Welcome back to Knight’s Booty. I’m sorry but I don’t have a short story for you this week. Instead I have a deck that I’ve been testing out in Modern that fills a gap that is missing in the current metagame. Now the reason for designing this deck is taken from Chapin’s “Next Level Deck building” eBook, which I highly recommend to anybody who wants to take that next step.
See, if we take a look at the current metagame (using mtggoldfish.com as our baseline) we are sitting in a very combo heavy environment. Splinter Twin is sitting at 13.26%, with Melira Pod at 12.14%. That’s only two decks and already we are covering a quarter of the metagame. After that we look at UR Storm at 5.43%, Scapeshift at 4.15%, Ad Nauseum at 2.24% and after that it peters off. So add all those percentages together and we are sitting pretty at 37.22%. Up from a quarter to a third of our current metagame is made up of combo decks. Which when you think about it is pretty amazing really.
So how do we go about punishing this combo dominant metagame? We could try going to go aggro and beat them to the punch. But most of the above decks are ready to “go off” by turn 3, and can aggro decks really beat that clock? I don’t know, but even with the power of Zoo and Affinity I can’t be comfortable in saying that they have faster clocks. And do we really want to try and compete with other aggro decks? I personally don’t.
So the next level up is control. In which we have UWR and Hatebears as your big bad guys. Combined however they only take up 7.98% of the metagame. Something is seriously lacking there, don’t you think? Even if you add in UW Midrange you are only looking at 10.86% of the metagame being control decks. This just doesn’t seem possible. Especially when you have Esper control eating the standard environment alive.
So what does this mean for us? It means that we can open up a whole new can of worms by moving into an area that is seeing very little love (control) and a colour that is notorious for it (black). That’s right, I’m talking about Mono-Black Control, with a focus on discard. But why discard you ask?
Because, just because. Seriously though, if over a third of the decks you are going to be facing are combo decks, you can easily pick them apart by removing their combo pieces from their hand. And aggro? Back up your discard with removal, another thing that Mono-Black Control is famous for, and you can take control of the board as well as their hand. Not to mention that the deck gets monumentally better whenever your opponent mulligan’s. If their deck punishes them before the game even begins, then we are going to be in an even better position to win.
Now, that is not to say that the deck doesn’t have it’s weaknesses because it does. It suffers in the fact that despite all of it’s abilities to disrupt the field and the hand, it can’t stop a topdeck. It also stalls out late game with a lot of dead cards in hand. But compared to the benefits, I am willing to overlook that little matter.
First off, the deck list as it currently stands:
The one card that it is missing is Thoughtseize, which can easily be put in place of Duress. But only if you have that kind of money. Now the one thing you might immediately note is that I am running a splash of Red in there. This is because Black has no inherent artifact hate, or nothing that is cheap enough to warrant being included in the build. But red does in the form of Smash to Smithereens, which in my past experience playing burn in Modern is a fantastic sideboard card. And having immediate access to Red does give some interesting options if we ever wanted to include a devastating card like Blightning, or Rakdos Charm. But I am focusing more on the Mono-Black version.
I want to talk about each card individually, but it will probably be easier if I break it down into each suite of cards, with the obvious Discard being the first.
First up is Inquisition of Kozilek. This card is a very powerful discard spell as the name of the game in any deck that isn’t control based is speed. Which means that cards are going to be cheap. Tarmagoyf only costs two, Kitchen Finks costs three, Pyromancer’s Ascension costs two, and so forth. So Inquisition of Kozilek has the ability to hit a lot of the cards out there that can cause problems.
After that I will address Duress. It’s not Thoughtseize, that’s for certain, but it can come in handy where Inquisition can’t. It can hit the higher costing cards, such as Splinter Twin, Birthing Pod, and Scapeshift. But because it can’t hit creatures it loses playability. That is the reason why I am only running a single copy in the mainboard, with more in the sideboard for when you do come up against decks like Twin, Pod, and Scapeshift. It can be an easy swap out of Inquisition for Duress and you don’t set off your card balance.
Next is Raven’s Crime, which I am honestly thinking of upping to three copies. The card is incredibly good in the late game when you’ve setup your win condition or are waiting to do so and you need to empty out your opponents hand. It turns every late game land draw into another discard spell, and it works in conjunction with Smallpox when you will have to discard something. I can’t tell you how many times I have been happy to have a Raven’s Crime in my graveyard and how many times I’ve been sorry to not have one.
Last, but not least in our spell slots for discard is Wrench Mind. This is about as close to Hymn to Tourach as we will ever see again. Sure, it doesn’t discard at random, but it is a straight up two cards for two mana. And when you can play this on turn two after your opponent has already played a land or two, plus an early drop from their hand, it seriously wrecks your opponents game. The earlier you can see this card the better your chances of victory will be.
The next section I am going to address is the removal suite, but first I need to talk about a card that fits between the two, and that is Smallpox. I don’t quite know how I feel about the card itself. It is very punishing to both players, but usually more so to our opponent. I mean I love the card. It has performed amazingly well in the early game against decks like Storm and Pod. As an aside, it is a fantastic turn two play against Pod as it removes two sources of mana available to them, and slows them down significantly. Storm is another matter, in that they need three mana to “go off”, unless they get a two mana “god hand”, and using Smallpox to slow them down to a crawl can hurt them more than it will us. Like I said earlier, we can discard a Raven’s Crime to it or any excess discard spells that aren’t doing us any good. And we are running a minimum of creatures so there is very little chance that we will be hurting our board state. Again, I love this card, but when I read it in a bubble it makes me cringe.
Now onto the removal suite.
