Deckbuilder's Challenge XLIX: Hall of Fame

{Comments}I ran though a lot of ideas for this one before settling on "I want to do something different with Mechtitan Core". The typical strategy seems to be playing it as an incidental payoff in Greasefang, Okiba Boss decks that can their time to freely recur it and other vehicle as they please. While that is pretty exciting to play and watch, I wanted something a bit fresher, something that would get people thinking and excited to play popular cards from Neon Dynasty in a different way - this is why the deck isn't a "Rush Mechtitan Core" deck either, as that's clearly the kind of deck WoTC is pushing with the card (and is a strategy Seth covers fairly well on Against the Odds if you want to make such a deck).

I decided to change focus a bit at this point and simply search for things that would work well with Mechtitan Core. Mechtitan Core could be thought of as a card that exiles things on purpose, so we would want "leaves the battlefield effects" and to a lesser degree "enters the battlefield" effects, but it takes a while before that is actually something you want to do. It turns out there is in fact a Vehicle that works very well with those conditions - Mountain Mover, a Heroes of the Realm card that I imagine hasn't gotten much attention since its reveal. With that in mind, I built a deck focused on quickly crewing Mountain Mover to get it to swing and accumulate a lot of dual-typed Mountains from the sideboard, at which point it can be gotten rid of on purpose by Mechtitan Core or Mukotai Soulripper to set up for a kill via another Heroes of the Realm card, Fabled Path of Searo Point, which effectively makes all our stuff unblockable as long as we can pay .

You'll notice this is why every creature in the deck has power 3 - Red actually has a lot of high powered creatures with either defender or some drawback like Okk that coincidentally make them excellent Pilots in a vein similar to Hotshot Pilot. I went with Torpid Moloch so that we could have a Turn 1 play to curve into our 2 mana vehicles. The rest of our pilots like Blade of the Oni and Scrapheap Scrounger are fitting 3/1s I could find that could crew Mountain Mover and act as pieces for Mechtitan Core. I picked these two for maximum flexibility - if we're faced with a lot of removal, Scrapheap Scroungers can come back from the graveyard, and if all of our vehicles get blown up, we can sink our mana into Blade of the Oni reconfigures instead. I'd like to see at some point if Phyrexian Revoker, Porcelain Legionnaire, or Clockwork Beetle could be considerations for this deck, but as is I'm pretty happy with the pilot choices overall as many of the rejected pilot candidates either aren't power 3, are too expensive to curve into Vehicles later, or just don't offer as much flexibility or resilence to removal as the cards I picked (our entire deck is going to be Artifact Creatures a lot of the time.)

Removal is pretty straightforward - we use Lightning Bolt and Surgehacker Mech too keep the board clear of problematic creatures, and Thoughtseize to try and catch anything else we can't stop like enchantment-based decks. I think this deck is fairly solid overall and worth a try at your average kitchen table match - good luck moving mountains.