Hello! Welcome to a rare money making opportunity by yours truly, 3WW Wingmate Roc. Most of you probably don’t know, but my character name is a Magic: the Gathering card that I used to love, Wingmate Roc. The card is kind of horrible in modern Magic, it was printed a decade ago and has long since been phased out power-wise, and it has a problem with creating a unique token which is annoying for things like cube, I took it out of mine for that reason for example.

Anyway, I thought I’d go through the different SMJHL teams and compare them to what Magic card they feel like, and while my opinion may not be correct, that’s what I’m choosing to set them as! Also, I will be biasing towards cards I just enjoy personally, I’m sure there may be cards that fit better but if I don’t like them, from an aesthetic, power, vibe perspective, they won’t be included. This means that they’ll probably be from my cube (a custom set of cards you can draft with your friends that you can check out here: Matica (higher powered) https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/matica and Mid Cards I Love (lower powered and where Wingmate Roc used to live) https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/2d8d160a-068d-425d-8ade-0f53fbf41677). These cubes are currently getting very updated as my friends and I hold a Draft Champs event every winter where we draft our cubes and retail boxes!

I just realized at the end that the Index had the teams listed not by conference in the teams page in each column, so we've got a mish mash here.



Already starting with a difficult one! The Armada is a boat, and there are quite a few vehicles in the game of Magic (Vehicles are artifacts that turn into creatures when you crew them with other creatures) but I don’t generally play with a ton of vehicles, or ones that look like an ice breaking one.




The Golden Argosy is my choice because it’s a fun one that I kind of love. I’m going to be saying this a lot, but it’s not a great card. It’s a card that has the crew members going on a great voyage and being flickered when they come back. It’s the flickering part that I’m interested in as it brings back people to trigger their effects again! This doesn’t work super much as I was a TDL add to Anchorage but did not end up going back to Anchorage after QCC drafted me.

Side note: I used to call this card Argussy and I am a little ashamed of it. This was a banger in Dominaria draft and not many people wanted it because they were cowards, so it was very free for me to pick up often.



Oh man, there are a lot of dinosaurs in the game of Magic, especially after they introduced Ixalan, which is a meso-american setting with Spanish Conquistador Vampires, pirates, and Mayan themed Dinosaur tamer/symbiotic relationship people, and huge Elder Dinosaurs roaming the land. The dinos are also colourful and featherful which is also so cool. Ixalan also has a hollow center like in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth.

The Colorado Raptors raptor looks like a regular raptor, not a triceratops or any cooler dinosaur, so I’ve got a selection from the newest Ixalan set, Cavern Stomper!



Cavern Stomper is a big guy for reasonably small mana (like an SMJHL team would be lower TPE????) and he just kinda fixes your upcoming draws and smashes in, unburdened by the small opponents in front of them! I also drafted this guy a bunch, I draft mostly Green+Black+other colour garbage in all sets, just a bunch of removal and dudes and splashing more colours than I should. I loved Cavern Stomper, especially when drafting Green Red dinosaurs in Ixalan.


Oh man! I didn’t know this was a team! This is super exciting because in Magic, a “bear” is a super common shorthand, it even has a special tag on Scryfall, which is the repository where you can find all cards in the game. If you type in “is:bear” you can see all the bears, which is a 2 mana 2/2. Most bears in Magic used to just be 2 mana 2/2s, and now you have tons of 2/2 creatures with abilities called bears even if they are decidedly not bears.

There is of course, just a Grizzly Bear, but we’re going to give the Great Falls Grizzlies the Ayula, Queen Among Bears.





Ayula is a bear (of course) and she makes all your bears stronger and better and fight the opponents when bears enter the battlefield (ie. are drafted???). Maybe the Grizzlies are just Grizzly Bears sometimes, but when they’re out there competing, you know that they are upgraded into AYULA, QUEEN AMONG BEARS. I don’t personally have much experience playing Ayula, just not a card in formats I play, but it seems like a sweet card that’s also fun and great.


Alright, another forest themed team! Bears are forest themed, right? This one is a hard one to place for me, I had to do some digging and searching, cutting my way through the forest for this one.



I ended up with Bonesplitter as the pick for this team. There are a few chainsaw types of cards but I kind of hate how they look aesthetically. There are also some lumberjack kind of peeps, you know, plaid wearing dudes with axes, but I chose to go with Bonesplitter because it’s just a nice simple equipment that’s cheap and effective. 


Oh man, love me a Berserker, I love cards that are just aggressive and attack and kill the opponent. Just good clean Magic as it was designed to be. I have to imagine that Newfoundland plays the SHL like that, just attacking no defense, you don’t need a goalie if you score more than they do.

