Oath of Druids has always intrigued me. The card simply puts a creature into play, but has a catch to it. That part is not what sparks my curiosity. It’s a powerful enchantment, for sure, but that is also not what draws me back to it. Read on, my friend, and I’ll show you how deep the rabbit hole really goes.

Oath of Druids is a special card. For starters, when this enchantment comes into play, the tone changes immediately. Now, it is not a very good idea to have the creature count advantage. Suddenly, having 5 Goblins in play becomes a liability to the player with 6 Mountains in play.

The only real draw back to letting a Druid have free run of your deck, is that they are careless. They love the things they love, but they hate the things they don’t love. If a Druid wants to find land, that is what he will focus on, and throw the rest away. Or, in this case, he wants a creature, and he will not stop until he finds a creature, or the table top and your library is now a part of your graveyard.

This still doesn’t sound all that bad does it? I mean, if I have more creatures in play, then my opponent gets a free creature too! True, I am glad you pointed that out. You can feel free to flip cards into the graveyard until you find your Goblin Balloon Brigade all you want to. However, when its my turn, and I am playing creatures specifically put into this deck to accent the Oath of Druids, I believe that I will have the upper hand.

The early decks that utilized this card only really focused on what the Oath can do for you, and that was to throw Sliver Queens and Verdant Forces into play. That sounds fun enough, but then someone in some place got an evil thought in his head and decided on a re-occurring thought. The concept was that while the Oath is good at tossing a creature into play, it is really good at getting rid of your deck too. The idea was that the old card called Gaea’s Blessing, from Weatherlight, would help keep my library fresh.

The Oath deck then went into multiple directions, and it might take a little too long for me to cover all of them in this article.  However, I think discussing one version of the deck is appropriate and it just so happens I am happy to discuss this version (as a blue mage):

Counter-Oath.

The forefathers of this deck must have liked the idea of recurrence. This deck was mainly focused on board control and keeping the peace. They played a ton of instants; counters, card drawing, bounce, and fog effects, in hopes of stalling the game out just long enough to get their big stud into play, via the Oath. The early decks used Morphling to over power the other creatures in the environment, and eventually kill the opponent. Then later on, Odyssey provided the creature called Cognivore. If you take a look at Cognivore, you can see why he would be the perfect fit for any blue heavy deck. He flies and he has power and toughness equal to the number of instants in the graveyard, and you are going to have a ton in yours, especially after you Oath for the first time and flip 20 instants into the grave until you find one of your two or three copies of Cognivore.

While that kind of deck would have made me happy to be able to play it, I unfortunately did not get too. This is because Oath of Druids was a pretty pricey card, running close to $20 each. I didn’t get my hands on my play set (four copies of a single card) until Gaea’s Blessing rotated out of Extended, and the principle of the Oath deck was practically dead.

That would not make for a good ending to an article, however, talking you through the deck I did end up making with my Oath of Druids might be 'funner' for the both of us. Add to that the fact that the deck was mainly a casual deck with strong creatures, and it fits perfectly here.

My Oath.

I always liked the idea of the Re-Animator deck. Do whatever is necessary to get a big, fat creature into play and devour your opponent. Nothing can be more simple or fun than watching your opponent being stuffed down a big, fat creatures throat without chewing, except maybe making your opponent quit as a result of a lock deck, but that’s for a different article.

I used that strategy in construction of my deck. An Oath style deck will only have around 12 creature cards in the entire deck. It is based on getting the Oath into play, and controlling the board until your opponent plays a creature and begins the madness.

Believe it or not, in my deck, the only color not represented was Blue. I could produce blue mana, but zero blue cards. Maybe I should have tried to fit in Fact or Fiction, but I thought that was overkill.

First step in making your Oath deck, is to figure out what big, nasty creature you want to exploit. I was able to decide on a few. I chose to use Magnivore, due to the fact that he uses the same principle as Cognivore; I would just use sorceries instead. Next, I am a huge fan of Phantom Nishoba. He is simply beatings. He stops an on rush of creatures dead cold, he fearlessly storms the enemies lines, and all the while, I gain life from his efforts. There have been very few creatures, in my opinion, as good as him for his cost.

Next, I wanted to be able to control the board if things were getting out of control. So I chose two nice creatures. Crater Hellion is a 6/6 creature, who comes into play and does damage to all creatures in play. Probably the best thing about him, is the fact that he goes away by himself, by you not paying his echo. I’ll explain why that is important in a moment. The other board controlling creature is Visara the Dreadful. She is a big flier, and can block all creatures, without protection from black, and then can turn sideways and make a creature die. She is another really good creature.

From there, I decided I really didn’t want to play 12 creatures, because I wanted to make sure I get the creature I needed when the Oath activated. So I had a pool of 3-4 creatures I could swap in and out for during the different playing sessions of the deck. The last creature, and maybe the key to the deck was a green fellow from Judgment, Battlefield Scrounger. This common was good in this deck, because one Oath was going to strip a lot of cards from the deck and put them into the graveyard before finding one of the 5-8 creatures in my deck. This was definitely going to give me threshold, and allow this creatures effect to be played. The Scrounger therefore replaced the lost Gaea’s Blessing.

The sorcery spells were a collection of the fun spells. I also had a handful of sorceries that I would swap out periodically to keep the deck fun and new for me. Some of the spells I used were: Duress, Chainer’s Edict, Innocent Blood, Diabolic Tutor, Volcanic Hammer, Persecute, Pyroclasm, etc. Given that the deck was a casual deck, I never really tried to see how deep I could go with all the older sorceries. I was content with tossing fire into your face, killing your creatures, and seeing if your left over creatures were good enough to handle my Nishoba and Magnivore.

I didn’t just use sorceries though. I relied heavily on Tainted Pact to get the Oath for me. Between the Pact and Tutor, I normally did not have too much of a problem with this. The only problem that I did have, is when I played a creature without evasion, and I could not get rid of it. If I played a Petradon, the big ole’ 5/6 inflatable guy would get blocked every turn by a small guy. As long as the Petradon was in play, the Oath would not activate, because my opponents were not dumb. So that is why Crater Hellion was a great choice. He came in to play, did his business, and got the heck out of the way. Magnivore ended up being the same type of creature as the Petradon, but his haste, and the fact that I could hard cast him as a surprise was too good for me to pass by. I also played Pernicious Deed in the deck to wipe away bad things and leave my little Oath alone.

So you can see, the Druids in the Oath picture are a very busy bunch. Always standing in circles, talking about trees, summoning big, huge, nasty creatures out of no where, and causing lots of knowledge (cards) to go by the way side. It is such a powerful card, yet costly at the same time. Yet, like every other abusable card, the cost is only a cost, if you can not exploit the cards weakness and make it your advantage.

cpn

You can discuss this article in the MDV forums here.

Most Popular Articles of 2006
The Games People Play - Tactical Magic.
If I worked at R&D
The Beginner’s Guide to Rogue
Druid Week Primer
Opting In: Ravnica
MDV Idol: Finale!
Avatar Week Primer
Delusions of Mediocrity: Getting Stuffy in Here.
Lands-More than Mana: Part One
Raiding Ravnica: Guildmages and You!