Swoop (Casual)

You've seen theme decks with lots of flying creatures before. What makes the "Swoop" deck different? Two things: It's got green in it, and it's bouncy! The way to win with this deck is to distract your opponent while your squadron of airborne critters pecks your opponent to death.
How do you distract your opponent? That's where the green cards and bouncy cards come in. Big green creatures provide ground defense while you mount your air attack. You can use spells that "bounce" permanents, such as Temporal Spring and Repulse, for several purposes: To buy time to whittle down your opponent's life total, to clear a path for your flying attackers, or to save important cards you control by returning them to your hand or library so you can play them again.

Repulse, Rushing River, Coastal Drake's ability . . . these seem straightforward, but you can pull off a lot of tricks with them. Sure, you can just get some damage through by bouncing potential blockers and attacking. But try this: Wait for your opponent to gang-block one of your bigger creatures. Then, before damage is assigned, bounce one of the blockers. Often, your attacker will survive and destroy any blockers left in play. Here's another trick: Let's say one of your creatures is about to die in combat and take an enemy creature with it. Wait for combat damage to go on the stack, then bounce your own creature. Even though it's no longer in play, its damage will still be dealt to the enemy creature. Then you can replay your rescued creature.

There are two ways to go to improve this deck. One is to put in more creatures that change colors along with more spells that take advantage of this effect (like Jaded Response). Or you could remove the color-changing theme entirely and just focus on beatdown creatures and bounce spells. The Invasion set's Kavu Climber and Kavu Titan are both excellent candidates for a "stomp and bounce" deck. Replay the Climber to draw another card, or play the Titan as a 2/2, then play Repulse on it and replay it as a 5/5. It's like watching a rerun that gets funnier each time you see it![3]