Outlaws of Thunder Junction introduced a whole bunch of new mechanics, including the new “Outlaw” supertype for creatures, allowing us to play around with creature typing combinations outside of the traditional typal deck synergies. What if we decided to focus on synergies of both Outlaws and a traditional creature typing?
Today, we’ll be looking at a reconstruction of the Most Wanted decklist, helmed by Olivia, Opulent Outlaw. Olivia lets our Outlaws generate a bunch of Treasures upon doing combat damage to players, and in turn can spend those to buff up our board. So all together, Olivia has synergies with:
- Outlaws (Assassins, Mercenaries, Pirates, Rogues, or Warlocks)
- A generally aggressive, go-wide strategy
- Treasures (and by extension, artifacts and sacrificing them)
- Counters
- Vampires?
In order to gain the most benefit of running a second creature typing we have to build around, it should synergize with most of the things Olivia herself does. We also need to pick a typing that has a deep enough roster to encompass enough Outlaws to actually benefit from the main reason we would use her as a Commander. So, naturally we might pick Vampires. Right? Right?
Wrong! Today, we’re making sure Olivia has all the backup she needs by keeping a horde of Goblins riding in the saddle. Turns out, Goblins have 62 legal options that are also Outlaws, and quite a few of them are pretty solid picks. While we’ll still splash in some generally good Goblins to help back them up, we should have more than enough Outlaws to consistently gain value from Olivia while also leveraging her Treasure generation to make silly mana, buff our board, and stockpile artifacts for some backup win conditions if we can’t just win with the ol’ beatdown method.
While this is a bit different from my usual takes with Precon upgrades, we have to make some serious room for all these Goblins, so we’re gutting most of the creature package from the deck. In total, we’re actually cutting just about 40 cards – obviously this is a lot of the deck, but we’re keeping enough of the shell that this is still pretty worthwhile as an “upgrade path” if you purchase the box rather than just buying it all from scratch. It’s still reasonably budget-minded as well, although I’ve taken a few liberties to make the deck more functional with a non-traditional strategy for the Commander.
Due to the changes being more drastic than usual, I’m not going to go through the reasoning for each card cut and added, and rather list them out and pick a few key cards I chose for the final decklist.
Here’s the Goonhammer Approved Goblin Gang.
Cuts (and What Stuck Around):
We cut all the non-Goblin creatures from the deck, but these ones were worth keeping:
- Academy Manufactor provides a lot of extra value from generating Treasures and gives us a bunch of free additional artifacts to play with
- Graywater’s Fixer is a really awesome recursion tool and a really fantastic way to make some plays after a board wipe. Since a lot of our Outlaws will be cheap, it’s not hard to make a lot happen in one turn with this.
- Morbid Opportunist as a card draw engine, since Goblins dying is practically a built-in subtheme to the typing.
- Vihaan, Goldwaker is just an unethical win condition as well as a really nice support piece for Outlaws.
In addition to the creature package getting a makeover, we also cut these cards:
Shoot the Sheriff
Shiny Impetus
Life Insurance
Bounty Board
Mass Mutiny
Hex
Seize the Spotlight
We Ride at Dawn
Glittering Stockpile
Council’s Judgment
We also cut down on a few lands to make room for other utility options:
Bonders’ Enclave
Temple of the False God
Sunhome, Fortress of the Legion
Adds:
- In order to not be a Certified Goober, we do need to add a bit of ramp back in with Boros Signet and Liquimetal Torque.
- We’ll flesh out the removal package with things like Blasphemous Act, Vandalblast, and Generous Gift: all Commander staples that should keep things running smoothly.
- Kindred support will come in the form of cards like Shared Animosity and Vanquisher’s Banner.
- We’ll have a lot of things leaving and entering the battlefield in both artifact and creature form, so things like Reckless Fireweaver, Zulaport Cutthroat, Agent of the Iron Throne, and Impact Tremors all put in work.
- For lands, we slot in Den of the Bugbear & Restless Vents for some nice utility into open boards as well as Tectonic Edge for more land removal. None of these are needed though: the manabase is pretty solid out of the box!
