Casual deck advice

[dad]

At my local gaming store, we generally get about 30 magic players on Friday nights.  Only a few are dedicated to competitive Type 1 and a little more towards competitive Type 2.  I find myself playing these same players over and over again because the decks I run (Stax, Oath, Long in Type 1, Gruul, Firemane control in Type 2) offer little pleasure against more casual players.  I decided that I wanted to build some ‘classic’ decks that would be more appropriate for casual games and I am looking for some insight to make them better.  These are decks I have enjoyed playing in the past and thought that giving them a makeover would be fun.  For starters, the decks I am looking at building are:

RecSur
Tooth and Nail
Enchantress
Stasis
U/G Madness
Counter Sliver
Other suggestions

Deck Skeletons (not my lists, but starting points that interested me)

Stasis

U/G:
4x Tropical Island
3x Polluted Delta
3x Flooded Strand
10x Island
2x Lotus Petal

3x Stasis
4x Howling Mine
1x Feldon's Cane
3x Exploration
2x Crucible of Worlds
2x Zuran Orb
4x Force of Will
3x Daze
3x Thwart
3x Chain of Vapors
2x Gaea's Blessing
4x Brainstorm
4x Impulse


Recsur

Mana
6 Forest
4 Windswept Heath
3 Wooded Foothills
3 Bayou
3 Savannah
1 Tropical Island

Creatures
4 Birds of Paradise
3 Wall of Roots
2 Eternal Witness
2 Loxodon Hierarch
1 Squee, Goblin Nabob
1 Genesis
1 Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary
1 Reya Dawnbringer
1 Kokusho, the Evening Star
1 Viridian Zealot
1 Bone Shredder
1 Spike Weaver
1 Wood Elves
1 Tradewind Rider
1 Keiga

Disruption
4 Duress
2 Swords to Plowshares
1 Pernicious Deed

Card Draw :
3 Enlightened Tutor

Engine
4 Survival of the Fittest
2 Recurring Nightmare
2 Oath of Ghouls


Tooth and Nail

4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
3 Vine Trellis
3 Eternal Witness
1 Sundering Titan
1 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
1 Darksteel Colossus

1 Triskelion
1 Mephidross Vampire
4 Xantid Swarm

4 Tooth And Nail
4 Sylvan Scrying
4 Reap And Sow
2 Moment's Peace
3 Pernicious Deed
2 Sensei's Divining Top

4 Urza's Mine
4 Urza's Tower
4 Urza's Power Plant
2 Forest
4 Bayou
4 Llanawar waste
1 Bosieju


Madness

3x Tropical Island
1x Tundra
1x Savannah
2x Lonely Sandbar
3x Tranquil Thicket
3x Wasteland
1x Island
1x Forest
2x Windswept Heath
3x Flooded Strand
2x Cephalid Coliseum
4x Basking Rootwalla
4x Wild Mongrel
4x Arrogant Wurm
4x Jotun Grunt
2x Wonder
4x Brainstorm
4x Lion's Eye Diamond (LED)
4x Life from the Loam (LftL)
3x Roar of the Wurm (RotW)
1x Mox Diamond
4x Careful Study


Counter Sliver

//Land
4 Tundra
3 Tropical Island
1 Savannah
3 Flooded Strand
3 Windswept Heath
1 Plains
2 Island
1 Forest

//Creatures
4 Crystalline Sliver
4 Muscle Sliver
3 Plated Sliver
3 Telekinetic Slivers
3 Gemhide Slivers
2 Talon Sliver
2 Winged Sliver

//Spells
4 Force of Will
4 Daze
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Brainstorm
4 Serum Visions
2 Worship


Enchantress

// land
4 Savannah
2 Serra's Sanctum
4 Plains
4 Windswept Heath
8 Forest

// 1cc
3 Elephant Grass
3 Mirri's Guile
4 Exploration

// 2cc
3 Seal of Cleansing
4 Sterling Grove
4 Argothian Enchantress

// 3cc
1 Karmic Justice
1 Ghostly Prison
1 Words of War
2 Solitary Confinement
2 Sacred Mesa
1 Story Circle
4 Enchantress's Presence

// 4cc
1 Parallax Wave
2 Moat
1 Worship
1 Ivory Mask

I welcome your suggestions.  Also, if there are decks you recommend I ’dust’ off, please let me know.

[Hi-Val]

If you want a deck that's really good and still not cheesy for casual players, check out the thread on Skittles decks in this forum. If people are playing crappy decks without 4-ofs or just getting started, you can still give them a run and have fun without smashing them. The thing is, play whatever they have with your Skittles deck. You'll be bound by commons and uncommons only. They may get out their big combo and it'll be fun or you'll just run them over because you play some of best commons ever printed. I've never had a player complain about my deck afterwards because it has no rares in it. Even if I end up dominating a multiplayer game where I get three Hondens out, everyone considers it fair. Skittles is also a challenging deck format to build for.

You can also use it to show people how strategies work-- abusing CIP abilities, graveyard recursion, mana development, etc.

Hope this helps out, I know there's a grey area between tournament player and total scrub and I think my suggestion falls a lot closer to the latter than the former.

[Jacob Orlove]

I love playing my Skittles list against non-skittles decks, precisely because it's generally well-balanced, and wins the game in fair ways, all while not playing any rares. Plus you get to run all kinds of awesome cards like Thornscape Battlemage that would otherwise not make the cut. You do have to build a little differently, because common skittles counterstrategies are unnecessary, and the odds of hitting a capable land destruction deck are much higher, but since decks are infinitely tweakable, that just adds to the fun.