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Creatures:
4 Faceless Butcher
4 Hidden Horror
4 Nightmare
3 Wall of Distortion
3 Chainer, Dementia Master
3 Soul Scourge
1 Phyrexian Gargantua
1 Spirit of the Night

Other Spells:
4 Altar of Dementia
4 Terror
4 Recurring Nightmare

Sweet Dreams.

Description of deck by its author (quoted):
For nightmares, my reasoning goes like this:

It is clear in scanning the nightmare-esque cards printed so far that a lot of them are creature type horror. Horrors, it turns out, have really spooky creepy-crawly names/pictures that are reminiscent of nightmares. There are so many horrors, in fact, that I’ll start with non-horror cards first and fill holes later. I don’t want the deck to appear to be a horror deck, which feels like a dangerous possibility.

The most playable non-horror cards seem to be Terror, Spirit of the Night, Wall of Distortion, and Altar of Dementia. Terror is just an all-around good card, both generally and thematically. Spirit of the Night works great with the graveyard-animation mechanic the initial cards established. Wall of Distortion gets opponents’ cards into the graveyard and has great flavor text (“It reflects only nightmares.”). Altar of Dementia is, quite frankly, a borderline card that happens to work very well with Chainer (allowing you to both sacrifice creatures before they are removed from the game and put more potential creatures in the graveyard for Chainer to animate).

I want to use Fevered Convulsions and Dread of Night, but neither seems to fit what I’m trying to do. Looming Shade and Dungeon Shade both have good flavor texts for a nightmare deck, but including them starts to make me think too hard about the theme just by looking at the decklist. Dumb reason? Maybe, but I also need a reason to winnow cards.

When the dust settles, only two horrors make the cut. Hidden Horror has that under-the-bed feel to it, and works great with getting a fattie into the graveyard to animate. Phyrexian Gargantua, meanwhile, has good enough flavor text to warrant a single copy. I desperately wanted to use Childhood Horror, but I didn’t think a threshold card made sense in the deck.

Think you can do better? Throw a “Nightmare” theme party after the release of Torment and see what you and your friends can conjure up. Here’s a hint, though: Don’t use Terror or Fear, since most of the critters will be black.

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by Jay Moldenhauer-Salazar @ www.magicthegathering.com

TRIBAL: Nightmares