There’s a set called Kaldheim that is inspired by Norse mythology, so we’ve got tons of picks here. I almost took Horizon Seeker or Usher of the Fallen, but my choice for the Newfoundland Berserkers is Dragonkin Berserker.



A cheap threat that comes down, is itself a berserker, and makes dragons when it attacks and you’ve got mana? That sounds perfect, give me some of these guys. I was a bit wary of taking this one since the Newfoundland team colours have a lot of grey in them, but that’s kind of a skill issue on whoever chose those colours and not something I can do.


The GOAT SMJHL team, the Quebec City Citadelles! I have to say, there are a lot of owls in Magic, and birds are generally blue and white in Magic so it really fits. There are too many choices, so I just chose one that is a bird (not an owl) and where the name is sweet.

The Quebec City Citadelles are the Preening Champions!



Preening Champion is sweet, I love a 3 mana 2/2 that comes with something, and this one did so much work in one of the best draft formats of all time, March of the Machine! One of the best cards in the set, one of the most fun to play, and a great name to boot. Of course this team is this card.

You could of course also call them the Dream Strix because THEY TRADED ME AWAY. My dream to remain with the Citadelles was ruined, and so it is only a dream owl for me. As the text box on Dream Strix says, I needed to learn the harsh truths of the cut throat SMJHL.




Nearly done on the left hand side of the teams! I’m realizing now that I am not going by conference or anything, so this might be a bit confusing lol.

There are a lot of Scarecrows in Magic, usually they’re colourless because they’re artifacts, but also there are a lot of horrors that are also scarecrows. Scarecrows also are good at transmuting your mana from one colour to another, which I love because I play so many multicolour piles that I need fixing for. So, because of that, I’m choosing a card that is scarecrow vibe in Magic, but is not literally a scarecrow, which I hope is okay.

Gravestone Strider is a great card in another goated format, Murders at Karlov Manor! It fixes your colours and has graveyard exit synergies which was super important for the decks I was drafting all the time. It was also low priority for most decks other than the specific ones I drafted so it was free as well.



If you want an actual scarecrow, technically Three Tree Mascot is one:



But also, we’ve got Oasis Gardener (wasn’t great in its format because Outlaws of Thunder Junction was horrible)




The last team of part 1! The Vancouver Whalers are great cause there are loads of whales in Magic, and I like a lot of em! There are so many sea monsters and big dudes in the game, and I also personally love whales that fly in art and books and stuff. I don’t know why but sky whales is just kinda my jam

For the Vancouver Whalers, I think I might have taken the strongest card in this set of cards in Ethereal Forager.



Ethereal Forager is great because it’s just so evocative and interesting from a deckbuilding and drafting perspective. I love delve threats, love spell slinging and this is kind of both sides that equation.

I’m not sure it’s strong enough to play in my cube but I may need to fix that by juicing up the blue based spells decks.


Alright! I’ve got half the teams set up with Magic cards, let’s rank them in terms of what I love the most from cards and therefore we can tier list the OBJECTIVE quality of SMJHL teams (left hand side column from the teams overview page in the Index).

Anchorage Armada - Golden Argosy (Argussy)
Colorado Raptors - Cavern Stomper
Great Falls Grizzlies - Ayula, Queen among Bears
Maine Timber - Bonesplitter
Newfoundland Berserkers - Dragonkin Berserkers
Quebec City Citadelles - Preening Champion
St Louis Scarecrow - Gravestone Strider
Vancouver Whalers - Ethereal Forager

Alright, now that I’ve got it all listed, I think I’ve got some rough tiers:

Tier 1 - Cards I love and fit their teams well

Vancouver Whalers - Ethereal Forager
Anchorage Armada - Golden Argosy

I think these are just perfect fits, love the cards, love the matching.

Tier 2 - Cards that I love but don’t fit their teams that good

Colorado Raptors - Cavern Stomper
Great Falls Grizzlies - Ayula, Queen among Bears
St Louis Scarecrow - Gravestone Strider
Maine Timber - Bonesplitter
Quebec City Citadelles - Preening Champion

I think there are some reaches here, I think Bonesplitter could be higher up and QCC is really barely making their case to be here in Tier 2.

Tier 3 - Unlucky, better luck next time

Newfoundland Berserkers - Dragonkin Berserkers

Uh, I just hate the Newfoundland Berserker colours mostly, so none of them really fit lol.


Surely I will do the rest of the teams (when I need more money).