Victim of Night is the first one up, and it can kill just about anything. In the current metagame there aren’t many Zombie creatures, nor are there Vampires or Werewolves. So there isn’t much that it can’t take care of, plain and simple, and because we aren’t worried about colour restrictions we can carry the two black in it’s mana cost with ease making it a superior choice to Doom Blade. There is only one other kind of creature that this can’t hit and that is one who has protection from Black, but we have a spell to deal with that.
Geth’s Verdict is the answer to “protection from black” and furthermore Hexproof. Now I’ve talked about Hexproof in a previous article and it is probably one of my favourite all-time decks to play. So I know how much of a pain in the butt it can be. Now, when I was regularly playing pauper and running Hexproof the worst thing in the world I could run into was Mono-Black Control because they had the one answer that could get around that restriction and that was Geth’s Verdict, because they were targeting me and not the creature. So unless your opponent is going to side in Leyline of Sanctity, you can be pretty sure that Geth’s Verdict will take care of what Victim of Night can’t. Oh, and it also hits your opponent for one life to boot. And yes you can kill your opponent with it, even if there are no creatures on the board, so it is never a dead card.
The last card in our removal suite replaced Doom Blade and has tested out fairly well so far. Sudden Death. It is more expensive, but it can do some things that a lot of removal cards can’t. It can take out creatures that are indestructible to start, as long as you can get their toughness down to four or less, which means that a few of the newly printed “gods” are even threatened by this card. And there is no fear about not being able to kill most creatures, because outside of Tarmogoyf and a pumped up Hexproof dude, there aren’t any creatures currently being run with more than four toughness. Four is the magical number in Modern because it can beat Lightning Bolt, and Sudden Death can go above that number. Now the last thing about the card, and by far it’s the most important aspect of it, is that it has an ability called Split Second.
This mechanic deserves it’s own little section. Split Second is a fantastic ability and a powerful one that isn’t utilized often enough in my opinion. First off I want to ask you a question. Have you ever been playing against a blue player and tried to kill their Delver of Secrets only to have them Counterspell or Mana Leak your spell? It sucks doesn’t it? Well because of the way Split Second works the spell can’t be countered. You see as long as the spell with Split Second is on the ‘stack’ no other spells or abilities, that are not mana abilities, can be played. Meaning no counterspell. And furthermore it can disrupt a combo like Deceiver Exarch and Splinter Twin. if by some chance they managed to land Twin you can kill the creature in response and they don’t have the opportunity to make their infinite army, nor can they cast a counterspell to prevent it from happening. The same goes with Pod and the infinite combo of damage and life gain through a sacrifice outlet. You can kill the outlet before the chain has a chance to go off and by doing so at least buy yourself some time. It can also affect Affinity, a deck I haven’t mentioned yet. Normally if you were to kill their powerhouse Arcbound Ravager they could sacrifice a bunch of artifacts to it to make it’s Modular ability huge and then when it died they could just redistribute them anywhere they wanted. Well, with Split Second they don’t have that option and Ravager just straight up dies.
After our removal suite we throw in a splash of utility with Sign in Blood. A good little pay two life draw two card spell. Or at least that is how it is read most of the time. And it is a good payoff. Late game it can let you dig for the answers you want or need and early game it can simply refill your hand after annihilating your opponents. Not to mention that because it reads “target player”, you can use it to finish off your opponent as well. And a lot of players out there will agree that there isn’t much out there that is more disgusting that being killed with a Sign in Blood.
Now a deck wouldn’t be complete if it didn’t have creatures. Well, that’s not entirely true as there are creatureless decks out there, but this isn’t one of them because if we ran only discard and removal we would easily lose any ground race. Now we aren’t running a lot of creatures, but the ones we are running have an immediate impact on the game.
Ravenous Rats is the first one that I’m going to address, and it is the weakest one by far. We are paying two mana for a 1/1 body that isn’t good for a whole lot other than chump blocking. But it can chump block like a champ! What’s special about him is that when he enters the battlefield he makes your opponent discard a card. It’s not random, but it’s still something. So early or late game this creature can disrupt the hand, clog up the board for a turn, or maybe even eek out a few points of damage on the attack.
After the rat we have Liliana’s Specter, a flying rat one could say? She does the same thing as the Ravenous Rats, in that she forces your opponent to discard a card, and sadly she also shares the same toughness quality seeing as she is only a 2/1 body. But she does have flying which can help gum up the air if you need a easy blocker there, or she can fly over anything on the ground that is waiting to eat your face.
The last creature to enter into the fray is a personal favourite of mine, and he is none other than the Chittering Rats. Yes, another rat. But he is a good rat. Well, for a common he is a good rat. Correction, he is a great rat! I mean, he is below the power curve of being only a 2/2 bear for three mana but when he enters the battlefield you Time Walk. Not familiar with that card? It’s an old card that was printed only up to Unlimited and it is banned in everything, except in Vintage in which it is restricted. Because it gives you an extra turn for two mana. That’s powerful, no matter what stage of the game you are in. An extra turn? Hell yes, I would love to take two turns in a row! It can be a huge tempo shift! But now you are asking how does the rat give us an extra turn? Well when he enters the battlefield he forces your opponent to take a card from their hand and place it on top of their library. Effectively making them ‘re-play’ their previous turn. This is even more effective when you have already chewed apart their hand with your suite of discard spells. And it’s even more effective when you work it into our “win con”.
Shrieking Affliction. A single black mana for an enchantment that will punish our opponent for playing their hand out too fast, as Aggro decks are known to do, and reward us for emptying out our opponents hand. The best part about this enchantment is that if you can empty their hand entirely, and this is if they do not have card draw in their suite of spells (but nobody runs Divination), then there is an almost guaranteed six damage over two turns, in which they either allow the clock to continue or they buff up their hand in hopes that they can outlast the effects of the Shrieking Affliction. This of course only works if you don’t draw up into one of our many spells that force our opponent to discard.
