MTG Salvation

I've seen people making Oona, Queen of the Fae a monoblue deck, and my Intet, the Dreamer deck is pretty much without red.

Has anyone built decks with fewer colors than the general itself? What are your experiences?

I noticed at one point my Sen Triplets deck had no black spells in it. It was just an Azorious control deck. I tossed in Languish and an AN combo to spice it up, but it worked fine before.

I've also done Nin, the Pain Artist at the head of an artifact deck. It had a few counterspells and Cyclonic Rift, but no red at all. Nowadays I've probably include Goblin Welder and Daretti, Scrap Savant.

The closest I've had were my Animar and Uril lists. Both essentially splashed red for a few key staple cards (wheel of fortune, gamble, etc).

Quote from narejED »

The closest I've had were my Animar and Uril lists. Both essentially splashed red for a few key staple cards (wheel of fortune, gamble, etc).

I, too, notice that red has been more supplementing (in small %).

Similar experiences here. My Ruhan of the Fomori, Marath, Will of the Wild, Animar, Soul of Elements, and Uril, the Miststalker decks all barely splash(ed) red. When I first started playing I felt like I was sort of obligated to include more red cards, but the more I played the more I realized that if the deck works better leaning towards two colors, go for it. You aren't obligated to have a particular percentage of any color.

I wonder how many Reaper King players don't use a full 5-color deck.

Like many, my Animar, Soul of Elements deck has a minimal amount of red cards in it (three, in my case). My Scion of the Ur-Dragon deck has a fairly light amount of both whtie and blue: just spot removal, wraths, and counterspells, while the bulk of the deck is Jund.

My Uril, the Miststalker deck runs very little red. Runes of the Deus, Fires of Yavimaya, Xenagos, God of Revels, Forgeborn Oreads, and Kessig Wolf Run are the only "red" cards to make the list. My Damia deck only 6 black cards and is mostly UG; same for Zedruu only running 6 white cards and being predominantly UR. I usually worry more about gravitating towards the cards that I like/want rather than trying to strike some sort of color balance.

Along those same lines, when I had a 5-color Sliver deck I ran it as basically 3-color with only minor splashes into the other 2 colors. This cheapened the mana base significantly and made the deck much more consistent. In that instance I did make some card inclusions decisions based on color requirements, but I had too many cards I wanted to include in that deck anyway so I had to make a tough choice anyway.

I think that in the case of Oona, with both blue and black being soooo color instensive with the popular spells in the deck that people want to play, it makes sense that people might stick to one color or another. It's hard to play black for just Necropotence and Grave Pact (or whatever other black mana intensive card you may want) when you also need triple blue for cards like Cryptic Command.

I just built Yasova Dragonclaw... who is basically heading a 'more power than manacost' red-tinted Gruul aggro deck that has blue for four spells(Savage Knuckleblade, Temur Ascendancy, Mind Spring and Time Warp) and (sort of) her own ability. And even the latter two spells could probably be replaced with extra combat and wheel effect, respectively...

A red deck with some green in it, and the barest hints of blue existing. Eeyup.

My Child of Alara is more like a Sultai deck with a Red splash - White is featured on a grand total of two cards (Unmake and Angelic Purge).
Likewise, my Chorus of the Conclave is Green with a white splash, while my Prime Speaker Zegana is mostly a Green Eldrazi ramp deck, splashing Blue for some control elements.

Quote from CoolSeedling »

I wonder how many Reaper King players don't use a full 5-color deck.

my reaper king deck is essentially monored. helps that it essentially is a scarecrow tribal with a couple of red changelings, and a LOT of non-basic hate. its a pretty rubbish deck until that 3 or 5 colour deck that sports only nonbasics shows up, and then the reaper king goes to town.
that being said, its a deck that only has basic lands, and it DOES have all 5 basics in the deck; paying 9 for reaper king isn't a very good deal. don't think im usually colour-screwed either. i think its something like 2 plains, islands, swamps and forests and 32 mountains maybe? i can't remember and im not home right now.

i dont think any of my other decks are skewed badly towards one colour or the other though.

Quote from cyberium_neo »

I've seen people making Oona, Queen of the Fae a monoblue deck, and my Intet, the Dreamer deck is pretty much without red.

Has anyone built decks with fewer colors than the general itself? What are your experiences?

