Stairs to the Spirit Realm
Like my ally-themed deck, this is a heavily creature-focused deck. The reason I like creature-focused so much for Rainbow Stairwell is that it's such a slow format that having two creatures out by turn 3 is actually a really strong board position.
Spirits is a solid theme for a five-color singleton, since there are a lot of picks in every color at almost every CMC.
Starting Hand
It's a five-color deck, so you need a solid mana base in your first hand. Bear in mind however, that 3 mana is enough to cast 50% of all spells in the deck, and if you only ever hit 5 mana you can still cast 83% of the spells. That means that having a good mana spread (as many different colors as you can) is every bit as important as having enough mana.
I wouldn't accept a hand with less than three mana sources - two lands and some kind of accelerator (
Loam Dweller,
Elder Pine of Jukai,
Wayfarer's Bauble) is good, but three lands is fine too. At least one one- or two-drop and a three-drop that you can play with the mana in your hand is best.
Early Game
Most games you won't drop any spells on turn one, and that's fine. Turn two is good to have something, but it's not game breaking if you can't. By turn three you need something on the board to swing with every turn - blue and red have the best options for these.
Card Selection
There are some obvious cards missing here, like the good tutors (especially Vampiric Tutor, Sylvan Tutor, and Demonic Tutor), the good dual lands, Kokusho, the Evening Star, Cavern of Souls, Urza's Incubator, Kindred Discovery, Door of Destinies, and a few other great cards. The reasoning is simple: too expensive. This deck is worth anywhere from 30 to 40 dollars, and most of those cards would immediately double that price (or more).
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.
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.