Now, you might be asking yourself why we aren’t using something like Liliana’s Caress (a strictly better Megrim). Well because with the way that our deck is designed we don’t want our opponent to have any cards in hand, and in order for Caress to affect our opponent they have to have those threats. Once we get our opponent into “topdeck” mode, he is simply going to play out whatever cards he draws into without fear of taking the two damage from the Caress. Making it a dead card on board once we are done destroying their hand.
And the last card to make it into the deck is one that I’ve been experimenting with as a real late game kill card, and that is Haunting Echoes. See, the deck will regularly go into the late stages of the game with ten and twelve turn games, as we either wait or dig for our win con or beat our down slowly with creatures. What this means however is that we will usually be filling their graveyard with a ton of cards, either from hand removal or board removal. Now imagine if their graveyard is full and you are now both playing the top deck game and you pull Haunting Echoes. You cast it targetting their graveyard and suddenly their deck has shrivelled down to almost nothing but basic lands. I’m pretty confident that at that point your opponent won’t have enough answers in their library to deal with you.
Sounds fair enough, doesn’t it? Well, I’m not done yet. I’m going to do something that I don’t normally do and go into the sideboard.
If you go back and look at the list there is red splashed in there, and I think I said something about Black not having any inherent artifact hate. A simple splash of Smash to Smithereens works to alleviate that problem, and this card is good against several decks. Obviously you want to side it in against Affinity and Pod, but you can also use it in the fringe match ups where Aether Vial shows up, as in Merfolk and G/W Hatebears. The other card that isn’t in the main board is Leyline of the Void. An enchantment that gets around Abrupt Decay and can destroy several different decks at the same time. Storm is one of the key matchups as both Pyromancer’s Ascension and Past in Flames require the graveyard in order to function. That’s not to say that a storm deck can’t “go off” without them, but you would be smart to mulligan into seeing this in your opening hand. Another big deck that it can come in against is Pod. It shuts down the infinite damage and infinite life combos, and forces them to move into a mid-range beatdown deck. Not the best of solutions, but it makes the matchup very playable. The last one I’ve added in is a personal preference in Echoing Decay, which is fantastic against tokens, but it really should be traded in favour of Infest or another “sweeper” type effect.
And so there you have it. A deck that is reasonably affordable compared to other decks that are in the metagame right now (I mean, come on… Pod is almost $2100?) and is suited to fight a lot of the popular decks.
Until next time,
~ Gerald Knight
Extra Booty: Now this is purely speculation, but there is another reason why I am investing in building this deck and that is because of a card that is being released in M15 which I think can put this deck over the top. Waste Not. The community designed card. For those of you who haven’t heard about it or don’t remember what it does, it is a two cost black enchantment that has three different effects when an opponent discards a card, depending upon the card type. A creature card will net you a 2/2 zombie token, a land card will net you two black mana, and if they discard anything else you get to draw a card. All said and told I don’t know how this card wouldn’t be a beast in the deck and I am planning on pre-ordering at least four of them.
Panic sets in as you are told by the pretty lady at the airport terminal that your luggage has been lost. It’s unthinkable. How could your luggage be lost? You need that for this weekend. Your clothes were in there. Your hygiene products were in there. Your Magic cards were in there!
How are you to compete at the Grand Prix without them? You plead with the lady to find out if she can do anything to help you, but all she can do is shake her head and say that they should be able to recover it tomorrow. But tomorrow will be too late. You need to register your deck in a couple of hours. How can you play without a deck? You hang your head dejectedly and pace for a few minutes as you try and think of something. Some sort of solution. Hey! Maybe someone at the venue will lend you a deck? That’s feasible, right? Might as well give it a shot.
So you call a cab as you take a look in your wallet. Not much there, but enough for entry into the Grand Prix, the cab ride, maybe a meal or two. Might even be able to pick up a chase rare that you had been intending to find.
The cab pulls up to the venue and you hand him the toll. That’s some of your hope gone. You start walking around among the masses of people, noticing a few Pro players signing autographs and a few MTG Personalities talking with other players. Vendors have setup and are already hawking their wares. Everything from cardboard crack, to sleeves and playmats, dice, and tokens. You open your wallet again to see what measly amount you have. But of all the things you see, your friends are not amongst them. You pull out your cell phone and try calling them. Long distance charges be damned. One of them picks up, but it’s so loud where you are that you can’t hear anything.
An announcement comes over the speaker that Deck Registration for the Grand Prix will be ending in an hour. Last chance to get in. That panic starts creeping from your heart to your stomach. You flew all this way to compete. This was your vacation. You spent months planning this, tuning your deck, and all for what? To not be able to enter? You couldn’t let that happen.
You make your way over to the vendors and start looking in their showcases. Everything is through the roof! You check your wallet again. Definitely not enough for a single fetch land, let alone a playset of Past in Flames, or Birthing Pod, or even a Scapeshift. How could you imagine to compete with anything in the field without the heavy hitters? But you are desperate and keep looking, until your eye falls on something shiny. A vendor has a FNM Promo of Armadillo Cloak in their showcase, four dollars. Not that it would help you much, because the card isn’t Modern, which is what you came here to play.
But wait? Wasn’t there a card that was recently printed that acted like Armadillo Cloak? Sure was! It’s Unflinching Courage! Your mind starts racing as cards run through your head. Rancor, Ethereal Armor, Daybreaker Coronet, Kor Spiritdancer. Reid Duke’s deck from last year! But we can’t afford Daybreaker’s, Kor Spiritdancer’s, nor the Leylines of Sanctity that have to be in the sideboard to even make the deck possible, let alone the fetch lands that make white available to play the important pieces. So how could you even manage to make the deck? Pauper. That’s how. You ask the vendor if he has bulk commons and begin rifling through long boxxes.
