Cards, ever since I saw that card on the Innistrad card image gallery, I was sold. I just knew there could be something good there, somewhere. But before I met her in her final incarnation, there was a long way before me. This is the story of how I met your Gutter.

The first thing to tickle my deckbuilding senses was a tweet from Neale Talbot – @wrongwaygoback – about the interaction between Gutter Grime and Blasphemous Act. While Gutter Grime had been on my mind since I saw it on the spoiler (I’m sorry cards, I know you are used to the term ‘card image gallery’, back when I grew up it was just a ‘spoiler’), I needed an idea to get the creative juices flowing. This was it.

While Neale’s idea was something he saw in a draft, I thought it would be something that cold be ported over to the realms of Casual play. Build up an army to discount Blasphemous Act, then pull the trigger and wait a turn to attack with you army next turn.

The search

I started by searching for cards that could help the theme. Creatures that could sacrificing themselves, or creatures that had a nice dying-trigger. Instant-speed sacrifice means instant-speed Ooze tokens, while dying-triggers mean they won’t be sacrificed in vein. The next step was ofcourse to find sacrifice outlets: ways to let my creatures die for fun and profit, and not be overly dependant on Blasphemous Act.

Having said that, I let myself fall in an all too familiar trap here: proliferate. This way, sacrificing an (artifact) creature to Throne of Geth (or Plaguemaw Beast!) would generate still one Ooze, but two Slime counters. So I narrowed my search of sacrificial lambs to lambs of the metal (i.e. artifact) variety, to work with both Throne of Geth and Plaguemaw Beast.

The newfangled artifact subtheme also worked it’s way into my mana-base, adding Tree of Tales and Great Furnace. Those additions were enough to merit the likes of Kuldotha Phoenix and Galvanic Blast with their metallic craftiness. I rounded the deck out with some general utility: cards like Everflowing Chalice for mana, Tumble Magnet for board-control and synergy with Blasphemous Act (tapping a guy each turn forces them to overcommit), and Tezzeret’s Gambit for more proliferating and more cards (Gambit is, without a doubt, my favorite card in New Phyrexia, losing only to Tezzeret himself in the entire Scars of Mirrodin-block).

In the end, I had too much cards to make a deck, but enough cards to start with multiple copies of the core (Grime, Act, sacrifice outlets) and some single- and doubletons to try out. When Jeroen came over one Saturday afternoon, I knew I wanted to test this deck and see what worked and what didn’t.

The test

For the testing, I used a method I have employed before: starting with a list of mostly singletons and making notes about each card I had drawn. Then I could change cards I had drawn at least once. I won’t bother here with the most minute details, but rather I’ll give an oversight of where I thought the deck was moving.

You see, every deck I make is a combination of two things. One, there’s the idea which prompted it and which got perfected into the basis for a deck. For example, while ‘Gutter Grime plus Blasphemous Act’ is just an idea, ‘Gutter Grime plus Blasphemous Act combined with subthemes of sacrifice, morbidity and proliferate’ is a good basis to start a deck from.

Second, every deck I build is one with a little bit of me infused in there. I don’t build decks I don’t like, and when I do build a deck, it tends to gravitate towards the things that I love: carddraw. Proliferate. Control. Slow games.

So for Gutter Act, I just started goldfishing (and later, testing against your uncle Jeroen) and letting the deck roam free and develop itself. It was like watching a raindrop roll down an windscreen; you have a general idea where the drop will hit the bottom of the screen, but you never know for sure.

In the mana department, I quickly ditched Sphere of the Suns and Wild Cantor. A two-color deck didn’t really need this kind of fixing, so I upped the number of Chalices, Sakura Tribe-Elders, and Viridian Emissaries. I still wasn’t sure about which of the latter was better – they both had their moments -, but I was pretty sure I was gonna need either one eventually. Sakura could sac himself any time, which is very nice when Grime is out. Emissary, meanwhile, needed something to die for, risking being unable to die, but I would feel a whole lot better feeding an Emissary to a Plaguemaw compared to Sakura.

