Deckbuilder's Challenge XL: Decks of Complete Collections

Snow Meese

("Tribal Wars")

So the reveal of Ulvenwald Oddity has resulted in some people pointing out "Moose" is not a Creature type (presumably because it would be too close to Elk). This leads to an interesting situation where among Magic cards featuring Mooses, some are Elks, and some like Ulvenwald Oddity are Beasts or something else. I decided to make a Tribal Wars-style deck featuring the various Mooses of Magic, with a bit of rough eyeballing and whatever I could find on Google (apparently a few Planeswalkers out there have already made private Moose tribal decks.) To make a long story short, moose apparently have distinctive beards and a more bell-shaped nose.

Now, it turns out that if you just shove all the meese in Magic into a deck, you just get a badly imbalanced deck that is full of mostly 4-5 mana creatures. Normally, we'd resort to all manners of Green ramp, but it turns out everything from Rampant Growth to Fyndhorn Elves sees plenty of printings because what do you know, people like good ramp.

The exception tend to be cards like Ruin in Their Wake that have very set-specific gimmicks... but that inspired me to look into Snow cards as I realized cards like Into the North and On Thin Ice are either single prints or have been reprinted very few times, either by being new cards or Snow 'staples' that haven't been focused on very often. Because the Snow duals instead got better versions in Kaldheim with basic land typing, this applied to both of them too, which is great for us as it means we can tap into other snow based payoffs like Blizzard Brawl to give our deck more interesting removal that isn't held down by the challenge restriction.

You will notice a general absence of cards that cost 3 mana but I feel this is acceptable due to the number of etb tapped lands we work with. A small selection of 1-2 mana support and setup is better to use on those turns until we can start slamming meese onto the table.