B5 – Men of Rohan
This is my newest deck, filling a spot in my collection that has been conspicuously vacant for many years. The problem was, green sucks.
Okay, that’s a broad generalization and an unfair indictment of the color. So, let’s explore my love-hate relationship with Magic’s fifth-best color. When I first started playing magic, we had two decks: a black-red deck from Portal and a blue-green deck from Portal. I liked the blue-green deck because it wasn’t the bad guy. As my collection grew, I added more green stuff because green had cooler creatures, like Crash of Rhinos, and cooler spells like Giant Growth.
Then I bought my first starter deck of Mirage. This changed everything. To me, there was a whole new color of Magic, one that had knights and soldiers and Warrior’s Honor and Disenchant to stop those pesky artifacts and enchantments (I’m looking at you, Nevinyrral’s Disk and Pestilence). Needless to say, it left a big impression on me.
My love of aggro remained, it just switched focus from big nasties to pumped weenies. Ice Age opened my eyes to Skyknights and Warriors, and Shandilar taught me how to really use banding. So I would get salty when green would get better creatures than white. And then Onslaught came long and they printed freaking Naturalize.
I was irate. Not only was green getting better creatures than my beloved white, but now it was getting white’s best utility spell? I swore off green. See, to me green already had its own thing: annoying control. At the tables I plaid at, green was the color of recurring Fog, Plow Under, Oath, and Enchantress. It wasn’t fair that it got to have all of that AND take white’s identity, too.
Over the years, my disdain for green waned as I came to realize that green and white did a lot of the same things because they were allies. Green gets pound-for-pound the best creatures, but white gets the best creature synergies. Green has the power to win battles, while white has the power to control them. I even concede that Naturalize is a better fit for green than Disenchant is for white.
So it came time for my green-white deck. I kicked around a few iterations that I wasn’t thrilled with. Knights were at the top of my list with Citadel Castellan and Knight of the Reliquary, but I couldn’t find a narrative theme that I really liked. Then while working on my white Human tribal deck, I came across some pretty good green Human tribal cards, one of which stood out above all others to me: Equestrian Skill.
My mind immediately went to the Lord of the Rings, specifically to the Two Towers and the Riders of Rohan. A stoic nation of Anglo-Saxon knights and citizen-soldiers defending their home from an unstoppable horde while being lead by a grizzled, tragic veteran who has one good war left in him? Shut up and take my money! They also have one of the first and definitely one of the best woman warriors in fantasy literature. And to seal the deal, their heraldry matches our colors perfectly: A green field with a white horse.
So I started working on my green-white Human tribal deck and I even did the unthinkable: I pulled cards from my mono-white Crusade deck to fill it out. Bonds of Faith and Sanctuary Lockdown fit so perfectly into the story of the House of Eorl. I will no doubt be retooling my white weenie deck soon, but that’s okay because it made room for other cards I love. There is plenty of glory to around, and if white can’t share with its buddy green, then it’s not really white, and we need not worry.