For my other sacrificial targets, I chose Myr Retriever over Sylvan Hierophant (the so-called Gravedigger-chain was too tempting), Necropede over Myr Sire and Perilous Myr, and I also eventually ditched my Core Prowlers, Solemn Simulacrums and Kuldotha Phoenices.

The matter of Necropede versus Perilous Myr was a tough one. Making the decision went back and forth for a while, even after I had seemingly settled on one or the other.

The thing is…

There was something missing. I couldn’t place my finger on it, but I knew with Gutter Grime wasn’t gonna happen in this setting. The deck moved away from Blasphemous Act, instead focusing on reusable sacrifices (and cheaper one-time effects like Mycoloth, who also happened to work great with Plaguemaw Beast) and counters. You see, there was the counter subtheme which made its way into the deck. Counters, ofcourse, meant I had to invest more in proliferation. I upped the number of Thrones, Beasts and Gambits, while I chose Galvanic Blast over Volt Charge.

When I looked back at this development, I saw that red was only in the deck for Blasphemous Act and the aforementioned Galvanic Blast. It just didn’t hold up any more.

Going white

I was stuck with a mono-green deck that had been fighting off the red parasite that I stuck in there. The red was distracting to the deck: Gutter Act was never gonna be a real thing, and I was too in love with the idea to be able to see that. Another case of the durdles had gotten a hold on me, and I was for a long time unable to shake it off.

What was the deck trying to do? Use sacrificing to build up counters on Gutter Grime and other permanents. Good, what do I need for that? That’s right – counters! I realised white cards of late have had a +1/+1-granting theme. Just take a look at Elder Cathar, Unruly Mob, and Gavony Township. I don’t know about you, but when I realised the filthy things I could do to Gutter Grime using Gavony Township, I was sold. For one, I could make sure the Oozes stuck around after someone’d haphazardly destroyed Gutter Grime. Second, Gavony Township plus Mycoloth? Even without sacrificing a creature I could win games with just those two cards – and it wasn’t like the deck wasn’t stuffed with sacrificial lambs to begin with.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. Cards, next week I’ll tell you about how Gutter Grime and I tried something new together.

[part 1]

red

unwieldy artifact removal

hello there, deathtouch

good limited removal

ruined my prerelease

curses deck, viable?

finally, real Slith

me no likey

more good flashback

pandemonium of death

heads will roll

only one arm?

“you! over here!”

hellrider of oxid-ridge

lovely at prerelease

could be fun

minimum: three damage!

slow yet tempo

punishment after transformation

boring mythic, neeeext!

where is nearheath?

limited, then constructed

giant becomes wolves

take that, humans

remember that wheel?

form of wolverine

really tiny devil

is too cumbersome

*  *  *

green

I hate Briarhorn!

three’s too much

flyers and… artifacts…?

new sakura twist

another revolting concept

radioactive swamp bear

overgrown battlement deck

sadly, no evasion

when poop attacks

bad creeping renaissance

vanilla-est of vanilla

deathly wild growth

hurr… hello Clarice

double deadly recluse

granny has secrets

such great flavor

more to proliferate

unreliable mana source

bland, better bears

new constructed trendsetter

really cheap flashback

“who woke me?!”

“heard that too?”

hit or myth?

annoying limited trick

*  *  *

multicolored

nice cycle, this

new archetype arises

your consecrated replacement

missus cap’n tickles

my first target

this, or immerwolf?

not huntmaster’s pet

all’s been said

uncommon lords suck

*  *  *

artifacts

burning vengeance deck

sit boy, sit

jump those hoops

like stoneforge sucked

“Oh, it’s John!”

most discussed card

vulshok human morningstar

opened at prerelease…

will use eventually

really interesting concept

torch for werewolves

*  *  *

lands

budget players rejoice

will this work?

could be something

sure constructed hit

white

overcosted green card

just for limited

see above card

stop whining, woman

white curses, dafuq?

sucky mausoleum guard

another limited card?

maybe, constructed, maybe

horned turtle armors

swings combat around

conqueror’s pledge much?

best white card

gutter grime fodder

combo deck potential

“<C2> white flyer”

spirits: annoying bunch

The Grudge 2

everyone is doomed!

lolcats invade magic

spirit sneak attack

decent air force

combat trick #infinite

“this roast stinks”

white hate bear

dangerous: anthem creatures

burn the corpses!

