Playing the TCG has made me realize how much of a contrarian I am by nature. Whenever someone says "Oh MAN that card sucks, who the hell would ever put it in a deck?!", I immediately begin thinking about how I could build a card around that deck.

I've never really been interested in building a Druid deck before, until I saw the series of Treant-token-creating abilities in Gladiators. Suddenly I really liked the idea of doing a token-centric deck. I knew it was a dumb idea because any decent deck has some AoE... and this obvious objection was the thing that made me want to make one that was somehow still good. But I could never figure out a way to make it really worthwhile, although Nature's Reach nearly convinced me that such a deck could be viable:



Then Fields of Honor came out. One of the first cards that I saw from it was a little common named Scout Kurgo.



He was, of course, universally denounced as a crap card. Getting four 1/1's for 5 is not exactly dramatic or useful. But I did of course notice that there was one other card in Honor that he was obviously made to be paired with:



So I was at Target and bought two packs of Fields of Honor, hoping to get a copy of The Taste of Divinity for my Berserking deck. Sure enough, I opened one, and bam, there it was! That made me happy enough to look at the rare from the other deck... and it was Taro.

I ended up putting this card on top of a stack of cards at my desk at work, and found myself thinking a lot about him. The Taro/Kurgo combow was interesting... spending 5 to put out four 1/1's and one OR MORE 5/5 protectors was exciting to imagine.

But Kurgo was the only reliable way to possibly pull off Taro. I wracked my brain thinking of other ways to reliably put four cards with the same name into play, and the best I could come up with was the Unlimited allies, and that just didn't seem to have the juice I needed. Kurgo seemed like the only way to get this guy out; the combo fell apart if one Kurgo was discarded. And it wasn't clear what kind of deck this combo would fit into anyway.

Then it occurred to me that he might work with Tokens. Bingo, I checked the comprehensive rules and it was confirmed:

At that point the deck built itself. 90% of the cards were from the latest Block so I decided to make it my first Block Constructed deck (though it was hard to give up Force of Nature):

Now if only I actually had all the cards (at least 12 of them are proxies)!

Hero: Brahu StarsearHero

Abilities:

4x Nature's Reach (costs 4)
4x Friends in High Places (costs 3)
4x The Sowing of Seeds (costs 2)
4x Reforestation (costs 5)
4x Nature Unleashed (costs 7)

Allies:
4x Scout Kurgo (costs 5)
4x Plainswatcher Taro (costs 7... or preferably 0!)
4x Dannon Spellsurge (costs 1)
4x Kino the Cold (costs 1)
4x Centurion Addisyn (costs 1)
4x Aknot Whetstone (costs 2)

Quests/Locations:
4x Halaa
4x The Last Barov
4x For Great Honor
4x Bolstering our Defenses

And just for fun, card #61:

1x Cairne Bloodhoof (costs 9)


So I think this is the first deck I've ever made that has 4 of every card in it (except for Cairne of course, who I'm almost certainly going to pull out before I ever ran this deck in any sort of competitive play). Unfortunately this means that it's also currently fully of proxies: in fact I only own 1 copy of Taro and 0 of Nature's Reach (and inexplicably, I seem to own 0 of Kino the Cold - either I've always drafted Alliance, or I traded them all away?)

I'm also a bit of a tournament noob, I'm not used to having a sidedeck so I haven't generated one for this deck yet. Hard to think what would be in it though except for maybe four copies of Hibernate.

How does it play? I've played against two different decks with it in the past two days. The first was a slightly out-of-date Shadowfiend rush deck, which I ended up beating 2-0. Though I had expected the Treants to be the most reliable engine for bringing out Taro (especially since I was always guaranteed to have two treants with my flip), in fact in both of these games it was a turn 5 Kurgo who brought him out. The second game was ideal: on turn 5 I played Kurgo, and then laid down THREE of Taro. I think I also had two copies of Nature's Reach out.

Then I had another friend play against me with a more up-to-date deck, with some AoE: a Loraala mage deck with 4 copies of Heartburn. I lost the first game by mulligan'ing into a worse hand dying to DoTs, but I still got Kurgo/1 Taro off on turn 5. Second game he drew a crappy hand with mostly 4-costs... but 3 of those were Heartburn. I ended up sourcing a Kurgo in favor of the awesome Token generation I had going. I played Nature's Reach on turn 4 and was very pleased with how survivable my tokens became... even though I think he played 3 or 4 Heartburns, he couldn't keep my tokens off the board, at the end of the game I think I had out three Treants, 4 Halaani, and 5 Bear Protectors (all of them 2/2's), and one Taro.

The real acid test for this deck is Nicholas Merrick, but even there I have a chance to put out 5 Kurgo's and 2 or more Taro's on turn 5.

So... my first deck to share with the Austin community! Tear it apart you guys, do you think it's viable in a Block Constructed tournament? What would you put into the sidedeck? I don't know the Meta very well so I'm not sure how bad it would fall down in front of some popular decks. (I do like how the tokens are nicely protected against Snipe in that Snipe would only get the first of several tokens.)

Ok, so here's what I can think of off the bat:
-I like your write-up a lot. Seems like you've really been thinking things through.
-The bad news is, now that Worlds is over, I don't think Drums block is going to be the format for any more upcoming tournaments.
-I'm guessing Cairn is supposed to be 1x, not 4x?

Things I'd worry about:
-Mikael. He's common enough in block to make me think main-deck hibernate is worth it, to remove him before he kills all your tokens.
-Engulfing Blaze, and Heartburn. Not sure the answer to these.