"By a route obscure and lonely, haunted by ill angels only, where an Eidolon named NIGHT, on a black throne reigns upright...
From a wild clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE
Out of TIME."
This is a weird one.
The earliest version of Dreamland was built around cards like Artificial Evolution and Spectral Shift. It was kind of a joke deck, something I brought out for friendly games that I had no real interest in winning, but rather making as weird as possible. It was hilarious to me to take things that people thought they could count on, like the color or type of their creatures, or what kind of mana their lands produced, and turn them on their heads. Changing fearsome dragons into 1/1 frogs, or replacing "demon" with "puppy" entertained me to no end. The goal was never to win, only to enjoy play, which is a fundamental gaming philosophy of mine, that is reflected in all my decks. Anyone can throw together all the best cards and make a deck that, statistically, must win in five or so turns. So much more important to me is the fun of creating something original, that tells a story or fits a theme, that expresses something of the designing player.
Dreamland captures these feelings of mine, and puts them to work in the game. It's an amorphous, chaotic deck, that changes as much of the game as possible from turn to turn.
The mission statement is simple: Turn things into other things.
Winning isn't the priority so much as making a weird, wild, and memorably wacky game. Having said that, winning is a lot of fun, and so, there are strategies here, buried under all the nonsense, and the deck does manage to win considerably more games than I ever expected, most likely because my opponents quickly come to regard it as entertaining, and seemingly non-threatening. I've spent many games overlooked, fiddling harmlessly with my opponents's fields, changing swamps into mountains and turning artifacts red, and then managed to steal combos, or pieces of them, that won me the game.
The cards, for the most part, are cards that have color or type-specific abilities that I can manipulate, cards that facilitate that manipulation, and Shapeshifters.
Some of my favorite tricks:
Insight and Painter's Servant combine to let me draw whenever target opponent plays anything at all. My imagination runs wild with Unnatural Selection, which lets me exploit the effects of cards like Endemic Plague, Kindred Discovery, and Kindred Dominance, among others.
Another of my favorites is Shapesharer, whose ability to turn Shapeshifters into copies of any creature in play is so much more excellent when you can turn any creature into a Shapeshifter (Unnatural Selection, Artificial Evolution, Imagecrafter), and then turn it into absolutely whatever.
When Lord of the Unreal is out, any creature of mine is liable to suddenly have Hexproof and +1/+1. In a similar vein, Krovikan Mist's power/toughness flux wildly as creature types change to and from Illusion, or as I rewrite its effect to specify the predominant creature type at any given moment.
There are many, many possibilities, but those are some of my favorites. As they all depend on combining the color/type-specific effects with cards that change color/type accordingly, there is a great deal of deck search and draw power to make sure that effects are pairing up nicely. There's a whole host of cards with the exclusively Dimir power of Transmute, great for getting what you need, when you need it, which usually go toward getting Insight and/or Painter's Servant.
SO: this is Dreamland. It is one great big, reality-warping mess, and I love it to death.
