XLN Prerelease Deck & Pool (Limited)

Realistically, this pool could probably have been built in more than one way. I can kind of see a three-color Dinosaur deck in these cards. But my prerelease promo was Captain Lannery Storm, and the first pack I opened contained a Firecannon Blast, a foil Firecannon Blast, and Angrath's Marauders. You don't ignore it when the cards send you a message like that, so I decided I was playing red-centered pirate aggro. I started out by building it as red/black/blue, with Air Elemental as a finisher and Siren's Ruse to retrigger raid and so on, but after a bunch of cuts, I realized that the blue had gotten really thin and it would be safer to just cut the color entirely, and go full red/black. Even then I would really have liked to squeeze the Sun-Crowned Hunters and Cobbled Wings in there, but the curve on the deck was real high to begin with, so the Hunters lost out to the Marauders just by virtue of not being the right tribe for the Cutlass and Crew; and I felt I didn't need as much evasion, thanks to all the removal spells keeping the board clear.

The deck played pretty well, to a 3/1 finish in the end. (The single match loss was to a friend, who had plenty of ramp and more humongous dinosaurs in his deck than I had Firecannon Blasts.) Treasure Map is awesome, particularly with Capt. Storm to back it up. It turns out that drawing two cards every turn is good enough to win games all by itself in Limited. Surprisingly, Dowsing Dagger (which I put in the deck purely for the funsies) was really good-- another Pirate's Cutlass would have been just as good, admittedly, but the Dagger did so much good work for me that the drawback of giving my opponent two chump blockers was totally negligible every time it hit the table. Lightning-Rig Crew has a strong claim to being the deck's MVP: In one game, I never hit with a single attack; LRC just sat there on defense the entire game, holding the Cutlass and the Dagger so it was a 4/7 blocker, and went all the way from 20 to 0, with a little help in the last few turns from the Marauders finally coming down to double their damage and speed up the clock. (On the other hand, I was super absentminded about the LRC's untap trigger; over the course of the day, I probably missed enough triggers to kill an entire extra player.)