About

Thank you for visiting Goblin Gathering

This site was created because of my unhealthy obsession with Goblins in Magic The Gathering.

About Me

First of all, I live in the UK. That is why any readers in the US will probably notice the slight variance in spelling, a lack of Z and an extra helping of U where you may or may not expect them. For this I apologise, but I will not surrender.

I first started playing Magic The Gathering™ in early 2017 after Rivals of Ixalan. My first deck was an atrocious pile of Dinosaurs and basic lands. It took me a while to get to grips with the basic rules and mechanics but even though my deck was terrible I really liked the tribal theme. My next deck was vampires, this time using a stronger standard legal mana base. Then with the release of Dominaria I built a black and white knights deck, still overly focusing on the tribal theme.

I rarely won matches - if I did it was due to the other players bad luck or poor draw, but one day a friend offered to lend me his mono-red deck. At that time in the standard format mono-red was very efficient and could close out games very quickly. I won a handful of games that day and decided this was a deck I'd like to build.

My first two goblin cards were in this deck, Fanatical Firebrand and Goblin Chainwhirler. I played variants of  this deck until the majority of it rotated out of standard in 2019. Shortly before this, that same friend who had lent me mono-red had given me a modern deck shell, and that deck was 8-Whack. This is when my infatuation with goblins really began, I started playing goblins in the modern format and once again was hooked on the tribal theme. In those days before the first Modern Horizons set we didn't have access to cards like Goblin Matron or Goblin Ringleader, but we did have fast and plentiful 1/1 haste creatures and Goblin Grenade. I was now playing a new, stronger format AND I was winning games! No wonder my love for goblins started here. It was probably also around this time I built a Krenko, Mob Boss commander deck.

I also managed to play a successful goblin deck in standard for a while before the 2020 pandemic and lockdown due to the reprinting of Goblin Ringleader and the vast pool of goblins available in standard at that time. I can vividly remember my frustrated opponents cries of dispair as a Ringleader flipped 4 goblins from the top of my deck. I uploaded the list here

The release of the first Modern Horizons set made a different goblin deck playable in modern. We no longer had to stick to the aggressive 8-Whack build and could start playing grindier midrange games. The deck played a lot more like the legacy version of goblins and because I had almost all of the pieces I built that too.

From this point on I became known as the local goblin player. When new sets released I bought playsets of all playable goblin cards and little else. While my friends would swap and change decks to try out new archetypes I stuck to my favoured tribe, only making minor tweeks as new goblins became available or the meta changed. 

More recently goblins have been really well looked after by Wizards of the Coast™ with cards like Conspicuous Snoop and Rundvelt Hordemaster which has enabled goblin decks to keep up with the ever changing metagame in most of the formats in Magic The Gathering™