The announcement comes over the P.A. system again letting you know there’s only fourty-five minutes left to register. Panic has begun to subside as you’ve figured out your plan. Now to just get the pieces in place. You got this!
So, I never intended to write a series about transitioning diffrerent format’s to and from Pauper, but it looks like that’s what I’ve done. I started writing an article about Standard and how new players can get into the scene with a collection of commons, and then I wrote about Legacy. Well, this time I am here to write about Modern showcasing one of My favourite decks. Hexproof. AKA Bogles.
The deck is pretty straight forward as far as decks go. You play down one of your hexproof creatures, play a bunch of auras on it, and smash your opponents face in. Sounds easy enough, right?
Well if you don’t have the money to run Reid Duke’s version, which includes the aforementioned Kor Spiritdancer (which will usually run you about $10 a piece) or the Daybreak Coronet’s (again another expensive card at a high of $25), not to mention the fetch lands, then you can turn to Pauper.
The first thing we need to do is establish our Mana Base. Now we can’t afford fetch lands, obviously, so how do we make our lands tap for white? Because we can’t run this without Ethereal Armor or Arma… sorry, Unflinching Courage. Well, this deck is based off of enchantments, so why not start looking there?
The best aura’s that will fix mana for a deck like this, at the common level, are Abundant Growth which will let us tap for any colour and it also cantrips. The other one is Utopia Sprawl, which will ramp you up a colour on top of the mana generated by the land itself. And if you feel adventurous enough you could spring for the recently printed Selesnya Guildgate. They are almost like Temple Gardens or Sunpetal Groves, but not nearly as expensive. And since we aren’t running the Coronets, these auras can fill that slot. Not to mention they both synergize well with the Ethereal Armor.
Now to replace the Kor Spiritdancer we have to do a little bit of looking. I mean nothing can really compare to the card drawing that this creature is capable of, nor the Ancestral Mask like ability built into it. But what if I told you there was another option? One that in some cases might even be a little bit better? What could be better than having a playset of Gladecover Scout and Slippery Bogle’s to annoy your opponent? What could be better than eight hexproof creatures? Why twelve of course! That’s right, Silhana Ledgewalker can easily replace the Kor Spiritdancer. And sure, it isn’t as pumpable and it doesn’t have the card draw bonus, but it’s another creature your opponent can’t touch. Plus it has the upside of conditional unblockability. If our opponents can’t stop it in the air then they are really in trouble. Even if they can they still have to deal with Trample and First Strike!
Sounds pretty simple eh? Let’s go one step further. If you have a little bit of cash, but not a lot, you can find a replacement for the Leyline of Sanctity (A $15 dollar rare!). Ever heard of the True Believer? And no, I’m not talking about the kid Henry from Once Upon a Time (Good series by the way!). True Believer (a $1 rare if you are lucky, $2 if you are not) was a creature printed in Onslaught that gave you Shroud. But it was printed again in Tenth Edition which makes it Modern legal. Now, yes it will die to Doom Blade and Lightning Bolt. But it’s a step in the right direction. Especially if you want to modify your deck a bit and run Alpha Authority, but I’m getting off topic.
Let’s see what this might look like, shall we?
Enchantments (28)
Creatures (12)
Lands (20)
And so there you have it. Without getting into Sideboard cards you have a functional (if a little underpowered) Modern deck made out of mostly commons. And if nothing else? It’s a great place to start!
~ Gerald Knight
Extra Booty: Now there are a few things I want to address in Extra Booty today. The first is if you are going to upgrade the deck, do so with the lands first. An easy way to modify the deck when you can acquire lands (such as Sunpetal Grove and Temple Garden) is to remove one mana fixing aura per land added. From here you can add in other auras that you think might work well. If you can get the Spiritdancers then you can let the Ledgewalkers go and replace them with this bomb of a creature. And if you can find the Coronet’s then I tip my hat to you and you can replace them with whatever makes you feel most comfortable.
Now, the xtra special thing I want to talk about, which I don’t normally do, is a sideboard (or mainboard) “tech” card that is good against pretty much every deck out there.
Suppression Field. It has been seen as a singleton, or in pairs, in a couple of sideboards. But I think that it deserves some special attention from a sideboard standpoint, if not from a mainboard. The card makes activated abilities cost more to play. So this means that your opponents Birthing Pod is going to cost more. Your opponents Arcbound Ravager won’t be the sacrifice engine it’s supposed to be. And Ad Nauseum will generally fold as Lightning Storm counts as an activated ability, even while it is on the stack. Now you’re going to argue back that there are plenty of decks that it doesn’t hit. Such as Storm or Zoo. And you are right on that, except that if you read everybody’s favourite fetch lands properly, they are not mana activated abilities. I’ll let you think on that until next time.
You turn the key and lock up the shop for the day, ready to go home and get some grub before heading out to Friday Night Magic, ready to test out that shiny new Heroic deck you’ve been tweaking when your phone goes off. It’s your little cousin, and he is going on about how Grandma got him the Magic Holiday Gift box for Christmas, bragging about how he pulled a Fabled Hero, Prognostic Sphinx and Polis Crusher. He sounds so excited about his loot, when he asks you if he can come with you tonight. You think about it for a second and say why not?
You go and pick him up and bring him home, looking at his collection realizing quickly that what little has isn’t going to stand a chance at your local game shop. You walk over to your overloaded shelf of magic cards and pull a deck off of it. It’s one of those Pauper decks that you read about on Three Kings Loot’s website the other week. It’s the mono black one, which only seemed appropriate after you saw your cousins reaction to the dreaded Gray Merchant of Asphodel. Like a kid in a candy store.