*  *  *

blue

new distortion strike

another underwhelming mythic

exclude plus one

yay, bad aura’s

much better aura

milling, communism style

sadly, too situational

ooh, more curses!

kamigawa to innistrad

damn scary ghosts

love this card!

love this name!

more laboratory zombies

skaab are wormfangs

noes, books attack!

calm now, books

angry birds: innistrad

versatile, therefore powerful

Innistrad special: McSkewer

great movie cliche

tongue through cheek

blue burning vengeance?

a giving magpie

fixed mind control

lightning paraglider equipment

“but dentist, my-”

like I needed

*  *  *

black

four leg clawer

vorthos activation cost

cursing silver bullets

cursed with curses

creature-based kill spell

sshhh, it’s okay

gives you wings

stupid baseball references

gorgeous artwork, period

where is geralf?

undying without keyword

name deserves better

new LSV material

ambition is expensive

beneficial black two-drop

easily splashable temptation

best preview article

flavor homerun, again

awesome German name

“where are you?”

you human betrayer!

art beats card

mind your step

what’s that symbol?

wow, sick flyer

birthing pod potential

CAPSLOCK INDICATES AWESOMENESS

*  *  *

That’s it for today. Come back soon for the rest of the set!

I won’t bother you with the durdle versions of the deck. I’ve had a lot of games where I just attacked a bit and never could do something cool with Sundial. Sundial wasn’t even that scary threat I envisioned it to be a lot of the times. Casting it should be awe-inspiring and something I could take advantage of, but that was far from always the case.

The breakthrough (or so I thought) came when I weighed greens pros and cons against one another and concluded I should try the deck with UW. I moved my focus to a Blink-deck, looking to bend the laws of time and matter to its own advantages.

Green’s primary task in Intihuatana was the mana acceleration. Actual games showed me that I had way too much mana and too little action and defense. By cutting the mana, I thought, I could add more proactive cards to put a little pressure on my opponent.

Another aspect of green was, not surprisingly, in the fatty department. In this deck, though, the fatties weren’t really fat: Hunted Troll and Nacatl War-Pride. Hunted Troll had left the deck before I cut green altogether. As you might have thought, putting all your eggs in a six-mana-without-haste basket was a risky proposition. I ran three, which was too little, but running one more would raise the chance of ungodly opening hands. Here’s the Bant-colored list I settled on (note: not recommended). (Check my article here to see the motivation behind the cards.)

Intihuana v3.0
Lands (24)
3 Forbidden Orchard
4 Forest
6 Island
4 Plains
4 Seaside Citadel
3 Terramorphic Expanse

Creatures (26)
3 Avacyn’s Pilgrim
2 Borderland Ranger
2 Farhaven Elf
2 Fiend Hunter
4 Flickerwisp
1 Fog Bank
1 Llanowar Elves
4 Mistmeadow Witch
3 Mulldrifter
3 Nacatl War-Pride
3 Sea Gate Oracle

Other spells (10)
2 Lightning Greaves
4 Muddle the Mixture
4 Sundial of the Infinite

What didn’t work

Like I said, the deck was too slow and had way too much mana. I had too few action cards in the deck, which meant that draw spells and library manipulation effects just led to more draw and more mana. If you look at the above list, you’ll see that except for the Intihuatana-core, the deck consists of just three types of cards: defense, mana, and draw. How was I ever gonna win with this deck? Put all my money on War-Pride? Fly over for the win with Flickerwisp‘s o-so-sturdy 1-toughness body? I also had this nice tutor-engine based on Muddle the Mixture, but I found myself having to hold the Mixtures in order to not get utterly destroyed by random spells.

