I went with allies for my first crack at Rainbow mostly because there's a lot of love for them in all 5 colours, so it was a nice place to start.
The Rainbow Stairwell Format
Rainbow Stairwell is my favourite format in MtG at the moment, followed by EDH and pauper. It's a singleton format with a boat-load of restrictions that make for challenging deck-building!
The problem with Rainbow Stairwell as a format is that there is a lot of disagreement about what the format actually entails. I would argue that the
2011 article on the WotC website (https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/serious-fun/stairway-compleation-2011-05-09) is the closest to an official guideline we have. It presents the following rules:
- Your deck must be exactly 60 cards, six cards from each of the five colors as well as six artifacts or colorless cards.
- Additionally, you must have one each, for each color, of cards with converted mana cost one through six. That is, you much have a staircase of cards starting at one mana and moving up to six, for each color.
- Multicolored cards are not allowed.
- Singleton: no duplicate cards, except for basic lands.
A very popular rule is to disallow sideboards, which I have done. If you would include a sideboard, this deck's maybeboard could simply be used as a mildy effective sideboard.
I have seen other popular variations however, including a 56-card setup (4 of each basic land, no nonbasic), versions requiring a full set of dual lands, banning X in mana cost, and using multicolored cards that count as only one of their colors, but those seem less common. I have also seen the additional rule that cards cannot target nonbasic lands, but that seems more like an etiquette thing than a firm rule. None of my Rainbow Stairwell decks follow these additional rules.