So you both scarf down some pizza while playing a few matches before heading over to the shop, only to realize once you step through the door that it wasn’t Standard tonight, but Vintage. Your heart skips a beat thinking about how wrecked your cousins deck is going to get against that kind of competition. A Standard Pauper deck isn’t built to take on those types of decks. So you ask him how much money he has on him, thinking that maybe you could get a few cheap cards to give him a chance. He looks at you and says that all he has is the twenty dollars that aunt Gladys gave him. Twenty dollars isn’t going to go far in Vintage, not by a long shot. But then you have a brainstorm and hop on your smartphone and look up Classic Pauper decks. They are cheap enough and might just have a chance.
Given your cousins fascination with the Gray Merchant you settle on a Mono-Black deck and walk up to the counter giving the list to the owner, before realizing that Classic Pauper is an online format only and that there are cards printed from sets not released online that could be added. You make a few changes to the list and smile as your cousin begins gathering all the cards together to take on his first challenger.
The store owner calls out the pairings and you sit down beside your cousin and watch as he drops down a first turn swamp and Duress to draw out his opponents Force of Will, followed by a second swamp and a Hymn to Tourach. His opponent groans and your little cousins face lights up. Maybe, just maybe, he can pull this off.
The above is a Mono-Black Control deck in Classic Pauper, a format that is almost exclusively online. There are a few stores that hold tournaments and the format is growing in paper popularity, but it isn’t mainstream yet. Inside you can see a healthy mix of discard and removal and card draw, a board wipe to keep things under control, and your end game Gray Merchant and Corrupts. A deck like this costs under $20 at 3KL, and is a great way for a new player to have a deck that has a chance of being competitive if they ever come across some really old school players, and they don’t have to give up their college loan to afford it.
As a quick rehash, if you are not familiar with the Pauper format or did not read my previous article on it, Pauper is a format made up entirely of commons. All the standard rules to Magic apply with a 60 card (minimum) deck and a 15 card (maximum) sideboard. The major thing to note about Classic Pauper is that it allows for any card that has ever been printed at the common level to be used. Yes, even a card like Rancor. Speaking of…
So, like I did with my last Pauper article I am going to throw an extra bone at you, an alternative if you aren’t a control player is Green-White Hexproof. One of my personal favourites. The deck ‘runs on rails’ as it were, and is relatively easy for young or new players to pilot. It’s very simple in that you try and get your Hexproof creature down and then load it up with aura cards and beat your opponents face. “Cheap” and effective auras include Armadillo Cloak ($1.99 each), Rancor ($3.75), Ethereal Armor ($0.25 each), or it’s older and more effective brother Ancestral Mask ($0.49). Combined with aura’s like Abundant Growth ($0.25) that enchant your lands to mana fix, you can quickly make quite the untouchable beat stick of a creature.
So there you have two cheap and effective Pauper decks you can build for new players to help them get into Vintage.
Who says that Magic has to be expensive?
~ Gerald
Off to battle I went with my red white deck of unsurmountable speed. I know, that’s a big word for me, but I figured why not try and make my deck sound better than I anticipated it would be. To be honest, I didn’t really like my cardpool, not when I compare it to what I had at the pre-release. But that is my first problem. I’m comparing it to my previous sealed pool and I can’t do that. I have to look at this with fresh eyes, and so with a bit more analysis I went into my first match.
I had ten cards I could cast on turn one, six cards on turn two, one on turn three, and so forth. Sounds like I have a good curve. I have nine humans to abuse with the pegasus, I have five heroic creatures with XX spells (bestow and otherwise) to be able to trigger them, including some pretty cool combat tricks (coordinated assault is cute). And I have a removal suite that can range from the little guys to gods. Maybe I didn’t have such a bad pool afterall. But there was only one way to find out. And that was to take it into the field.
So my first opponent for the week was Robert who was playing a Blue/Green deck. His seeded pack was Green and so he had the Nessian Wilds Ravager in his pool and he was boasting a bunch of fliers. And he also had the Legendary Kraken. I had a feeling that my little army was in for a big fight.
Match one started with me on the play, dropping a Priest of Iroas, into his island. Then I swung for one damage before dropping a Priest of Iroas. He presented a second land, played an Kiora’s Follower – Game Day Promo passed. I swung in with both my guys and he blocked the priest. Unfortunately for him they planned a Coordinated Assault and the follower fell. He played a third land and passed, to which I responded by hitting him again uncontested and then played out an Akroan Phalanx. His next turn saw another land and another pass. I swung in again and he flashed a Horizon Chimera in, which would explain his lack of tapping, but unfortunately for him I held my mana open and had a Lightning Strike to answer that threat. He sucked up the damage before I played a Cavalry Pegasus and he scooped. Game one down.