The deck is based on hurting the opponent through blinking and Sundial, but the blinking took over. You now what’s bad? Making a deck about card X (Sundial of the Infinite), when the supporting theme Y (blinking) slowly takes over the whole deck. It’s okay if you can let go of X, but I couldn’t – and wouldn’t. The deck wasn’t Sundial-dependant, but sort-of Sundial-saturated. I didn’t really need it. There where times where I would use it to good effect, but usually I was too busy durdling – blinking dudes and drawing some cards, ramping my mana. Y’know, playing Magic just for the sake of playing Magic.

Why green was just too… too

Mana – I thought it would be invaluable, but yet it wasn’t. In reality, the mana was mostly there to power out Nacatl War-Pride as soon as possible. In other words, the green was in the deck to sustain green cards. I was playing green cards to help me play green cards!

Besides, the green cards weren’t part of the Blink-part of the deck, and I thought I could salvage the deck towards a more streamlined Blink-deck by removing the green altogether. This would lower my curve and remove my need for mana acceleration, generating quite a few vacant slots.

Although I removed the only fatty from the deck, I replaced it with another one. This, however, wasn’t a fatty that works well with Sundial, as War-Pride did, but a fatty that works well with Blinking: Quicksilver Dragon. At the time it seemed like a good idea, as did the removal of green, but you can probably guess that enforcing the Blink-aspect even more wasn’t healthy for the part of the deck that wanted to be about Sundial (which, before I started building the deck, was the entire deck).

Let’s not get ahead of myself

Anyway, I think it’s time to show you my list first, and discuss why I changed what I changed.

TrUW Sundial
Lands (24)
1 Glacial Fortress
3 Halimar Depths
5 Island
1 Kabira Crossroads
2 Moorland Haunt
1 Mystic Gate
6 Plains
1 Sejiri Refuge
4 Terramorphic Expanse

Creatures (18)
2 Drift of Phantasms
4 Flickerwisp
1 Fog Bank
1 Inquisitor Exarch
3 Mistmeadow Witch
3 Mulldrifter
2 Quicksilver Dragon
3 Sea Gate Oracle

Other spells (18)
1 Lightning Greaves
4 Momentary Blink
4 Muddle the Mixture
2 Oblivion Ring
4 Sundial of the Infinite
3 Venser, the Sojourner

As you can see with the manabase, playing just two colors allowed me to play more gimmicky lands like Moorland Haunt, and a few ETB-lands like Halimar Depths and the singleton Kabira Crossroads. Having four Terramorphics allows me to shuffle cards away after peaking into the Depths, which seemed reasonable. That ‘engine’, if you will, is also one of the reasons I chose to run so many non-four-ofs. That, and a whole bunch of carddraw, card selection, and transmuting.

You’ll see another transmute-engine in the deck, that of three mana. Drift of Phantasms is similar to Muddle the Mixture: it has a reasonable spell-side, as well as the relevant transmute-ability. When I was testing with Jeroen, I noticed that a lot of the spells I really wanted where three mana: you can go for blinking with Flickerwisp, semi-permanent removal with Oblivion Ring, and you can grab Sea Gate Oracle in a pinch to dig for more cards.

I also added more targets for Muddle, since I already ran multiple copies of the important cards like Sundial and Witch, and I figured I might as well add some silver bullets. Fog Bank is a decent blocker, and Exarch can help defend but also start Blinking away the opponent’s life total. I was also considering adding Swiftfoot Boots for Lightning Greaves, but I pulled the plug before I could change that.

Lastly I need to discuss the tag-team of Venser and O-Ring. These two really stretch the laws of time, not to mention what happens when you add Sundial into the mix. Venser blinks your permanents. This is great for cards like Kabira Crossroads or Mulldrifter. You wouldn’t really think it would work all that great with, say, Oblivion Ring. But it does. First, you cast it and exile a permanent. Then, you exile O-Ring itself with Venser, and when the leaves-the-battlefield trigger hits the stack, you end your turn. The result: one permanently exiled permanent, and you get to exile another permanent during the next end step, when O-Ring returns, which is in your opponent’s turn. During your turn, you can do it all over again.

