No Sacrifce, No Victory: EDH Warrior Tribal

Commander / EDH* BRGW Tribal

sekkuaar

Creature (26)

• 1x Blood-Chin Fanatic
• 1x Boldwyr Intimidator
• 1x Bramblewood Paragon
• 1x Brighthearth Banneret
• 1x Butcher of Malakir
• 1x Champion of Lambholt
• 1x Champion of Stray Souls
• 1x Chief of the Edge
• 1x Civic Wayfinder
• 1x Daghatar the Adamant
• 1x Den Protector
• 1x Dragonscale General
• 1x Duskwatch Recruiter  ^Flip
• 1x Fleshbag Marauder
• 1x Garna, the Bloodflame
• 1x Grand Warlord Radha
• 1x Herald of Anafenza
• 1x Herald of Dromoka
• 1x Imperious Perfect
• 1x Kresh the Bloodbraided
• 1x Manic Vandal
• 1x Merciless Executioner
• 1x Reassembling Skeleton
• 1x Rubblebelt Raiders
• 1x Stonehoof Chieftain
• 1x Viridian Zealot

Instant (8)

• 1x Anguished Unmaking
• 1x Boros Charm
• 1x Inspiring Call
• 1x Kindred Summons
• 1x Mercy Killing
• 1x Second Harvest
• 1x Secure the Wastes
• 1x Utter End

Land (36)

• 1x Bojuka Bog
• 1x Canopy Vista
• 1x Cinder Glade
• 1x Command Tower
• 6x Forest
• 1x Game Trail
• 1x Isolated Chapel
• 1x Jungle Shrine
• 1x Kessig Wolf Run
• 6x Mountain
• 1x Nomad Outpost
• 1x Opal Palace
• 1x Overgrown Tomb
• 1x Path of Ancestry
• 4x Plains
• 1x Rogue's Passage
• 1x Sandsteppe Citadel
• 1x Savage Lands
• 5x Swamp

Enchantment (11)

• 1x Anointed Procession
• 1x Black Market
• 1x Cathars' Crusade
• 1x Cryptolith Rite
• 1x Death's Presence
• 1x Goblin Bombardment
• 1x Greater Good
• 1x Growing Rites of Itlimoc  ^Flip
• 1x Parallel Lives
• 1x Primal Vigor
• 1x Shapers' Sanctuary

Sorcery (4)

• 1x Kindred Dominance
• 1x Primal Command
• 1x Roar of the Crowd
• 1x Sylvan Offering

Commanders (2)

Artifact (11)

• 1x Birthing Pod
• 1x Gilded Lotus
• 1x Golgari Signet
• 1x Gruul Signet
• 1x Herald's Horn
• 1x Oketra's Monument
• 1x Pillar of Origins
• 1x Selesnya Signet
• 1x Stoneforge Masterwork
• 1x Throne of the God-Pharaoh
• 1x Vanquisher's Banner

Planeswalker (2)

• 1x Domri Rade
• 1x Garruk, Caller of Beasts

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Why Warriors?

Because you’re not a COWARD, are you?

In all seriousness though, Battlebond, the upcoming 2HG set features some pretty neat Warrior cards in almost every color, including a super sweet new 5 color Legendary Warrior to head up your EDH deck.

Now that the spotlight has been put onto my favorite tribe in the game I’d like to show off the current incarnation of my 4 Color Warrior EDH Deck looks like. With all that said, let’s get down to business!

NO SACRIFICE, NO VICTORY

Warriors as a tribe are much more than just attacking. Don’t get me wrong, we’ll be doing a LOT of turning creatures sideways, but the tribe has a lot of synergies that are often overlooked in the place of just swinging face. What my deck focuses in on is generating tokens and taking advantage of +1/+1 counter generation to make a big army that can win either through direct combat or by other various means which I’ll elaborate on later.

OUR COMMANDER(S)

For a while I initially used Saskia just for her colors, but after a while I saw that I just wasn’t casting her, so I decided to go with a much more powerful partnership.

Not only is Reyhan a Warrior, but her ability to transfer counters from our dying creatures plays a key role in the deck and I’ve had more overall consistent results with her in the Command Zone instead of the 99.

Bruse is pretty much just here for his colors, but having something gain double strike and lifelink in a pinch sure doesn’t hurt either.