Game two started with him having to mulligan down to six on the play and starting with an island. I played a plains and put down a Nyxborn Shieldmate, by far one of my favourite commons of this set. He played down a forest and like deja-vu he played down Kiora’s Follower again. My second turn met with a mountain and a bestowed Nyxborn Rollicker to make my shieldmate ⅔ and swung past the Follower unblocked. His next turn played down an Ordeal of Thassa on his Follower and swung in for three. This is when I almost started to panic, until I drew into a Lightning Strike. I swung simply and did my damage, leaving all my mana open. He took the bait and declared attackers, which forced the Lightning Strike out of my hand to a combat trick I wasn’t expecting. He played Retraction Helix on his own creature and responded by bouncing it back to his hand, ending combat and playing it back out. But at least the bounty was gone. By my next turn I was ready to swing again but this time he blocked. Then I played another Akroan Phalanx to end my turn. He played a land and passed. I drew, played a land, attacked and the Phalanx met a Voyages End, only to be played out again. This same thing happened the next turn, except after I played the Phalanx again I played a Pegasus that was met with an Annul, all the while whittling down his life. Unfortunately this was where things started to look bad. He finally had enough mana out to throw down his Nessian Wilds Ravager. I knew I couldn’t let him destroy one of my guys so I let him have the counters and stared down a 12/12 hydra. Not the most pleasant thing in the world to say the least. I went to my turn, and played an Akroan Crusader and passed, knowing that nothing I would be able to do would get past the Nessian. I needed him to attack with it and I could crack back to hopefully finish him off. Which is how it played out with a little bit of a twist. After he attacked with the hydra and dropped my life total down he played a Thassa’s Emmisary, nearly foiling my plans until I drew into one of my two Revoke Existence’s. I cleared the way and swung in to bring him to within an inch of his life before playing down a Favored Hoplite just to make sure that I had more than one chump blocker back in case he had any tricks. He drew up but couldn’t find an answer and said “good game”.
First match of the league in the books and I felt good. Not entirely confident in the deck just yet. Always found I had more mana than I needed and I am thinking about dropping one mana for another combat trick. But I can still be happy being off to a good start.
I also took the time to look over Roberts pool and noticed that he went the wrong way. Even with all of his blue control he had more in black with Hero’s Downfall and Asphyxiate, along with Pain Seer, and a Reaper of the Wilds. I convinced him to maybe try out Green/Black for next week, might be a better challenge.
~ Gerald Knight
Valentine’s Day has come and gone, and gifts of love have been exchanged.
But not all creatures are loved equally, and if there is any card that has been so utterly left unloved from the Theros set I would have to say that it is Spellheart Chimera. If you ever see your opponent play this card in draft you are pretty much guaranteed to win. If you see it in constructed you will probably be asking yourself what your opponent was thinking? Let’s take a closer look at it, shall we?
It has Flying and Trample and a static three toughness. It’s power fluctuates depending upon the number of sorcery and instant cards in your graveyard. It’s also aggressively costed at only three mana, a colourless, a red, and a blue.
Now in Limited this card is near unplayable because creatures are the name of the game, not spells. Your typical draft, or sealed, deck is going to be made up of at most five to seven non-creature spells. Which means that this flying roadblock’s Trample ability will be almost irrelevant as it’s power will be too low for it to matter.
In constructed however I may have found a home for it, in Block. If you read my “That’s Bull!” article then you already know what Block Constructed is, if not here is a brief description. It’s like any constructed format with a minimum of sixty cards in the deck, but you are limited to only a Block of cards. In this case we are using Theros Block, for obvious reasons.
Now the Block Constructed deck I started out with was based on the Scry mechanic. Every card in the deck had some interaction with Scry or had the Scry ability. This was the core of the design concept for the deck. Being able to rig your draws to be able to keep on curve or be able to ‘dig’ for the answers you needed to stop your opponent. If you look up all the cards that have Scry in red and blue from Theros alone you total seventeen, Born of the Gods adds an additional 8, bringing our grand total to twenty five different cards that have or use Scry.
Before the Chimera came to mind I was playtesting the deck online with the Flamespeaker Adept as it’s champion creature, and for good reason. With combat tricks like Titan’s Strength to make boost it’s power from the simple two to nine, and Aqueous Form to make him unblockable, he can be quite the little beatstick. On top of that if you can get the Prognostic Sphinx joining him in the air it makes for a near game ending combo.
That combo was what fueled this concept in the first place after I went undefeated in a Theros Draft after getting the Sphinx with two Adept’s a a couple of Magma Jet’s and Voyage’s End. It made me wonder if it was viable as a deck concept and that is when I decided to try it in Block Constructed. Let’s take a look at the deck
It’s initial testing was against blue green Prophet of Kruphix deck and was favorable as the creatures were weak enough to succumb to the first striking adept and it didn’t have enough to stop it in the air with the Sphinx. Next up was blue white heroic, which was too easily defeated with Voyage’s End and Sea God’s Revenge. The biggest test was going to be against naya monsters, which featured ramping with Voyaging Satyr and Sylvan Caryatid into Polakranos, World Eater and Stormbreath Dragon and Elspeth, Sun’s Champion and you get the point. Naya Monsters, at the time of this writing, makes up seventy-five percent of the online meta, which shows just how dominant it is.
Now the secret to beating naya monsters was to be patient and wait for them to cast their big creatures that they were relying on. They usually want to curve out and get their big threats in play as they expend all their mana, so cards like Dissolve and Stymied Hopes are great ways to combat them. Voyage’s End will buy you a turn, and the new Sudden Storm will buy you two turns, all while using Scry to set up your next big road block, or curve out, or threat.
And so after doing some testing with the original list I realized that Prescient Chimera wasn’t very beneficial and was way too expensive, but the deck couldn’t afford to lose anymore creatures. The deck was creature light already. And that’s where the Spellheart Chimera comes into play. The deck is using a lot of “counter/burn” to keep our opponent’s board in check, so why not have a cheap creature that can take advantage of all that. Spellheart Chimera is cheaper than the other chimera and grows larger as we cast more spells. What it doesn’t do is scry every time we play a spell, but that’s not bad because a lot of our spells already do that.
So let’s take a look at the new list.
It’s different, that is for sure and I can almost guarantee that nobody at your FNM is going to expect it and might even think you are crazy when you play out the Spellheart Chimera, but when you beat them with it you will make some people rethink what I though. Because, I never thought that the Spellheart Chimera would find a home, I thought it was absolute garbage. But, this redheaded bastard stepchild of the Theros set just might have found some love.