Sadly, all this didn’t really matter. At the moment I didn’t understand why it didn’t work. I just assumed it was too slow, which is a fair assumption for about half of my decks. Writing this article, though, I discovered that this was a Blink-deck masquerading as a Sundial-deck. Usually such a masquerade is a good thing, but here it was actually so that the mask was supposed to be the central part, and the Blink-part should have been the mask.

Jeroen’s Words of Wisdom

I was planning on entirely dropping the deck, since I grew so frustrated with the games where there wasn’t a way out of losing. But then, Jeroen bestowed a piece of wisdom upon me that I had missed since I was so engulfed in the deck. “You should focus more on positive effects for your deck, instead of trying to hurt the opponent.” I hadn’t seen this, trying to make Blinking work. What I was gonna need to do was look for cards that could benefit me if I had a Sundial out.

Seeing how far this article is already, you won’t be surprised to not find a decklist at the end. For starters, I don’t have a deck yet. Theres just too many options, and I would like to keep it to two colors if I can help it. Second, I don’t have a lot of the cards I want to play. And third, that lingering feeling of saturation. I’m still tired of the deck, and as a result I’ve put all my ideas towards revamping it on a mental shelf for future use.

So next week, you won’t have a clue as to what I’m gonna write about next week. (Actually, you do. There’s a new set coming out, so…) See you then!

First, here’s my deck. How this all came together will be explained below, and much more.

UBR Control (Innistrad Sealed, 6 players and 4 packs)
Lands (17)
5 Island
5 Mountain
1 Shimmering Grotto
1 Stensia Bloodhall
5 Swamp

Creatures (11)
2 Civilized Scholar / Homicidal Brute
1 Falkenrath Noble
1 Geistcatcher’s Rig
1 Hanweir Watchkeep / Bane of Hanweir
1 Instigator Gang / Wildblood Pack
2 Markov Patrician
1 Morkrut Banshee
1 Murder of Crows
1 Stitcher’s Apprentice

Other spells (12)
1 Brimstone Volley
2 Dead Weight
2 Forbidden Alchemy
1 Geistflame
1 Grasp of Phantoms
1 Into the Maw of Hell
1 Moan of the Unhallowed
1 Rolling Temblor
1 Silent Departure
1 Victim of Night

* * *

Three or four?
Short answer: four

We started the draft by discussing the number of boosters we would draft. I was a proponent of four from the beginning but started to have my doubts later during the week. The four-camp had quite the number of fans, but we were fully aware of the possible downsides. In the end, the lure of six new chances at that awesome moneyrare won us over. But how did it go?

We all had pretty good decks, with the exception of Sander, who just didn’t manage to find his personal space where he wanted to be. He drafted a Zombie-deck that was too dependent on Undead Alchemist and Endless Ranks of the Dead, and those cards ask a lot of questions and have a lot of only-if’s to begin with.

Sander was seated left of me and managed to draft that UB Zombie deck. Left of Sander was Jeroen, who also picked up an Undead Alchemist. Jeroen went with green instead of black, and his Zombies weren’t a heavy theme in his deck. Jeroen did better than Sander in the draft, because his deck wasn’t as dependent on certain cards as Sander’s deck was. Still, I think Jeroen could’ve done much better had he turned his draft around after his P2P1 Olivia Voldaren! Jeroen finished third I think, but he could’ve done much better with Olivia, I think.

Left of Jeroen was Mike, our usual W/G drafter. This time, he added a dash of blue to go with his usual palette of colors. Mike started the draft out good but due to terrible bad luck in the last round, he went from second to second-to-last. Left of Mike was article regular Rick, who innocuously drafted a P1P1 Liliana and was able to sculpt a relentless killing machine around her in the colors of Orzhov. It turns out the power of his deck was enough to get him to the first spot in the draft. Well done, Rick!

