Welcome to Paper Champion’s first creature spotlight and deck.

Today, I’ll be focusing on something that’s been bugging me lately. A few of my readers have been a real pest about having a weekly creature spotlight article. I might bee a sucker for writing content my readers like to see and I refuse to let them get ticked off by not putting forth the effort.

Now that the puns are out of my system, let’s focus on the creature type Insect.

As of today’s writing, there are 138 insects in Magic: The Gathering. Most of them are green and black with a few falling into red and the remaining colors. Sadly, most have never made it to any type of competitive format. I guess it’s best not to let bugs do an army’s job.

As it turns out, insects seem to be very mana intensive. Many require higher mana costs for similar creatures as well as higher activation costs for fairly simple abilities. Insects just don’t seem to have too many shining achievements it seems.

For those of you interested in a good clean fun casual tribal deck focused on Insects, I have the answer. “Am I Bugging You?” focuses on the best insects Magic has to offer without the stereotypical swarm of 1/1 insect tokens or the infect decks many of you have seen of the mono green variety.

This insect deck wins the old fashioned way, it hits hard. It also played unfairly with ways to give your giant bugs shroud and fear. Let’s take a look…

Insects scare people and are sometimes hard to swat. Cover of Darkness and Steely Resolve make this possible for your big bugs. Many of your heavy hitters have just one point of toughness. With these two enchantments in play, your creatures have a better chance of survival as well as damage dealing ability.

Once Cover of Darkness is in play, your opponent should have a very quick clock. Carrion Ants, Deadbridge Goliath, Deadly Grub, Scute Mob and Deadly Insect will be your main damage dealers and can punish the opponent if unblocked.

As for utility creatures, Brain Maggot can do just enough hand damage to ruin an opponent’s day. Marker Beetles plays multiple roles as a good body, a chump blocker for additional cards and temporary boost to another creature. Nantuko Vigilante stops pesky artifacts and enchantments. Skylasher can offer instant speed blocking in a pinch.

The deck lacks removal of any kind and is heavily dependent on damage alone to deal with threats. It will be up to you to trade smart with advantageous blocking and dealing your damage as soon as possible.

The decklist for “Am I Bugging You?” can be found here.

Swing Last,

Aiokii

Like this deck? You can contact Aiokii in the comments below, Twitter or Facebook. Aiokii can also be found on MTGO, hit him up for a game sometime. Also, take the time to check out Reddit Budgetdecks for cheap discussion and deck ideas.