~ Gerald Knight
Extra Booty: Before you jump on me for that red-headed bastard comment, I was born a bastard, proud of it too, and I fathered a red-headed child who is now a step-child to my fiance. Don’t say that writers never talk about themselves!
So a few months ago a new brick and mortar gaming shop opened up in the heart of my beloved city’s downtown core. I was there the day it opened and couldn’t thank the owner enough for doing something that was so risky. See, shops in our city’s downtown region don’t usually last long unless they serve coffee or cigarettes, so this guy was taking a huge risk. But it was a necessary one because if you wanted to game and you lived downtown there was nowhere to do so without hopping on a bus for a 20 minute ride or so.
So you can imagine my excitement when this shop opened up, and how excited I was to hear that they were going to be starting a Born of the Gods league if they got enough DCI numbers before the release. Well they managed to accomplish this and I’m now entered into this league.
But what is a league you ask? Well this league is a WotC sanctioned series of events. You start with a seeded sealed pool. Meaning that they are using Born of the Gods pre-release overstock packs to start our limited decks off. So, I chose white again seeing as I had such great luck with it last time, but I will get to that in a bit. From this sealed pool of three Born of the Gods boosters and three Theros boosters you make your deck of 40 cards (minimum) and then you play at least 3 matches against others in the league within a weeks time.
After the first week you get to choose either a Born of the Gods booster or Theros booster and add those cards to your pool, and keep going. This goes on for 5-6 weeks and then prizes are handed out depending upon how you did. The store keeps the decks in their shop to ensure that nobody cheats by modifying the contents in between matches, but after the first week you can opt out of the league and take home everything you pulled. Though I don’t know why someone would do this.
So, like I said I picked the white seeded sealed pack and went to town opening up my product to see what I could manage to pull off.
First I will get to my rares:
Plea for Guidance – This was in my seeded pack, and I couldn’t have groaned any louder upon pulling it. I am not a fan of this card, though it might not be that bad if I could pull something else to compliment it, such as a god, but overall at sorcery speed I can’t be happy with this.
Mindreaver – I didn’t really look twice at this card. It’s not that bad as a mill engine with it’s heroic ability, but it’s second ability holds almost no relevance to the limited format because you don’t generally see multiples of cards in within your top 23.
Chained to the Rocks – This card I was happy to see. One of the best white removal spells in the format. Though it is not as good with Born of the Gods bringing in Revoke Existence, but it is straight up cheap removal.
Xenagos, the Reveler – The planeswalker, not the god. I was quick happy to see him show up in my pool. If things went my way I could easily pull off an awesome deck if I got cards to compliment him. Either way I had found my money card.
Arbor Colossus – Another great card, cheap beats with a monstrous ability that can take out every pre-release promo except green. Awesome!
Felhide Spiritbinder – This guy is a beast for abusing enter the battlefield abilities. Not to mention a ¾ body for four mana isn’t bad at all.
Overall I wasn’t too pleased with my pulls, I mean I certainly wasn’t pulling off the Blue/White heroic deck like I did at the pre-release, but from the rares I pulled it looked like I might have been able to pull off a monster Red/Green deck. So let’s take a look at what I did pull that didn’t make it into the deck.
White
Red
Blue
Green
Black
Multi-coloured/Land
And then I had the deck. I resorted to playing Red/White with the use of Chain to the Rocks and the Felhide as the champion rares. The deck looked to be as fast as I could possibly make it with a quarter of the deck being only a single converted mana cost, the next stage up had another six, after that there was one three CMC card with only a handful beyond.
Creatures (17)
Spells (6)
Land (17)
Come back for Day 2 and beyond as I take the deck through the league. If you have any suggestions or see something I missed please leave a comment and I will look into it. Thanks.
~ Gerald Knight
So by now everybody has gotten their hooks or teeth into the Born of the Gods expansion and have probably started to brew up a hundred new decks or just stuck to minor modifications to current decks in the format. Well, I’m not exception. But I’m not going to look at Standard today, I want to look at Theros Block Constructed.
For those who don’t know what Block Constructed is, it is where you create a deck based off of cards from only a block. Sounds pretty simple doesn’t it? If you haven’t gotten it yet I will give you an example. The previous block involved Return to Ravnica, Gatecrash, and Dragon’s Maze, and if you constructed a deck out of only those cards then you would have a Block Constructed deck. So that means, if we move to the present block, that we are going to only use Theros and Born of the Gods for this exercise.
If you are asking why we would do something like this, and potentially ‘gimp’ ourselves in design space, you need to read my previous article about Pauper and how restricting your card selection forces you to look at things differently, challenges you more, and makes you see cards that you wouldn’t have normally looked at. Not to mention an exercise like this can prepare you for when the eventual standard format rotates.
I am going to use a focus card for this article, and one that caused a little bit of a stir when it wa previewed, Ragemonger.
I don’t know how many creatures or cards in the past have been able to reduce coloured cost of creature spells being cast, but there aren’t that many. Colourless cards have been printed throughout the ages starting from the days of Urza’s Incubator all the way through the Scourge with the Warchiefs, and beyond. But coloured cost is something special. It makes playing creatures much easier, most of them turning into colourless casing only, leaving you free to keep up whatever mana you need for your combat tricks and removal in your hand.
So, how can we abuse this? Let’s take a look at some of the more prominent Minotaurs that showed their heads in the last two sets.
Fanatic of Mogis, a devotion based Flametongue Kavu that hits your opponent’s life total instead of a creature. While sometimes that creature removal is preferred, it can’t be denied how much damage he can cause, especially if you remove the coloured mana costs. Can you imagine being able to spend three generic mana to get what he can do?
