Ajani's Historic Kitties!

In celebration of all of the kittie love being injected into Magic lately, as well as a way to try to pay some homage to my own sick kitten, I've decided to once again check out the underrepresented creature tribes of Arena with Cats! There is no cat payoff per se other than the fact that we are playing adorable little purrecious pieces of heaven in card form. Cats are the best and there's nothing you can say that will convince me otherwise!

There are not many cats available on Arena right now, and most of the better ones revolve around white and green. Sure, Cauldron Familiar is a Standard staple at the moment, and Frenzied Arynx is a big scary cat boy, but I felt like the addition of black or red to the deck wouldn't do much to help it. So we are playing Ajani, the Greathearted, who apart from being a cat himself (even if the card does not state it), is all about love and caring which is purrfect for petting and snuggling with kitties! This deck is extremely bad, I'd put it firmly at a 2 on a powerlevel scale, but if you don't really care about winrate and want to hit opponents with a bunch of cats, then this is the deck for you!

The Cats:

Holy moly that's a surprising amount of cats! Not many of them are any good, but there's a lot of them, and we're playing the lot! Most cats come at the 1-3 mana range, meaning we should build the deck aggressively-oriented, aimed at big cat beats with a minor lifegain synergy. We have Charmed Stray and Leonin Vanguard as our lifegaining 1-drops, and the Arena-exclusive Sanctuary Cat makes an appearance looking absolutely ADORABLE in this deck. We run the best cat in Standard, Ajani's Pridemate to go alonside all this lifegain synergy, as well as Savannah Sage to get even more lifegain going. WE run 3 more cats as 2 drops, with Oreskos Swiftclaw and Prowling Caracal being functional reprints of each other, and Pouncing Lynx as a very underwhelming 2/1 with first strike but only on our turn. As 3 drops we have the sometimes-recurrable Vivien's Jaguar and Generous Stray for more card draw. At 4 mana we run 2 Ajani planeswalkers, which though they don't have a creature type due to being planeswalkers, both make cats to add to our beautiful little pack. Closing out the cat curve we have Leonin Warleader making even more cats when attacking, and Keeper of Fables letting us draw a card every time one or more of our creatures deal damage to the opponent.

The Lifegain:

As mentioned before, this deck runs a minor lifegain subtheme. In order to kick it up another notch, we run Ajani's Welcome to get more life anytime a creature enters the battlefield, and Dawn of Hope to let us draw cards for some mana anytime we gain that life. We run Camaraderie as our only big lifegain spell, but it's more of a finisher anyways as we will be casting it to go for one big swing turn while drawing a lot of cards.

The Interaction:

Our deck needs some way of not dying to all the powerful stuff our opponents are likely to be playing in Brawl. In order to have some outs against a more powerful deck, we run Prison Realm and Conclave Tribunal as ways to keep threats off the board while we keep the tempo high attacking the opponent. We also run the due of Vivien, Arkbow Ranger to snowball our creatures or having them remove threats and Vivien Reid as a source of card advantage or to deal with powerful fliers, enchantments, or artifacts.

Anthem Effects:

We run three creature-specific anthem effects, and unfortunately we still don't have our cat lord Regal Caracal available in Arena again even though we were able to play with it before. Due to that, we run Radiant Destiny, Icon of Ancestry, and Vanquisher's Banner to buff all our little kittens into becoming fierce felines ready to pounce on anyone that gets in their way. Bow before the might of these adorable kittens!

Non-Cat Threats:

End-Raze Forerunner

Unfortunately there are not enough cats to make this a cat-only deck. I know, I am as disappointed as you are, but at least this isn't as bad as the Wolf situation! We run Gideon Blackblade to make our kittens more powerful while keeping up the pressure, and Beast Whisperer and Guardian Project should help us keep drawing cards while we are putting our adorable kitties on the board. Venerated Loxodon is here to bless these Kittens with extra +1/+1 counters, and End-Raze Forerunners does the pseudo-Craterhoof job of being the best finisher in most green-based tribal synergies. Finally we run one Finale of Devastation as a way to find a creature we need, or as a final haymaker if we ever get to 12 mana, grabbing End-Raze Forerunners to give everything +12/+12, haste and trample from the effects of the sorcery and the creature coming into play.

The Mana:

It feels extremely weird playing a green deck without the mana dork package, but most of the cats are in white, we so try to work within those limitations. We run Flower // Flourish to fetch basic lands we might need early on or to pump the team for a big swing later in the game. Legion's Landing // Adanto, the First Fort works pretty well with our aggressive cat starts, letting us continually create lifegain tokens and getting us more mana to work with. We run Arcane Signet because we might be aggressive but we're not stupid, and Song of Freyalise to turn all our cats on the board into effective mana dorks. Heraldic Banner is our other mana rock, which will usually be tapping for white and buffing out small cats by one attack. The land base is pretty simple, with 5 plains and 5 forests and all of the dual lands available on Arena. As colorless utility lands we run Arch of Orazca, Field of Ruin, Mobilized District, and Interplanar Beacon to help us vs the multiple different matchups that give this deck a hard time (it's all of them, the deck is BAD). We run a Castle Ardenvale, and both memorials for some extra value, as this deck needs all the help it can get to get the edges necessary to win any game.

So there you go, if you like cats you might get a kick out of this deck. If you like winning, you definitely won't. Play cats and enjoy the cute little weird meows and purrs the cards make when played on Arena. Cats are love <3