Let me get back to the booster discussion to wrap this section up. Did we make better decks? Yes. Did we need the fourth booster? Probably not. Would things have been different without that fourth pack? Yes (for me, at least, which kinda means ‘for everyone’). Will we do it again this way? Probably not. In the end, I was a tad disappointed by the fourth pack. Drafting becomes so much more easy.

* * *

What to do when signaling barely works.
Short answer: it turned out okay.

Looking back, I found it curious that every drafter had at least one color in common with his neighbour. Sander and I shared both blue and black; Sander and Jeroen also had blue in common, while Mike and Jeroen had both blue and green in common (yes, that’s four blue drafters in a row); Mike and Rick shared white, and Robert and I shared red. Actually, only Rick and Robert had no overlapping color.

Yet – and I think the fourth booster is to blame for this – we all had decks that we were satisfied with (again, except Sander). Also, the colors (especially blue) had enough different applications that all of us could draft what around their first few picks without having trouble getting enough playables. But I can’t stress this enough: more than anything, the fourth booster was to blame for this.

* * *

Dipping your toes in Blue.
Short answer: there were four blue drafters in a row!

Four out of six players drafting blue is pretty mind-boggling. But like I said above, the different angles of the color (and the color-intensity per player) was responsible for four very reasonable blue decks. I was drafting a controlling blue deck (what else?), Sander was in Zombies, Jeroen was drafting all-around good cards, and Mike picked a few weenies and such to support his aggressive stance.

Still, there was something interesting going on right from the beginning. To my right was seated Robert, and to his right was Rick. Rick opened a Civilized Scholar, a card I was aware of was very powerful. I feared I might not get it. Rick did not took it, but I didn’t know that was because of Liliana. Perfectly reasonable to pick Lilly over Scholar, I’d say. What Robert took over Civilized Scholar, I do not know. I was very happy to scoop it up, and another one a few boosters later.

* * *

The danger of a seemingly underwhelming textbox.
Short answer: the unknown was something to avoid.

The fact that Civilized Scholar (two of them) came to me unopposed was more due to it’s seemingly underwhelming textbox rather than the fact that it’s blue, I think. People see a card that is just a Looter, and that kind of effect is historically underrated in my group. It may be one of the reasons I draft blue so much.

The duo of Scholars made their way into my deck without any opposition. My second pick, the one before Scholar, was a Murder of Crows – yay! So I knew that whatever I was going to do, I had to keep a close eye on my creature count in order to make those two worth their grain. What was my first pick, you say? Don’t worry, we’re getting there.

* * *

The effect of dual-faced cards.
Short answer: hideously underrated.

More than the effect of the fourth pack, I was curious to see what effect the DFC’s would have on the draft. There weren’t any hideously powerful DFC’s opened at the get-go, so there wasn’t any signaling here.

What there was, though, was a lot of players who’d rather steer clear of the DFC’s in favor of drafting cards they were more familiar with. Somewhere in pack three I was faced with the tough decision of Falkenrath Noble versus Instigator Gang. In the end, after much debating, I picked Noble, saying goodbye to Instigator Gang. But it came back! This baffled me. Robert, to my right, passed the card twice as a mono-red player. Instigator Gang was just insane and I literally won every game in which I cast him. (Noble, by the way, had a similar effect. I knew he was good, but that he was this good I couldn’t possibly conceive.)

Every one whom I played had to respect the Gang this way. While the only effect the Gang had on the draft was to invoke fear, I wonder what it’ll to do our metagame should we draft the set again. Will DFC’s be more respected? Will people start fighting over them more than they should? This is the most interesting question that will be answered in the next draft.

* * *

Will those darn kids start respecting the dead?
Short answer: they really did!

My expectations for both graveyard interaction and DFC’s proved off. DFC’s where played way less than I thought, while the graveyard was more active than I initially imagined. I suppose this is because the graveyard as a mechanic is more present than DFC’s, and while the latter can be avoided, avoiding graveyard interaction would often be stupid and also much harder to accomplish.

