Deck Building Challenge - A good Tribal Wars Angel deck

[Holiday]

Background
My buddy loves Angels and always asks me to build him an Angel deck legal in the Tribal Wars format which I explain here.
I have been trying for years to make him an Angel deck that is competitive but I've been unable to. The Tribal wars format requires 1/3 of the deck to be cards of that creature type, or cards that can produce a creature of that type. For example, Entreat the Angels isn't an Angel but it counts because it can produce Angels.

I have created sooo many variations of this deck and while many are decent, none have really been good. Here are some ideas I've tried.
- Angel Stompy (Ancient Tombs and City of Traitors)
- Enchantment based angel deck with Serra's Sanctum, Luminarch Ascension, and Sigil of the Empty Throne
- A Miracles style deck with Entreat the Angels, Decree of Justice, Sensei's Divining Top, and Terminus
- An artifact based deck that uses artifacts like Metalworker and Grim Monolith to power out cards like Platinum Angel
- My current build is built to blink morphed Angels like Akroma, Angel of Fury and Exalted Angel with cards like Restoration Angel and Cloudshift.
Many of these decks suffer from having to run 20 Angels. I am willing to revisit any of these ideas or consider any new ideas.

Keep in mind, the meta is composed of creature based decks very similar to the legacy builds of Elves, Merfolk and Goblins. There are also tons of more oddball decks like Dragon Stompy, Slivers, Walls, and Zombardment (with 20 zombies). Sweepers like Wrath of God, Earthquake, and Terminus are great.
An Angel stompy deck sounds like it would be ideal but Chalice of the Void and Trinisphere aren't as good in this format. A miracles list suffers from having too many creatures that are dead in your hand.

Help me out guys, I'd like to borrow your experience and creativity.

[Holiday]

Here's my current list:

4 Mother of Runes
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Wrath of God
4 Chrome Mox
4 Cloudshift

4 Exalted Angel
3 Linvala, Keeper of Silence
4 Restoration Angel
4 Akroma, Angel of Fury
3 Sublime Archangel
2 Baneslayer Angel


4 Ancient Tomb
6 Plains
4 City of Traitors
4 Plateau
2 Karakas


The idea is simple. Play Exalted or Akroma morphed and then blink them the next turn with Restoration Angel or Cloudshift.

[Bed Decks Palyer]

If the field is swamped with creature decks (I guess it is with 20 dudes/deck being a minimum), you might try something extremely silly. Play 20 Angel cards to fulfill the requirement and to win through card quality (4/4 is better than 1/1), then use some kind of CA tool (maybe not exactly Jayemdae Tome) and fill the rest of the deck with removal. You don't need any tricks, just win with brutal power and maybe a bit of a recursion. (Some white land returns creatures from gy to hand.)

mono-W version:
4 StP
4 PtE
3 Council' Judgement
3 WoG
3 Terminus
2 EtA

20 Angels
there's an angel that does WoG:tapped on etb.

20 Plains

_________


WU:
Miracles-like list with heaps of Angels


WB:
4 StP
4 PtE
4 Chainer's Edict
4 Vindicate

fill the void


WG:
8-16 removal
GW hexproof angel, lftl+cycle lands and Genesis for CA plus recursion?

[Holiday]

Thanks for the suggestions, BDP.

The WOG Angel I think what you're referring to might be Sunblast Angel. Looks like it kills tapped creatures, I wish she had Flash. Still, something to consider in such a creature heavy format.
I like your recursion idea, everyone runs a ton of removal and sometimes the 4/4s just end up dying as fast as they come out. The GW Angel with Hexproof, Sigarda, Host of Herons is a solid card for 5CMC. I had not really considered it yet because I haven't tried splashing green. Def something to think about. Thanks.

[Bed Decks Palyer]

Thanks for the suggestions, BDP.

You're welcome!

The WOG Angel I think what you're referring to might be Sunblast Angel. Looks like it kills tapped creatures, I wish she had Flash. Still, something to consider in such a creature heavy format.
I like your recursion idea, everyone runs a ton of removal and sometimes the 4/4s just end up dying as fast as they come out. The GW Angel with Hexproof, Sigarda, Host of Herons is a solid card for 5CMC. I had not really considered it yet because I haven't tried splashing green. Def something to think about. Thanks.

Yep, those are the two angels!
With Sigarda you got a creature you don't need to protect that much. Otoh, WG brings very little except if you're somehow start to play with Life ft Loam to have some CA and to drop Genesis into gy to have recursion going on.
You might try an RW Rifter/Slide (or even RGW for LftL again) with the usual asset of cards for cycle-creature-control, than add the blink angel and the two morph angels. I guess Sunblast would be funny with Slide. Rifter has an advantage to be kinda solid against creature decks.

