So I returned to playing magic a couple of months ago - right after dragons released. My first deck was jeskai midrange and while it was powerful and bursty, I just wasn't having the success or even the fun I wanted to.
Then I saw Sultai Whip and thought "well that's cool". So I sleeved it up, and had some fun there. A couple weeks later, it's feeling stale, people know how to play around me at FNM's - I have the cards for Kent Ketter's G/B dragons so I give that a whirl. It's cool, but disruptable.
So I'm sitting here with whip stuff, dragon stuff, and a couple of signed rhino's and decide to slam it all into together with the idea being that anything that goes to my graveyard should have a meaningful and real impact. So far I've 4-0'd 3 fnm's and just took origin's gameday. It's a highly meta choice against a field full of aggro and burn. The name "Circus Whip" comes from having a circus full of creatures - rhinos, raptors, dragons - we've got something for everyone.
The gameplan game 1 is just to vomit things in your graveyard and try to stick a whip and go from there (as it is with most whip decks). For me, an ideal turn progression would be:
T1: scryland
T2: basic, caryatid.
T3: basic, Sidisi, milling, raptor, rhino or ojutai.
T4: Drop whip, swing, mill as above
Game one, it can be fairly difficult for any deck to deal with whip. Despite the rise of thopters, not many people are maindecking enchant/artifact hate so you can get away with some really aggressive/ dirty play or bounce back from seemingly unwinnable positions. Whipping back a rhino represents a 10 life swing (+7 for you, -3 for them). With all the mill we're doing, it's also not uncommon to go t6 drop a den protector, flip, grab something like murderous cut, and get back at least one raptor. Whipping back ojutai is always fun as it's another 10 life swing with an anticipate to boot. There's just a lot of different lines you can take with the deck G1 based on your opening hand.
Pretty much the only thing that I would say is that your opening hand must have 3 lands and a satyr, courser or caryatid. If you want to play super greedy, scryland, untapped-on-enter land, and caryatid will get you there (and it has for me) but it can also leave you stranded as well (and it has for me haha).
After G1 you have multiple options.
Against super wide strategies (gobelisk, jeskai tokens, white weenie) I'll usually side out the mill (satyr, sidisi) and bring in the mass removal control package. The mill comes out because nothing feels worse than t2 dropping a satyr and milling a languish and bile blight (true story - actually happened one time). Additionally, Dromoka comes in as a backup life-gain strategy.
For anything running enchants or artifacts (thopters), unravel and the other dromoka's command come in and do some serious work.
Against abzan, the absolute most important thing to do is land an early whip, and to play with a control/ survival strategy in mind. They have limited ways of interacting with whip, but do have ample ways of getting rid of your hardcast creatures. The idea is you play your fatties, make them drop the removal on it the first time, then whip it back. Gaea's Revenge, Dragonlord Dromoka, Ojutai, and Silumar are pretty critical here as well. Ojutai/Silumgar's hexproof is rather annoying for them and all 3 act as a wall/stall defense. If you can manage to land a whip and get a raptor or dragon to fight (drom. comm.) with anything on their side, this can be pretty huge, as well. Their only real way of interacting with Gaea's is abzan charm, so you just kind of cross your fingers there. For abzan, my sideboard plan usually looks like: -4, satyr, -3 sidisi, -2 courser. +3 dragonlord dromoka, +1 d. command, +2 gaea's revenge, +2 crux, +1 ugin.
Against control? Well. That's my least favorite matchup. Basically, you have to play fast and smart at the same time, and hope you have an Unravel the aether to deal with perilous vault. You can handle counters, you can handle ugin, perilous vault, though? That will wreck you. Gotta get it off the field before they can pop it.
All in all, this is a fun deck, and one that gets more than it's far share of double takes. There have been a fair number of people who, when looking down the field at a sidisi, ojutai and whip in play with a rhino or two in the graveyard will just go ahead and scoop. This is shortly followed by "are you really playing four colors??". Yep, and with all the color fixing (caryatid, courser, and kind of satyr) I think I've only ever been screwed once. I think the only thing I may do at this point is remove one blue souce and switch it to a white source. This current iteration of the deck is a lot more white-hungry as opposed to previous blue-hungrier builds.