* * *

White is the place to be.
Short answer: maybe I wasn’t the only one afraid to go white.

White wasn’t really the place to be, but it still was great (Rick’s number one deck was half white, after all). I even first-picked a Fiend Hunter (followed by Murder of Crows and Civilized Scholar, as you know by now) and got another one of those, as well as a Slayer of the Wicked. This meant that white was open (which was true, since neither of my neighbours played it). Yet, beyond those three cards I rarely got any. This was also because Sander saw the signs and tried to go into white, cutting me off even more. But then, red came along.

I held on to white for too long and had the chance to play white in addition to the Grixis-colors, but I wisely decided not to. White was the worst of my three colors and splashing for at least two double-white cards would be asking for trouble.

* * *

It takes a lot to force me into red.
Short answer: all it took was a Brimstone Volley.

Up until the second pack I was confident I wouldn’t be playing red. But then I opened a common by the name of Brimstone Volley, and that was that. At this point, I was in four colors. I finished pack one under the impression I would be Esper, but then the quality red started flowing. I even picked up a Burning Vengeance, which I sadly could not play. Because Robert was the only red mage besides me and he was to my left, I was able to take all the red I could hope for in packs two and four. In the end, I was happy playing red.

* * *

Not everyone reads everything.
Short answer: preparation only takes you so far.

You can read and test all you want, but sometimes the group dynamic weighs heavier than the established consensus of a set. We generally don’t worry about draft archetypes; we just draft the cards we like and decks we like. Sometimes, that leaves you with a weird color combination that a seasoned drafter would never guess would work. The prime example is Rick’s winning deck being white-black, a color generally eschewed by drafters better than us.

* * *

Burning Vengeance is an Intangible Virtue in disguise.
Short answer: I almost made it.

In the third pack, I was passed an early Burning Vengeance. I did not take it. The next pack I was again passed Burning Vengeance. This time I took it, hoping the other would table back to me. Sadly, Rick verbally made it clear to the table that he was “hate-drafting one of these cards, not because I need them, but because two of them can get out of hand quickly”. I knew what he meant and this sensation was confirmed when I did not see the second Vengeance in the pack. Still, hoping for it to table, I started prioritizing flashback and ended up with a few good ones, but no cards I wouldn’t ordinarily draft.

After drafting I decided Burning Vengeance was like those few white cards and that one Spider Spawning I managed to pick up: too much hassle for too little gain. With four packs drafted, who was I to dilute a rock-solid deck with all these elements of durdling?

* * *

Well, that’s another article in the books. I hope you have enjoyed this not-so-ordinary view of a draft format. Let’s just hope me and my group can keep up drafting on a more regular basis. Next week it is time for the world to see Intihuatana in its true form. I’ve already had one test done with it, and maybe this weekend I’ll have another. It’d be nice for a change to premier a deck with actual testing under its belt. See you next week!

I wrote down a few random thoughts on a piece of paper when I came up with the idea for this week. So I decided to just go down my points one by one, each one a little story.

It takes a lot to force me into red.

Red is my least favorite color in Innistrad. The best common is Brimstone Volley and after that, there’s a whole lotta nothing. Geistflame and Pitchburn Devils are the only other red commons I’d want to play, and that’s already kind of a stretch. In the rare and mythic department it gets better, but counting on your red rare/mythic savior is beyond realistic. Balefire Dragon, Olivia Voldaren and Devil’s Play are all perfect red cards and all, but I feel the (un)common backup is lacking. Brimstone Volley is even horribly splashable, so you are less likely to see that one pass.

In short, I’d like to stay out of red if it’s possible, or whenever I can. I’ll gladly pick another card over another red card, even when the red one is slightly better (I won’t pass a Devil’s Play in favor of a Stitched Drake, don’t worry), thereby giving my neighbor the idea that red is open. Innistrad red as a base color? I think it’s an illusion.

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White is the place to be.

