Why would you amass goblins when you can amass treasure? This budget-friendly* Boros deck, led by Thorin, King of Durin's Folk, is all about playing dwarves, hoarding treasure (and *coveted* jewels), and then using your vast wealth to play politics, defend your treasures, or take the fight to those who yearn to steal what is rightfully yours. It has a few surprising tricks up it's sleeve that will keep experienced players engaged while having a simple enough goal to be new player friendly (play dwarves, make treasures). Here's some things you might do during your game: - Use your treasures without sacrificing them thanks to cards like Inspiring Statuary and Ghirapur Aether Grid. Dwarves can be sneaky! - Get political by using War Cadence after attackers are declared to making blocking difficult, strike a deal with Your Temple Is Under Attack, or activate your Gleaming Splendor to allow others to draw cards. Dwarves can be generous! - Have a bunch of beefy dwarves and want to be even greedier? Play Trove of Temptation which forces other players to attack you but nets you a treasure each turn. If you have Brash Taunter you can reflect the damage back to other players for some fun. Lose too many dwarves? Blasphemous Act and the Brash Taunter still lives, reflects the damage, and you still keep making treasures. - Did someone steal your coveted jewel?? Nab it back with Treasure Nabber when they tap it for mana (which they will inadvertently do without thinking). - Have Bifur enter which doubles dwarf triggers, which doubles treasures production, which pumps the board, and pings opponents. - Swing with a double strike, trample 14/8 Iron Hills Blacksmith with Orcrist that potentially generates a dozen treasure tokens with each hit. - Finish the game with a sneaky Crash Through that gives your dwarves trample, disarm everyone with War Cadence, or use Hit the Mother Lode to generate treasures then sac them to make more treasures with Treasure Vault and ping everyone to death. There are tons of directions for upgrading this deck. Here are a few ideas: - Smaug the Magnificent + Last Light of Durin's Day. Dragon and dragon tutor. Does damage based on the number of treasures you have. Might be worth adding another dragon too as backup for the tutor. - Magda, Brazen Outlaw. Makes treasures when your dwarves tap. - Collector's Vault is fun flavor. - Smothering Tithe if you want to be THAT kind of player. And finally, here are some deck design philosphy notes: - The goal was to provide a solid bracket 2 experience that was easy enough for beginners to pick up but with enough complexity to keep it engaging for more seasoned players. - Adding flavor was really important for me so there are some suboptimal cards. - I made sure there was enough protection and interaction to make it feel like you could safely build and protect the hoard. We aren't trying to win on turn 5. I also didn't want to it to feel too safe so if players want to play aggressively they can. Want to play safely? Send Bofur on an adventure. Want to play passively? Put him on the field. There are many cards like this that offer a "safety" vs "aggro" decision for players to make. - Finally and most importantly, the deck should not only be be fun to play but also fun to play against. *is any commander deck really budget friendly? at the time of writing, this was $145 on tcg player but I expect the price to climb mostly due to gleaming splendor which could be cut to save on costs.