Welcome back to Daily Arena!

It’s time for another look at one of the preconstructed decks that WotC gave us to play with in the Closed Beta on March 22.

Today we will be looking at the G/W Selesnya Pride precon. This is a cat tribal deck with token and life gain sub-themes. It wants to stay alive long enough to flood the board with Cats that pump and/or are pumped by some awesome Cat Lords, and then overwhelm the opponent with claws-to-the-face.

Edit: User usurpingcrusader on Reddit pointed out a strategy for building this deck into a purely token-focused G/W deck, where Anointed Procession is a key component. See the discussion over on Reddit. I am posting their (in-progress) deck list at the end of this article.

As ever, I have a video for your enjoyment. I lost the first game in the video pretty badly to a Merfolk deck playing unblockable creatures that I never drew removal for, and in Game 2 I triumphed over Gruul Dinosaurs despite a significant misplay thinking Pounce did what Ambuscade does…woops! Also I didn’t realize the sacrifice Deserts are sorcery-speed…good to know!

Edit: Some more games using this deck. The second game in this video illustrates why I’m not in love with Anointed Procession.

Here is the deck list:

Selesnya Pride

I think most of the decks in this card are fairly self-explanatory, but I’ll briefly go over the heroes and zeroes. Heroes first.

Pride Sovereign is amazing in this deck. You get a couple of lifelinking Cats every other turn, and grow Pride Sovereign as a bonus! This can pull you out of a situation in which you’re otherwise almost guaranteed to lose, and if your opponent doesn’t deal with it quickly can build up to a huge advantage.

Regal Caracal is a rare card that gets you 7/7 worth of stats for only 5 mana…and 4/4 of that has lifelink! This would be awesome even in a deck that wasn’t focused on Cats, and the fact that it’s going to pump most of your other value creatures is a nice bonus.

Cast Out is a card I’ve called out in all the other white decks that have it. This is just great unconditional instant-speed removal with a cheap cycle fail case and I love it.

Desert of the Indomitable and Desert of the True are great. They really help justify playing a slightly-higher-than-normal land base, smooth out your draws, and can be sacrificed to the other deserts in the deck for value.

Speaking of other Deserts, Hashep Oasis and Shefet Dunes have effects that can have a real impact on the game in this deck, and are low-risk since they don’t come in tapped and you’ll often have extra life in this deck if you need colored mana from them.

There are other good cards in this deck, but these are the cream of the crop, so now I’m going to move on to cards that I would consider replacing.

Anointer Priest would be so much better if it wasn’t limited to tokens. The Embalm and decent blocker stats mean it’s not a completely atrocious card, but you can do better for this deck.

Watchers of the Dead is just a 2/2 that’s slightly easier to cast in 90%+ of games. Get it out of there.

Initiate’s Companion is a card I probably wouldn’t even consider outside of Cat tribal. The amount of things running around in the current meta that kill 1-toughness creatures make this cat’s stats a real drawback. I’d replace at least one of these with something else.

Pouncing Cheetah does not have the blocking stats that you really want on a flash creature, and again the only reason to play it is that it’s a Cat. I’d definitely get rid of at least one of these, as well.

Anointed Procession seems like it would be amazing in this deck, doubling the tokens generated by your Cat and Horse Lords. It has a huge drawback, though, in that it’s going to do stone nothing for you enough of the time that I’d rather have another piece of primo white removal most of the time. In my experience, most of the games in which you draw this card and win, you would have won if it was any other card in your deck, whereas most of the games in which you draw this card and lose, your chances of winning would have gone way up if it were a Cast Out or something similar.

With all of that in mind, here are my suggestions for upgrading the deck.

On a limited budget, I think I’d do something like this:

Selesnya Pride (Budget Upgrade)

And for those of you less constrained by a tight economy:

Selesnya Pride (Upgrade)

That’s all I have to say about Cats.

Thanks for reading! Hit me up here, on Reddit, on Twitter at @DailyArena, or on Facebook via the @DailyArenaMTG page.

Peace.



Edit: As promised, here is a deck listing for an alternate token-focused G/W build:

usurpingcrusader's G/W Tokens

Joseph Eddy is a Father, Husband, Son, Brother, Software Developer, and Gamer. Magic is his favorite hobby, and he’s looking forward to seeing you all on Arena. He streams Magic Arena on a weekly basis (or more), but currently is unable to keep to a set schedule.