Otterball Antics: Standard Izzet Otters

Note: This article was translated from Chinese by AI and may contain errors. Read the original Chinese version.

Before We Start

Bloomburrow has ten charming tribes. If you ask which is the most challenging to build, aside from the Frogs mentioned in the previous article, it has to be the Otters. At first glance it is a traditional prowess route that burns and beats down, yet it also contains the possibility of wild turns with convoke. Which route is more stable?

Card Analysis

Generally speaking, the best way to see how a tribal deck plays is its legend, but the legendary Otter Alania, Divergent Storm is clearly not designed for Standard, so the core card that fits both approaches above is Valley Floodcaller:

Valley Floodcaller
Creature | Otter / Wizard
Flash
You may cast noncreature spells as though they had flash.
Whenever you cast a noncreature spell, Birds, Frogs, Otters, and Rats you control get +1/+1 until end of turn. Untap them.

As a walking, flashing Jeskai Ascendancy, Valley Floodcaller gives the prowess route extra bonuses and makes all noncreature spells flash, and the team-wide untap lets you pay the cost of noncreature convoke spells for free. It looks like you could go either way? In reality that is not the case.

Compared with red aggro, which also takes the prowess route, the offensive Otters led by Stormcatch Mentor seem a bit mild, and cannot match red aggro in either speed or staying power. Going the convoke route, the board-building ability is somewhat lacking, and convoking middling spells like Stoke the Flames and Meeting of Minds feels clunky. To pull off a wild board turn you still have to rely on Valley Floodcaller and Stormsplitter, and depending on specific cards to function means that when you cannot meet the prerequisites, the game experience turns to mush.

So what is my answer?

Decklist

As you can see, this is an Otter convoke deck that both controls and beats down. A powerful web of fire woven from Torch the Tower, Lightning Strike, Nahiri’s Warcrafting, and Ill-Timed Explosion suppresses the opponent in the early and mid game, and once the opponent is weakened, Valley Floodcaller leads the Otter tokens to give the opponent a beating.

The convoke target is the deck’s apex, City on Fire. Paired with Valley Floodcaller, it can come down as early as turn four, taking the opponent out in one punch with triple damage. Even without the Floodcaller, casting it with Otter tokens and normal land drops is not hard, and it can also be fertilizer for an 8-point sweep with Ill-Timed Explosion. As for sources of Otters, here I use Ral, Crackling Wit, Stormchaser’s Talent, and Otterball Antics to build the board, paired with the Otter-specific spell Pearl of Wisdom to refill the hand.

For lands, like the Frog deck, I packed three sets of rare dual lands: Spirebluff Canal, Shivan Reef, and Restless Spire. The difference is that for tribal lands I only used Lilypad Village. That is because the deck has only four creature cards, the Floodcaller, and putting in too many tribal lands would get in the way of the deck’s operation, so after evaluating I chose the surveil 2 that helps more in the long game.

Gameplay Demo

The opponent is white-black midrange, seemingly a deck that earns resources by blinking Beza, the Bounding Spring. Early on the opponent drew plenty of removal, but everything removed was a token I made with Otterball Antics, so I took no damage at all, and I also delivered an on-time Nahiri’s Warcrafting to the opponent’s Preacher of the Schism. Later the opponent built an air advantage and a life lead, and also had Aven Interrupter to disrupt, but did not account for that monster City on Fire. With the Otter tokens made by Ral paired with the Floodcaller, I slammed it down and sent the opponent home with one punch.

The opponent is the mono-black discard deck common on MTGA. Although under the pressure of Ruthless Negotiation I discarded City on Fire first, for a deck that keeps making Otter tokens, can hit planeswalkers directly, and draws cards, it is hard for mono-black discard to suppress completely. On top of that, the opponent was careless and let Sheoldred, the Apocalypse get answered by Torch the Tower. In the end Stormchaser’s Talent reached level three, the second Ral also saved up to his ultimate, and that same turn a triple Pearl of Wisdom and a quadruple Lightning Strike badly hurt the opponent and won the game.

Conclusion

If I had to name something imperfect about this Otter tribal deck, it is probably that there are too few Otter creatures (?), which can only be put down to the tribe’s nature. But looked at another way, this control-leaning archetype also has less trouble making changes, so interested readers can adjust it themselves and see.