“Ocelot Pride Midrange is a white-based creature-token strategy that leverages Ocelot Pride to generate a wide board of life-linked Cat tokens whenever noncreature spells resolve, creating explosive value alongside Guide of Souls and Ajani, Nacatl Pariah. The deck disrupts the opponent early with Thoughtseize and Cabal Therapy while applying aggressive pressure, using Orcish Bowmasters to punish cantrip-heavy decks and maintain parity. Wasteland and Karakas provide mana disruption and recursion utility, allowing the deck to play both a proactive threat-on-board gameplan and a disruptive control role simultaneously.”
Missing sideboard cards? The full 15-card sideboard runs about $323.
Buy sideboard on ManapoolThis is a mirror match, so Surgical Extraction is the main addition. Once a copy of Ocelot Pride or Ajani, Nacatl Pariah has hit the graveyard, it lets you strip the remaining copies from their hand, library, and graveyard, which cuts into the redundancy of their engine. Containment Priest stays in the sideboard: it only exiles nontoken creatures that enter without being cast, so it does nothing against the Cat Warrior tokens from Ajani, Nacatl Pariah, the Warrior tokens from Voice of Victory's Mobilize, or Ocelot Pride's token copies, and it would even exile one of your own nontoken creatures that returns to the battlefield when an opponent's Static Prison leaves. Goblin Bombardment is weak here since the opponent's Swords to Plowshares and Static Prison already answer single threats, and sacrificing your own Cats for 1 damage rarely outpaces their lifelink gain. One Sand Scout is a low-impact body against a deck with its own board presence and removal, so trimming it for more targeted disruption is correct. Keep your core engine of Ocelot Pride, Guide of Souls, Ajani, Nacatl Pariah, and Swords to Plowshares intact, since this matchup is decided by who assembles their engine first and disrupts the other's.
Surgical Extraction is valuable against their Nethergoyf. Once one lands in a graveyard, you can exile every copy from the graveyard, hand, and library, which shuts off its escape ability and the rest of the Nethergoyf plan. It can also hit Moonshadow, or a copy of another card they are relying on. Null Rod does a modest but real job here: Mishra's Bauble's ability is an activated ability of an artifact, so Null Rod stops them from activating it at all. That blunts their cheap cantrip artifacts, so treat it as a lower-priority include. This matchup is a race where they disrupt with hand attacks, counters, and cheap interaction, so keep your core engine (Ocelot Pride, Ajani, Guide of Souls, Amped Raptor) fully intact and prioritize proactive threats over reactive slots. Hexing Squelcher stays in: it can't be countered and makes your other spells uncounterable, which is strong against Daze and Force of Will, and its ward taxes their targeted removal. Goblin Bombardment and Sand Scout are the weakest mainboard cards here, since sacrificing your creatures for damage is slow against their disruption and Sand Scout is a low-impact 2/2 in this matchup.
Containment Priest is a critical sideboard card here: it exiles nontoken creatures that enter the battlefield without being cast, which shuts off Show and Tell putting Atraxa, Grand Unifier or Emrakul, the Aeons Torn directly into play. Note that Priest does not stop Aluren. Aluren lets creature spells with mana value 3 or less be cast for free with flash, but they are still cast, so Priest does not exile them. Its main value is against Show and Tell. Null Rod is mostly irrelevant since their key engine pieces (Aluren, Show and Tell, Stock Up) are not artifacts. Only Lotus Petal is affected, so it's a weaker include and is best treated as filler. Prioritize racing quickly with your creature-token plan before they assemble Aluren or resolve a Show and Tell, since this deck can end the game in one turn if unanswered.