WB might be funny with the Armageddon Angel, but not in a creature-heavy format. But the Britney Angel (etb:Vindicate) and the Wrath Angel (will of councel: WoG/something else) look solid.

There are heaps of Angel:etb cards (some gain life, some prevent damage, some destroy things, you'll find lots of another ones) so you might find the Astral Slide build funny. Otoh, Astral Slide needs lots of support cards to work, and in a deck with 20+ creature cards (additionally most of them cmc 4+), this might be too hard. (Nice thing is that the white Decree makes angels.)

I'm not sure if Angels are viable (it'll be far more useful in EDH, but you might try pseudo EDH with Eladamri Call to find the necessary angel on spot: Twilight Shepherd Angel to mitigate opposing Wrath, Sigarda against Tribaldrazi, Angel of Salvation to "fog", Exalted Angel to feed the Sylvan Library, Sunblast Angle to make a WoG of your own).
Idk, it might be a bit too hard to build properly, and I'm not sure how the gobbos/knights/merfolk decks are fast and resilient, however this could be a starting point: RWg Astral Rifter possibly with Eladamri's Call toolbox.

Btw I always wanted to build an angels EDH to play all those beautiful angels, but then it was too much work and whatnot. I like the idea in tribal setting.

[Holiday]

I actually tried the Astral Rift build. I love the original deck and have had it built in some form since Onslaught block.
I started out with the 8 morph angels (Exalted and red Akroma). Decree of Justice was another obvious 4 of. Then I had 8 more various Angels to make 20.
Then I had some mix of Astral Slide and Lightning Rift (probably 3-3 or 4-2 split) and 4 Fluctuators. I also had some mix of sweepers WoG or Starstorm.
You also need at least 24 lands because a lot of them are going to cycle or EtB tapped.

It looked good on paper but when I ran it I ended up with too many cards that couldn't cycle (even with all the cycling lands). The Tribal Wars creature rule just limits the engine of this deck. Trying to get the astral slide blink effect is what led me to my current build with the Restoration Angels and Cloudshifts.

"......the gobbos/knights/merfolk decks are fast and resilient"
You're right. There are definitely different tiers when it comes to Tribal Wars. We have our seperate tournaments with the lower tier decks (Treefolk, Beasts, Vampires, Walls, Werewolves, Angels, etc.) with the winners going to the big leagues to battle the tier one decks. I find the games are much more fun with the more obscure tribes as opposed to trying to compete against Elves, Merfolk, and now Eldrazi...

[Steamflogger]

Hey friends, I may have something for you. Sunblast Angel already was suggested. A friend of mine plays an Extort deck in our casual group. It worked pretty well, but lost to masses of creatures attacking it. So I suggested to add removal and beaters. Since he is chronically low on budget I gave him my Sunblast Angels, which I never used. Seemed fine since we mostly play with 5 people on average. So always enough tapped creatures.. But as soon as the 2nd game we saw what I had done. Sunblast Angel works extraordinarily well with Blind Obedience on slowing down opponents and even clearing the board onesidedly. When you expext tribes like goblins to run at you Blind Obedience will definitely give you some time to build up.
I'm not sure if you guys play 1v1 or multiplayer, but if the latter is the case Extort goes a long way. 4LP (5 players) for 1 mana every time you cast a spell makes a difference, especially when people ignore you too long.

BTW he takes so much joy in reminding us to tap our creatures every time we forget to do so. "Ah, ah, ah! You forgot something, didn't you?"

[Holiday]

@Steamflogger

Thanks for the tip, that's a cool idea. We typically play 1v1 but we sometimes pay multiplayer if we have an odd number of people. Sunblast + Blind Obedience sounds like fun in multi.

Speaking of which, I love running Propaganda in my multiplayer deck. You deter people from attacking you without making enemies. I find the best strategy for multiplayer FFA is not pissing people off until it's too late for them to do anything about it.

[Steamflogger]

I already wrote another comment on my phone but yeah.. what was bound to happen with a wall of text on your phone did happen.. all gone. But I just saw the other thread you started and now am motivated to re-write most of it!

You're onto something with your strategy for multiplayer FFA. We're taking casual Magic pretty serious, aka nerding out hard , and record stats on every game since maybe 3? years (we meet every Friday). Data and general perception show that decks which take a step back and let everyone else bash away on their LP until they're ready to kick faces win a majority of games. We even created an award for winners that were far away from everyone's awareness and just picked up the win by killing the last other remainder who probably thought they already had it in the bag. You hold said award until someone else wins in a similar manner. I'm proud to announce that i've been there only once. Most of the time I like to play decks that do stuff and do stuff early. Especially playing a certain deck just screams "Kill me now" Pox..ox..ox..ox... You basically get a feeling for what it means to be the Antichrist when your deck holds Waste Not and Dark Deal and you're versus 4 opponents. Turn 3 Ultrakill if you draw into the right cards!

From here on I'll move over to the other thread.