Now here is one tricky little devil! Tibalt is actually a Tiefling from the Dungeones and Dragons cast of characters. Not necessarily evil, but devil-like in appearance. He is definitely a mischief-maker in Magic: the Gathering as well.

 

Wether he is causing you to discard and reanimate thing with spells like Faithless Looting and Unburial Rites or stealing all your opponents creatures with his Insurrection-like ultimate, he is always up to no good. However in order to build him up to awesomeness, we need to draw and then discard at random.

Sometimes, this will not always be a good thing. You will often want to keep the cards in your hand. It is not uncommon to not use his + ability in order to gather a hand of clutter and start using it then to ‘upgrade’ your hand. A lot of times, you will need to do this in order to get him to 4 loyalty and simply ‘burn out’ your opponent for the final few points of damage. Another strategy would be to keep both players hands full to really do damage with the -4 ability.

A lot of players will totally shy away from this little red planeswalker as they do not like to randomly discard. Little do they realize that this is great as A) a discard outlet and B) fodder for Grim Lavamancer. On turn 2 it is a decent play that will allow you to virtually refuel your hand when you are stuck drawing land after land. You need to condition yourself mentally to not just randomly , blindly drop land after land when you know you can potentially trade them in for business cards.

The Insurrection effect is so great especially in an EDH-type setting that you totally want to abuse it. One way to do that would be to proliferate some counters onto Tibalt. This can be made possible with cards like Contagion Engine and Contagion Clasp. Other possibilities include Gilder Bairn, which allows you to double up the counters fairly quickly. It does require a bit of planning, but boy does it feel great when it pays off!

With the proper care, Tibalt will reward you for making the right decision (eventhough the random discard is not really a decision). This card is sure to become coveted in EDH mono-red decks which have no real way to draw/filter cards in that color as well as aggressive red decks in the Standard format.