CORE CARDS

These are what I consider to be the core cards of this deck. Reyhan and Kresh are able to make a powerful engine that let us trade in both token and nontoken creatures for additional counters onto Kresh. Primal Vigor lets our various token generators get out of control while Cathar’s Crusade and Bramblewood Paragon gives them the necessary counters when they enter the battlefield, while Death’s Presence lets us net additional counters from them dying. Daghatar the Adamant is probably the most efficient nontoken creature for the strategy considering he’ll yield the most counters on death, and Dragonscale General lets us get even more out of our unrelenting assault with even more counters.

This core package of cards essentially enables us to relentlessly press the attack with little concern of what lives and dies because either way we still get value regardless of outcome.

REMOVAL AND SACRIFICE

Nothing too outstanding with these cards, just some ways to remove threats on Warrior bodies. Kindred Dominance is more often than not will wipe everything except your side of the board, and Utter End is there just to make sure that any extremely annoying permanents don’t stick around after the wipe.

There is a neat little interaction between Champion of Stray Souls and Butcher of Malakir that lets us retrieve creatures from our graveyard wile forcing our opponents to sacrifice their own creatures. Not the most efficient way to clear a board, but in the face of some graveyard hate it can save anything in the yard from being exiled and punish opponents for trying.

TOKEN MAKERS AND DOUBLERS

This package of cards lets us generate an obscene number of Warrior tokens. Anointed Procession, Parallel Lives, and Second Harvest are pretty self explanatory.

Oketra’s Monument rewards us for casting nontoken creatures while also reducing the cost of White cards by a bit. Doesn’t seem like much but with a few of our doublers out we can get a good bit of tokens out of one creature cast.

We can often mitigate the X/X Treefolk token that Sylvan Offering gives an opponent with some forced sacrifice from the previous package, and our opponents generally aren’t able to get as much value out of their X 1/1 Elf Warriors as we are so it’s pretty negligible.

Mercy Killing is an odd card because more often than not we will be targeting one of our own creatures that would be killed by targeted removal.

RAMP AND ACCELERATION

Mostly because of my own hubris the little bit of ramp/acceleration is creature-based like with Cryptolith Rite and Growing Rites. Civic Wayfinder is a neat little Warrior that gets us a basic, and Black Market will reward us for all the stuff that’ll be dying. Other than that we have some signets and a Pillar of Origins to fix for any colors that we don’t have.

(If you have the money for it though a Cavern of Souls would be pretty amazing for the deck, but since I don’t it’s not included here.)

MISC. WARRIORS

These are just some nontoken Warriors that were good enough to make the cut. Brighthearth Banneret is good cost reduction in addition to a +1/+1 if we draw it too late for it to be useful. Champion of Lambholt is good with this kind of strategy because she can get out of control relatively easily and grand make our whole army unblockable. Den Protector is a slower Eternal Witness but with the relevant tribe. Grand Warlord Radha can help with mana issues and Reassembling Skeleton can help us abuse our ETB counter effects.

Boldwyr Intimidator is mostly just a flavorful inclusion that won’t let COWARDS BLOCK WARRIORS and makes our opponents creatures COWARDS.

Herald of Dromoka and Chief of the Edge are pretty self explanatory, although it’s worth noting that the reason I’m only running Chief of the Edge and not Chief of the Scale is because of Kresh’s ability since it only cares about power and not toughness.

CARD DRAW/DECK DIGGING

All of these cards can either help us find what we need or draw us some cards. This Garruk is just an absolute card draw monster in this deck, plus his minus 3 and ultimate can really just let us go to town with getting things onto the board. Duskwatch Recruiter does a good job of imitating Garruk’s plus 1 with letting us filter through our deck and has cost reduction on his other side. More often than not we can cast out a pretty big Kindred Summons and get a good amount of creatures onto the battlefield.

Herald’s Horn gives us some nice cost reduction plus an additional card every now and then, while Vanquisher’s Banner boosts our army and gives us a card every time we cast a Warrior. Inspiring Call doubles as a card draw/combat trick in this deck that can make all of our creatures with a +1/+1 counter on them indestructible for the turn and give us a card for each. With the way this deck plays it’ll pretty much always net us a nonzero amount of cards.

I’m sure that Birthing Pod needs no introduction needs no introduction, but to those who are unfamiliar the card will let us sacrifice a creature to get one out of our deck which is super sweet.

Greater Good is a nice free sacrifice outlet that can get us cards in exchange for some powerful creatures and also has some nice interactions with Garna, the Bloodflame that I’ll talk about in the next segment.