I have never done this. Thought about it and wanted to try it, but could just never justify it. There's always those cards from the extra color that i'd really like to have and know that the deck would just be worse off without it. Oona, for example, I thought of making mono-black but I really like the very large amount of draw that blue has. I've yet to find a hybrid general that would just be better off without one of its colors.

For the most part, I've always played with people that came to the same conclusion. There are times where I wanted to build a 5-colored mono-blue where every colored mana producing land could tap for blue and another color but all the spells were U/x and multicolored. Though, that's fairly opposite of what you asked.

I have seen Mono-Green and Mono-Red Wort, the Raidmother.

Both built drastically different.

I run Doran as a mostly mono-green treefolk deck, with white and black splashed in for the non-green treefolk

I'd toyed around with building a Tasigur Storm/Doomsday list without green: funnily enough, I could still play Noxious revival if I wanted, too!

Really like my mono black sygg, river cutthroat aggro. Is it worth passing up blue cards to power up lashwrithe, nightmare lash and gray merchant of asphodel? Probably not, but it's fun and cool.

Also it's nice to finally be able to run talisman of dominance in mono black. Color identity & deck construction rules for this format have serious issues IMO.

Edit: Link to deck.

My Yasova Dragonclaw deck has no red cards in it and it works just fine.

I have built what is essentially a Mono Black Oona deck save for 3 cards, Power Artifact, Stroke of Genius and Phyrexian Metamorph I love it, it is probably my favorite build.

Mono Black Oona Stax

All my 3-Color-and-above decks that have red in them (Alesha, Animar and Horde) have rather little red in them, so it's true that red has a tendency to become to support/splash color especially when you exceed two colors (just a note I don't have any 2-Color decks with red in them, so I really can't say anything about them).

It's especially ironic in Alesha, since by Color (not Identity) she's Mono-Red and the deck probably runs like an Orzhov deck with Haste.

Honestly, I think it'll be rare to see an Animar deck with heavy amounts of Red in it though - it does have great support but numerically even that great support is outnumbered by the support given by EDH's favorite two color combination (GU).

I'm looking at maybe trying a General Tazri ally deck, but minimizing at least 2 of the colors.

Well, I have a U/B Zombie Tribal deck helmed by Grimgrin that only has 11 blue spells and 4 U/B spells. Mostly, it includes blue for a handful of blue and multicolor zombies and Rooftop Storm.

If I end up revamping Roon of the Hidden Realm, the current idea looks about 60% green, 35% blue and 5% white, heh.

My Marath, Will of the Wild and Vaevictis Asmadi are both pretty much Gruul decks that occasionally remember they had a third color.

Quote from CoolSeedling »

Similar experiences here. My Ruhan of the Fomori, Marath, Will of the Wild, Animar, Soul of Elements, and Uril, the Miststalker decks all barely splash(ed) red. When I first started playing I felt like I was sort of obligated to include more red cards, but the more I played the more I realized that if the deck works better leaning towards two colors, go for it. You aren't obligated to have a particular percentage of any color.

I wonder how many Reaper King players don't use a full 5-color deck.

Quote from CoolSeedling »

Similar experiences here. My Ruhan of the Fomori, Marath, Will of the Wild, Animar, Soul of Elements, and Uril, the Miststalker decks all barely splash(ed) red. When I first started playing I felt like I was sort of obligated to include more red cards, but the more I played the more I realized that if the deck works better leaning towards two colors, go for it. You aren't obligated to have a particular percentage of any color.

I wonder how many Reaper King players don't use a full 5-color deck.

I once had Reaper King Esper Artifacts with Sen Triplets as the lieutenant. Quite bad, and the new colour identity rule has made the concept mostly obsolete, although it was nice to ramp into the Bringers.

I've seen a couple Animar decks that were basically just Simic/Artifact/Eldrazi decks with maybe a Daretti or Moltensteel Dragon, likely just to say that they have to use Animar as the commander instead of their Prime Speaker Zegana or something. I have also (shamefully) built what was pretty much an Izzet Affinity Dragons deck with Numot as the general and Swords to Plowshares, Godsend, Jor Kadeen, Chained to the Rocks, and Ojutai, Soul of Winter to justify not just running Niv Mizzet.

My former Rhys the Redeemed deck was +80% green, considering the artifacts run white was only the splash in for removals and wrath.