I was thinking after designing my first deck that I wanted something that was much more aggressive. I wanted people to really care about their life totals. Also, I didn’t like the cluttered up board states that people constantly had, especially token players. They would just flood the board with their annoying little 1/1 pests and whatever tiny value creature. The problem was you wouldn’t really want to be spending a removal spell on these little miscreants in fear of the larger creature threats.
Inspired of the movie above, we are looking to build a deck that mirrors those exact same principles:
- We do not talk about Fight Club (this post does not exist)
- We do not talk about Fight Club (this post does not exist)
- If someone gets sent to the graveyard or is no longer capable of fighting, the fight is over
- There are only two participants per fight (as per fight spell)
- We fight one at a time
- We fight fairly (no shirt, no shoes, no weapons)
- And the most important rule: if your creature enters the board, it’s entering into a fight
I have an admission to make; I never watched Fight Club.
Our Commander is none other than Mr. Ben Reilly here. Ben Reilly is here for a couple reasons. First of all, he best represents the two colours needed for fighting: Gruul. Secondly, Ben Reilly is a big boy. What I mean by that is he’s big and he’s swinging in large. With web-slinging as his main mechanic, he can reset our other creatures back to hand, and add their mana value to his overall size, making him a very capable fighter.
The first part of the deck is rather easy to explain. We need to force our opponents’ creatures and our own into the pit. Everyone’s gotta get their hands dirty. To do so, we’ve got a variety of different fight spells in our pocket. Now the key thing to note is that we want to be playing more of the Instant fight spells whenever possible. This is to maximize their potential and create a genuine feeling of dread and fear in our opponents’ eyes. We live in a time of Magic where everyone is obsessed with trying to bring out their little small weenies in the beginning of the game to hopefully slowly accrue value over time. We can’t allow that. They are simply breaking our final rule. They came into the board; they get in the pit.
I want to make a distinction here. A “fight” spell in Magic is very technical. It is a literal “fight”. Cards that deal damage to one another through assigning damage do not count as fighting. The card literally has to share the word “fight” within its wording. So cards like Ram Through will not count for the purposes of this deck.
The harder part is to capitalize upon our “fighting.” You see, while we are tossing our creatures into the cage, we may as well throw in some bets. Boxing Ring lets us repeatedly fight if given the opportunity while also netting treasures along the way. Neyith is one of our big plays for the deck, greatly rewarding us with card draw for our creatures fighting and also forcing our opponents to block our creatures when we swing them at our opponents. Neyith can also potentially just close out the game should we double up enough power and just swing over our opponents with Trample or smack them in face for game.
We will be looking to constantly refuel our hand as our creatures get slain or get eliminated through unfair means of typical board wipes or spot removal. Cards like the above keep our hand stock full of advantage to keep our little fight ring going.
We also have a sort of slight sub-theme going on thanks to the power four or greater synergies (Ferocious). It works greatly in conjunction with our theme since we want large tanky creatures anyways to beat down our opponents’ cards. We can also leverage this to add to our advantage with additional card draw.
Pretty much all the Domri Rade planeswalkers are great additions to our deck for their plethora of different abilities. Both the original Domri Rade and Domri, Anarch of Bolas have “fight” built into their own abilities, helping us trigger our fights. Domri, Anarch of Bolas also slightly rigs the fights in our favour. Domri, Chaos Bringer, helps us ramp into our larger creatures while also giving them haste or a larger body through Riot. It can also help refuel our hands. If we get our hands on their ultimates, our pit fighters will indefinitely become dangerous menaces that cannot be trifled with.
You know who enjoys fighting? Dinosaurs. Dinosaurs carry a unique mechanic called Enrage where they grant you or gain benefits off taking damage. Normally, you’d like to abuse this by finding ways to tickle them for damage, but in this case, we can just straight up use them as our elite fighting force. Ripjaw Raptor is great for getting us hand. Ranging Raptors is straight up ramp. Don’t forget about Apex Altisaur. Now Ancient Adamantoise appears at first as a strange choice, but there is a slight additional reason for this. Ancient Adamantoise is a multi-faceted tool. Sometimes, we don’t really want our creatures to take on damage, and in that case, all that damage is dealt to Ancient Adamantoise instead (this includes fight damage). Furthermore, Ancient Adamantoise also absorbs damage taken by us in the backswing (we are almost always tapping out to swing at our opponents). Lastly, it can work as a ramp piece when it exiles itself, giving us treasures to deploy more threats or bring back a field if need be.
Fight Rigging is an essential part of our deck, mainly for flavour reasons (I wish this card started a fight as well). But Fight Rigging also shares a little bit of our sneaky strategy. To put it simply, nowadays, our opponent’s tiny advantage creatures sometimes have ways of evasion. We need a couple tools to help ensure that we fight on “equal” grounds.
Two of our elite fighters arrive here. What you may immediately notice is that both Stuffy Doll and Brash Taunter are pretty bad fighters. But here’s a truth that you may not really know, but a fight is also a game of stamina. Whoever last the longest, wins the fight. And some of the best fighters are the ones that can also tank a lot of damage. Both Stuffy Doll and Brash Taunter also make it much more painful for our opponents to fight, reflecting damage that they receive in their pit battle.
Now we do have our Rule #6 as shown here: We fight fairly (no shirt, no shoes, no weapons). However, we aren’t exactly using “weapons.” Basilisk Collar is more of a good luck charm accessory that we can attach to our fighters to give them just a bit of extra luck if you know what I mean. Bow of Nylea has multiple different applications. Its primary function is to make it less likely for our opponents to block our usually already damaged fighters. On top of that, it can be used to help buff out our fighters, slightly weather down a single flyer, give us life, or recycle our cards back into our deck with recursion.
My arch-nemesis, Blue, is quite unfun and often doesn’t like it when I have somewhere around sixteen power on field looking to break their face in half. For some silly odd reason, they keep refusing to allow my pals to fight and constantly deny them from getting into the field to begin with. Furthermore, even if they’re on field, people tend to try and get rid of them. It’s rude, and I want them to stop. Saryth, the Viper’s Fang, makes it difficult for your opponents to interact with our champions. Furthermore, she gives protection to our more defensive fighters if need be. Rhythm of the Wild tells blue to back off and makes it so our friends can enter the field without fear of removal on the stack. Lastly, Prowling Serpopard is a decent body on its own but acts as another form of anti-counter.
We don’t really have any board wipes, not that we’ll typically need them since our creatures will double up as both removal and put pressure on our opponents’ life totals. However, if need be, the above card is an excellent choice that also gives us additional bodies and triggers our fight synergies.
This is probably my favourite card in the entire deck. It does nothing except force creatures to fight. However, unlike most fight spells, our opponents get to choose. This above card is the old version and the newer version has errata’d the final line of text to essentially be “fight”, so it does work for our fight synergies.
Get in there, start a brawl, get some scrapes, and then jump back into the pit. Just remember the golden rule: We do not talk about Fight Club.