The Nightmare Before Christmas: The Beamtown Bullies

Image from The Nightmare Before Christmas © Disney

Welcome back to Alter of the Brewed, where we brew the most thematic Commander decks that have ever been sleeved. It's spooky month, which means we're taking a trip to Halloween Town with our friends from New Capenna, The Beamtown Bullies

This Is Halloween

As with each of our decks, first we'll settle on our priorities in our deckbuilding. How do we make a deck that has all the recognizable spooky charm of The Nightmare Before Christmas, but that still plays to the strengths of our commander and creates an overall game experience that is fun? Let's take a look at The Beamtown Bullies

The entire premise of The Nightmare Before Christmas is that Jack, the Pumpkin King, becomes enthralled with the idea of the gift-giving holiday of Christmas, but when he takes the reins of Santa's sleigh, himself, the gifts he doles out are a bit... disturbing. What better fit for handing out frighteningly terrible presents is there than The Beamtown Bullies

One final note: it's easy to hand out terrible gifts that completely lock out players from the game, whether it kills one player immediately, like Leveler

Our priorities:

1. Make the deck feel like The Nightmare Before Christmas
2. Give out gifts our friends are afraid to receive
3. Keep the game fun enough to get invited back

What's This?

First, we'll start with our most thematic card inclusions. Here are some my picks for 1-for-1 analogies that synergize with our deck's strategy. There are more choices a keen eye might catch in the final decklist, but sound off with your thoughts in the comments below!

Playing Sandy Claws

Now that we have a respectable amount of theme in place, we'll still need to determine our actual gameplay strategy.

First, we want as many ways to dump cards into our graveyard as possible. With The Beamtown Bullies

Next, we hand out creepy creatures for our opponents to get in at each other for big damage or to generate an effect that we need for the turn. Note that for this section of cards, this is a great place to make changes to the decklist to fit your local meta.

If we want to use The Beamtown Bullies

Finally, if we want to add in some tricks with our treats, we may want to get a little clever and find ways to kill our own reanimated creatures so we can reuse them, or send in creatures that are likely to kill themselves, rather than have them get exiled at the end of the turn with The Beamtown Bullies

Finally, we add in some ramp (mana dorks work great with our subtheme), removal (my list is low in this category, so tune this to your meta), and some ways to do some reanimation for yourself, and here's how my The Nightmare Before Christmas list has shaped up:

Residents of Halloween Town, have I done you justice? Is this list sufficiently spooky? Let me hear it in the comments, and don't forget to check out all of these Alter of the Brewed decklists over on my Moxfield page. Until next time, Happy Halloween!