Felhide Spiritbinder, a creature with the new mechanic Inspired. When he becomes untapped, presumably during your untap step after having attacked with him the turn before, you can pay two mana to make a token copy of a creature you control and give it haste until the end of your turn. When you combine this with other minotaurs that have Enter the Battlefield abilities, such as the above mentioned Fanatic of Mogis, it can quickly get out of hand.
Kragma Warcaller is one of the biggest creatures that can be affected by Ragemonger, reducing his casting cost from five converted mana cost down to three. Would you like to play a turn four Warcaller for only three mana? Can you imagine how much damage that would punch your opponent for? Imagine if you copied it with Spellbinder?! Such potential.
Oracle of Bones, a new creature from Born of the Gods using the Tribute mechanic.which will either pump him up to a decent 5/3 or keep him at 3/1 and grant you a “free” instant or sorcery from your hand. (Side note: Going standard this can make split cards from Dragon’s Maze with fuse free, see Toil // Trouble)
And lastly the new Minotaur Lord, Rageblood Shaman. The last key piece to making a deck like this work is certainly a guy who will pump up your little cow army up and even give them the ability to trample over your opponent.
Now if we include a playset of each of these we have twenty-four of our sixty cards already spoken for. So what Black and/or Red (leaning more towards the Red) can we arm ourselves with?
Well, if we go expensive we can grab Hero’s Downfall for spot removal, Fall of the Hammer and Lightning Strike are cheaper ways to remove more roadblocks, Magma Jet to deal some damage and to dig for the key pieces. A playset of each of these and we have forty cards with which to bullrush our opponent. Trim that deck down a bit and we might be able to find something like this:
What do you think? It’s not Slivers, and it’s not Humans, it’s a tribal all of it’s own, and it ain’t no bull!
~ Gerald Knight
Extra Booty: Some things to consider if you want to take this into Standard, Boros Reckoner works amazingly well with Fanatic of Mogis and becomes cheaper with the Ragemonger. Any Black and/or Red Fuse cards from Dragon’s Maze become viable with the Oracle of Bones. Doom Blade is a cheap alternative to Hero’s Downfall and is also less mana restrictive. If you want to go really big you can include Mogis, God of Slaughter himself to keep the pressure on your opponent.
So by now everybody has seen the new God of Dimir colours, Phenax. When he was previewed (without the rest of the set) it was met with mixed reactions, at least it was on Mythicspoiler.com. Half the people were saying how this card sucked and that they wished that Wizards would move away from the Mill deck, and the other half were screaming at how great the card would be, especially if you combined it with Consuming Aberration. Let that combo sink in for a minute. A powerful combo indeed and almost guaranteed to kill your opponent within 2-3 turns. But that is almost entirely a casual deck. Not that there’s anything wrong with casual, as it drives the market, but what surprised me was that nobody was talking about how this card could impact limited.
In limited this card is going to be a bomb, and in my opinion it is almost assuredly a snap first pick. When you figure that your opponent is running a 40 card deck then draw 7 on average for their first hand leaving them with 33 cards, and then by the time you get to play this baby down they have drawn 4-5 cards more leaving them with 28 cards or so. And with this guy as a milling engine, the games won’t last long. Much in the same way that Jace used to pump your deck in 2-3 turns when he hit the table and milled 10. Only this isn’t a planeswalker, can’t be destroyed or attacked directly. It’s an indestructable God. So there is my limited analysis for you.
But back to the group of people that really drive this game, the casual market. This guy is going to be a lot of fun and people are going to try and work him to death to make the fabled mill deck that seems to have become as niche a collection of cards as classic burn has. So I thought to myself, why not try and see what can be done by combining as many high toughness stall out wall-type creatures in the deck as possible and waiting out Phenax to drop.
Sadly we have no one drop defenders in Black or Blue, but we have several two drops that will fit in quite nice. The first is Doorkeeper, a 0/4 defender which has built in milling already, which works well if you don’t have Phenax out already, but is probably a little lackluster once Phenax is in play. Next we have Murmuring Phantasm, a very simple 0/5 defender for one and a blue. Nothing too complicated, but it will clog up the ground rather nicely. In keeping with going alphabetically we have Returned Phalanx next at a 3/3 with defender and a little combat trick that will let you attack if need be.
Moving into our three cost slot we can find Corpse Blockade, a nice 1 /4 creature that has a little combat trick of sacrificing a creature to gain deathtouch. An ability that should make opponents wary about attacking into you at all times if you have another creature to offer up to the god. After that comes a very nice Hover Barrier, a 0/6 defender with flying to boot. There isn’t much out there that isn’t monstrous that this fat wall won’t take care of. And after that comes an old goodie in Wall of Frost, a 0/7 defender that can cause your opponents creatures to stall out for a turn if they are blocked by him. And then we have the new member to the Fat Defender family from Born of the Gods with Black Oak of Odunas, a 0/5 defender for two and a black that can pump itself up with +1/+1 until the end of the turn at the cost of a Black mana and tapping another creature.
But we can’t rely on just these defenders in order to keep our opponent at bay, we need spells too. Defensive spells, such as Hero’s Downfall, Doom Blade, and Voyage’s End. Cards that can stall out our opponent until we can get our awesome defender mill engine online. Another card that came to mind is Far//Away, a multi-purpose card that acts as both an edict and a boomerang effect. Versatility goes a long way in deck construction.
So where would that leave us? Well, lets throw something together.
Creatures (24)
Spells (12)
Lands (24)
Overall, this is a very casual deck, and doesn’t appear to do very much, but when you get the engine online your opponent is bound to pull his (or her) hair out. It has the potential to be a very deceiving deck.
Until next time,
~ Gerald Knight
