Ever since the release of Lorwyn Eclipsed, I was intrigued by the changelings (shapeshifters) that were being revealed and thought to myself that I could try something funny. One of the Youtubers I watch seems to dislike “tribal” decks in general and comments that they are all essentially the same. So how about we propose a new idea here? Instead of playing any specific tribe, why don’t we essentially play all the tribes?
To help further our goals, we have The Ur-Dragon Morophon, the Boundless, the penultimate tribal leader. Usually, if you see this card, it is often used for a placeholder commander for various kindred types. However, we are playing Morophon fairly. By that, I mean, we are literally using him as the tribal leader of its natural tribe, Dragons Shapeshifters. As another note, due to how the changeling text works, you can realistically declare whatever creature type you want since all our creatures in this deck will constitute of that tribe anyways.
In terms of members of our tribe, they’re, and I’m trying to be downright honest here, pretty bad. With Morophon, we can run tribal members of any colour, allowing us to expand our range of members in our special club. Even then, most members of our club are pretty awful and do little to nothing. But that can come as a bit of an advantage because, and with a bit of politics, we can generally try to avoid getting our shapeshifters removed simply because they are not worth the trouble.
We aren’t playing shapeshifters because of their effects and physical bodies. We are abusing their typal text with changeling. Since our creatures are every creature type, we can use this advantage to give them special effects or to avoid certain downsides. For instance, with Call of the Grave above, we never get punished with the symmetrical sacrifice ability since we only have zombies on stage. With Cover of Darkness, our little monsters can sneak past our opponents’ defences to strike them freely (keep in mind that this effect is symmetrical, so be sure to declare a creature type you won’t expect your opponents to have). Total War is extremely evil as it punishes anyone for attacking and forces players to attack potentially in odd ways, potentially sniping any high value generators.
We are using tribal interaction as well. We have cards such as that of multiple discounted or empowered counters that benefit from having their tribe on stage. We can even use mechanics such as that of Zendikar’s “party” system to our own advantage. Board wipes that are tribal based can also be used to our own advantage by either avoiding extermination or hurting those outside of our tribe.
We also have ways to play some funny and unique spells while cheating their costs through mechanics like “Freerunning” and “Prowl”, mechanics that require our creatures to connect with damage.
We aren’t sending out our soldiers naked. They’ll be properly equipped with toys befitting of their class such as a katana, a cloak and dagger, or even a mystical robe.
Here’s a very special secret. We are actually a combo deck in disguise. With the above cards, we are looking to win with alternative win conditions. Normally, these are all typal limited, but our creatures all cheat around their typal clause thanks to their ability with changeling. The easiest of these is actually Liliana’s Contract, as you’ll see very shortly with the next section.
Thanks to two special changelings, the two above, we can actually get around the upkeep trigger while faking that we are far from the condition. You see, we can flash both of these creatures during our opponent’s end step so we can quickly meet the conditions needed, and assuming we have two creatures already in play, we meet the condition to win.
In terms of draw and recursion, we have plenty of options to consider using more typal synergies.
I would like to personally thank Tarkir Dragonstorm for really making this deck possible. You see, there are many cards that we use from that set specifically because the dragon synergies in that set were made so strong in terms of kindred support. That is why we are a “Dragon” deck because we are using all these cards to our benefit. The Orbs of Dragonkind are especially important for a simple reason; they help fix our colours.
In order to facilitate our tribe, we are running all the typal synergy lands (partially because I’m poor and I don’t want to pay for multi-colour lands and I’m too lazy to proxy). They’re also quite flavourful in reference to this deck. Keep an eye out for their land abilities since cards like Brotherhood Quarters can be used to cast cards other than our creatures. Now you can see the biggest problem with our deck. We can’t really cast anything other than our pretty awful creatures. However, there are fixtures.
There are a few ways that we actually get the coloured pips needed to cast our noncreature spells. Firstly, the original Lorwyn creature lands and some extras are great additions to help fill out our colour needs. The World Tree, secondly, is a way to turn all our lands into multi-colour lands. Lastly, the mount roads cycle from Outlaws of Thunder Junction all tap for real colours with the only demerit being coming in tapped unless we have any shapeshifter on board (I only recently learned that “mount” was a creature type).
That is why we need all these manarocks to facilitate our deck’s plan here. Cards like the above are all ways to help us cast our spells. Urza’s Incubator is a high value piece since, with Morophon, most of our creatures, if not all, are essentially free. Unlike Morophon’s declaration trigger, do note that Urza’s Incubator affects everyone’s creatures, so make sure to be careful when declaring a type.
Ultimately, my favourite card in this deck, is actually this singular creature tutor spell. Essentially, because all our creatures are wizards, we can activate the wizardcycling to just cheaply tutor up any creature we need. This card is very cool and very useful in our deck without a doubt.
This is a bit of an odd deck, but it really is quite fun to mess around with and show off. I think shapeshifters have a bad reputation due to commonly being slotted around to “fill up” tribal slots and synergies, and the reason I built this deck was to really exploit and push that creativity even further. Rather than using shapeshifters as a side piece, I thought it would be a lot more fun to use them as the main dish and really play around with all the kindred payoffs and cards available. I hope this inspires you and you have a great time.