- We do break the bank for Cathars’ Crusade, which I’ll touch on more in a bit.
- Lastly, we have Assault on Osgiliath as a cheap finisher: you can just pay X as 0 for a sweet board buff! Ruinous Ultimatum is also basically a finisher, and we shouldn’t have trouble casting it with all of our extra Treasures.
Now, to the Goblin package. First and foremost, we have a handful of Goblins that aren’t necessarily Outlaws, but will help push the rest of the Goblins in the deck up a notch by providing more tokens, stat increases, and sacrifice outlets:
Krenko, Mob Boss
Goblin Warchief
Sling-Gang Lieutenant
Skirk Prospector
Krenko, Tin Street Kingpin
Mad Auntie
Siege-Gang Commander
Legion Warboss
The real fun begins when we can get into the Outlaw Goblins, as these will be doing most of the heavy lifting and getting those sweet, sweet Treasure tokens from Olivia’s ability. In addition to the one’s that come in the base decklist (including powerhouse Grenzo, Havoc Raiser), we added these to supplement them:
Hobgoblin Bandit Lord
Frogtosser Banneret
Goblin Assassin
Goblin Spymaster
Enterprising Scallywag
Murderous Redcap – We’ll talk more about this one in a second.
Relic Robber
Stalactite Stalker
Treasure Nabber
Vial Smasher, Gleeful Grenadier
Conspicuous Snoop
Zoyowa Lava-Tongue
This leaves us with 19 Outlaws in the deck including Olivia, which should be plenty to get things done. We also have much better general creature support now with more Goblin synergies, so we should be able to hold our own even if our Commander bites the dust.
Let’s talk win conditions, because one of the advantages of this decklist is that we have quite a few:
- Combat Damage: Leveraging Olivia’s activated ability will let us use Treasures to grow the board and whack a lot of faces, with things like Assault on Osgiliath to close out the game for good.
- Aristocrats: Cards like Zulaport Cutthroat and Sling-Gang Lieutenant will let us dump a lot of our Goblins for damage in case we can’t get through on the board or are unable to attack for any reason.
- Artifact Blasting: Skirk Prospector + Agent of the Iron Throne will let us use all the artifacts we generate for damage at a much better rate than just paying Olivia’s activation cost, as well as give us a use for non-Treasure artifacts (like, say, from Academy Manufactor).
- Entering the Battlefield: Impact Tremors + Vial Smasher will help similarly to aristocrats, only they’ll help when we actually play things rather than have them die off.
- Waking the Gold: Vihaan, Goldwaker can animate our Treasures for a really wide board state, which can be faster and more explosive than activating Olivia a bunch.
- C-C-Combo: Remember how I mentioned Cathars’ Crusade earlier? We want to have a backup way we can really win out of nowhere, and with Murderous Redcap, we can do exactly that. Both are solid cards on their own in the deck, but if you manage to draw into both, you can assemble a powerful 2-3 card combo. It works in two ways:
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- With just Cathars’ in play, cast Redcap. Both triggers will go on the stack, so you can choose to resolve them in whatever order you want. Resolve Cathars’ first, making it a 3/3 with a +1/+1 counter. Resolve the Redcap’s trigger, having it deal damage to itself, which will cause it to hit 0 toughness and go to the graveyard. Thanks to having persist, it will come back with a -1/-1 counter. If you weren’t aware, a +1/+1 counter will just cancel out a -1/-1 counter, so you can just start from the top and loop the combo. Note that this won’t be dealing any damage on it’s own, we’ll need one of our ETB/Aristocrats cards mentioned above to actually get damage out of this.
- If you have Sling-Gang Commander or another free sacrifice outlet available, this gets a lot easier as you can sacrifice it to that effect rather than using the ETB trigger from Recap and use the built-in damage from Redcap itself to actually damage other players.
In conclusion, while it’s definitely an unusual route to take the deck, it can provide a really unique playstyle with a lot of interesting avenues to take the game down. It also provides Goblins with access to White bonuses, something the Typing rarely gets access to in an effective way. I hope they make enough stirrups in Goblin measurements!
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