Modern Counterpart.

Recommending Miracles seems like a bad idea and I would also not recommend RUG Delver as making mistakes with that deck is very unforgiving.

[Richard Cheese]

Another vote for BUG Delver and a vote for UWR Delver.

Bonus points for UG Infect, its an easy combo like Sneak and Show, but it gets bonus points since the deck strategy is comparable to it's Modern Counterpart.

Recommending Miracles seems like a bad idea and I would also not recommend RUG Delver as making mistakes with that deck is very unforgiving.

Wha? What are the unforgiving mistakes in RUG? That and Miracles may be tough to master, but they're both fairly straightforward to pick up and to me, super forgiving because of the amount of draw manipulation.