So obviously I didn't come up with the idea to splash white in Temur to play Mantis Rider. However, I did decide that taking a more aggressive rout without Beastcaller Savant and instead more
Heir of the Wilds
was preferable. Heir is able to get in early and makes for either a preferable blocker or free damage, or even forcing removal that would otherwise be used on the allstars in the deck.
Mantis Rider and Savage Knuckleblade are hella strong, Mantis Rider has obviously proven his worth again to most of us in the Jeskai Black deck, and here he's awesome to CoCo into and then block. Hitting two off of one CoCo is pretty much backbreaking for decks that can't provide immediate answers.
The gameplan of the deck is pretty straightforward, play dudes, ramp into bigger dudes, play CoCo for card advantage and to get ahead in board state, and close out the game before they can fight back.
We have some combat tricks in the two Dromoka's Commands and singleton Valorous Stance.
Den Protector, while generally a nobo with CoCo (that was fun to say), helps recur a CoCo or an Ojutai's Command.
OCommand is quite the sweet card, I wasn't really impressed when I saw it, however all of it's modes are relevant in this deck and it's awesome to leave open the four mana on t4 and see your opponent wonder if you're going to cast CoCo and instead counter their dude and draw a card, or return a Heir to surprise block, or even gain four life in those aggro matchups.
I have won several games at 1 life where we were able to grind through large board stalls and push in with our highly efficient creatures.
I am considering the maybe board stuff as either random thoughts or stuff I need to look at again. The lands are there because I feel the 4th Hearth is better than the 4th Foothills as Hearth can get R/G, U/W, and W/G. The manabase is nigh perfect otherwise and it's just numbers that I'm messing around with at this point to increase optimization, along with seeing how far we can push the lands to include the new manlands.
Thanks for taking a look and all comments are welcome!