BIG FINISHERS

This deck has a lot of very consistent ways to close out the game depending on how it’s going. Cards like Kessig Wolf Run, Stonehoof Chieftain, and Stoneforge Masterwork are great if you’ve managed to build up the board with big Warriors and can generally finish the game off just through combat alone.

But this is EDH and things are rarely that simple so luckily the deck has a few ways to deal with that. Blood-Chin Fanatic, Goblin Bombardment, Roar of the Crowd, and Throne of the God-Pharaoh all give us ways to close out the game in a board where we might not be able to directly attack our opponents.

Throne provides some nice drain early on with a Cryptolith Rite and a few creatures, but can also just end the game on its own later on if we’ve managed to build up a big enough board to just dome everyone else at the table.

Blood-Chin Fanatic and Goblin Bombardment fill the same kind of direct damage as Throne, but work better in different board states, although sacrificing a lot of tokens with +1/+1 on them and then a big Kresh to Blood-Chin Fanatic is probably my favorite way to end a game. Bombardment also has a nice bit of utility in the face of a mass exile like Merciless Eviction or another similar spell.

Garna is a very recent addition, but she’s served the deck well in that short time even if winning with her is really janky. Essentially what we would want to do is sacrifice almost everything to Greater Good and discard as many creatures as we can, then play out Garna and return everything for one big swing. It’s not very consistent but it’s still a very satisfying way to win.

LAST CARDS

These are mostly just things that I had laying around that I thought would slot into the deck pretty well, and so far they have.

Metallic Mimic is an honorary Warrior since it grants an additional +1/+1 counter to every other Warrior that enters the battlefield.

A NEW CHALLENGER APPROACHES!

With the reveal of Najeela a lot of people have started to show interest in my favorite tribe, and though I claim no authority on the matter, I thought I would take some time to show off some options that I would consider adding to this deck as well as some cards from Battlebond.

BEAT EM BLUE

If you’ve been following my blog for a while then it should be no secret that Blue is my least favorite color, so if you haven’t I’m just making my bias known. Even with that being said though, the pool for Warriors in Blue is extremely shallow, but the few that do shine through are pretty sweet.

Grimgrin, Ezuri 2.0, and Herald of Secret Streams already fit really well into the counters theme of the deck and push it just completely over the top, while Surrak makes all of our creatures uncounterable and grants Trample to the whole team.

And even though I don’t like Blue very much I’d like to take a second here to specifically talk about Grimgrin and how good of a card he is for Warrior tribal. Specifically though, how he goes infinite with Presence of Gond.

Once you’ve got Presence of Gond onto Grimgrin all you have to do is tap him to make a Warrior token and then sac the token to untap him and get a +1/+1 counter onto him. That’s good enough on it’s own but with Cathar’s Crusade, Death’s Presence, and Primal Vigor you’ve pretty much got infinite Warriors with infinite +1/+1 counters for your whole army.

Sure, it’s super sweet, but if you run this combo then you better be able to close out the game on that turn or be prepared to become the target of the table.

BATTLEBOND

The pickings from Battlebond are pretty slim for this deck, but the ones that make the cut are pretty decent. Rushblade Commander is a nice haste-enabler for our Warriors. Decorated Champion slots into the +1/+1 counters subtheme of the deck and makes for a nice juicy target for Blood-Chin Fanatic as well. Blaring Recruiter is just more token generation, Mindblade Render is more card draw, and Thrasher Brute pings an opponent every time a Warrior enters the battlefield which will be pretty frequent. Thrilling Encore is basically just another Garna effect which, while not super consistent, can still be really fun.

Anywho, that’s the rundown on Warrior tribal! This is by no means a comprehensive analysis of the viability of the tribe or anything like that, it was mostly just me gushing about my favorite tribe in all of Magic! I hope that y’all see what I love about the tribe and maybe consider giving them a chance for your next EDH deck!

Date added	6 years
Last updated	3 years
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	6 - 0 Mythic Rares 41 - 0 Rares 20 - 0 Uncommons 12 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	3.50
Tokens	Copy Clone, Elf Warrior 1/1 G, Elf Warrior 1/1 GW, Emblem Domri Rade, Emblem Garruk, Caller of Beasts, Morph 2/2 C, Treefolk */* G, Warrior 1/1 W, Warrior 1/1 W w/ Vigilance