Just like I would like to avoid Red, so do I pray White gets past me. I feel White is a very, vert strong color and it could easily have half the table fighting over it. For instance, it has both Faceless Butcher and Flametongue Kavu at uncommon! During a test-draft, I faced the choice between both of those cards, and that is a very ugly one. Both cards are usually the top cards in the pack, meaning that the next player in line might very well scoop up the card you passed. While I acknowledge the power of White, I will try to avoid two- or three-man fights over that color. But if the White comes my way unimpeded, I won’t hesitate to take it.

What to do when signaling barely works.

We all know the stories. “I took the green card ’cause it was the only good card of that color, so my neighbors where left to fight over the black cards.” This is known as signaling: let them know that there is nothing to gain in green for them and that they’d better take cards from another color. In our group, however, this is rarely how it works. The only signals that work are when you take the only card of a color out of a pack.

Our color signal receptors are less sensitive than those of regular drafters, and that’s okay. Last draft, it turned out that there where three blue drafters sitting next to eachother. We are generally attached to our first pick, and stubbornly hanging on to that means that people can signal all they want, you’ll still try to make your first card work.

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Not everyone reads everything.

This point is in part responsible for the above one. When you don’t read about a draft or don’t prepare, you enter the draft with a blank state of mind. Pick orders are unknown to you. Again, this is okay. My approach to a draft is to read about it, watch draft vids, and test on CCGDecks.com. I don’t do this to get an edge – mostly I want to know how the format feels and what colors speak to me. When someone who beats me didn’t prepare, they chose their own path and rode that to victory. While my mind is clogged with supposed wisdom, theirs is just filled with creativity to make an idea work, whether it’s an accepted draft strategy without them knowing (i.e. UW flyers) or not. It’s refreshing.

I remember a draft where one guy (I think the format was Time Spiral-Planar Chaos-Future Sight) kept passing me good blue and green cards. It turns out he was snatching up all the black he could get his hands on, and he won the draft undefeated. I don’t think he even dropped a game. Conventional wisdom isn’t always right – I would never have drafted such a deck, but the fact that I still remember it means that the deck did what it had to do – winning – in an out-of-the-box way. I’m glad my friends show me the ways I thought were bad. I wish I could follow my own path a bit more, but I’m too busy securing a safety-net underneath me.

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Burning Vengeance is an Intangible Virtue in disguise.

Great, I have your attention again, now haven’t I? Both cards are so-called build-around-me’s: cards that encourage you to draft them and consequently change your entire draft plan to enable them as much as you can. I haven’t ever really drafted around a card. I remember picking up a Muraganda Petroglyphs in the aforementioned TPF draft, but it was really to late to do anything with it.

I would love nothing more than to be able to make a Burning Vengeance-deck work. The thing is, Vengeance expects you to go all-in, prioritizing flashback cards. When they don’t flow rich, you end up with a mediocre deck. Intangible Virtue, on the other hand, requires you to go all-in on a strategy that doesn’t look half as bad if it fails. You still draft strong creatures, now picking higher the ones that make tokens.

Another card that is a lot safer is Invisible Stalker. I’m open to building a deck around him, which is again not as dangerous. He wants a nice curve and some equipments, neither of which is a dangerous goal to pursue. Burning Vengeance rewards you greatly for succeeding with that deck, but requires drafting on such a different level that the stakes are very high.

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The effect of dual-faced cards.

This is by far the thing I’m most curious for. How will this work in draft? We’ve decided that, just like in official tournaments, the DFC’s are common knowledge at the beginning of the draft, and so is picking ‘em. I feel this is a great new take on signaling, as you can deduce what people are playing should they pick ‘em.

Your right-hand neighbour snatches up a Bloodline Keeper? Maybe you shouldn’t pick that Victim of Night in your pack, then. But it also works the other way around – why didn’t they pick that powerful Civilized Scholar? What sick rare must he have opened, then? I’m gonna love seeing how this all plays out. DFC’s add information to a subgame (the draft) of Magic that is not about fighting over colors, but coöperating with your neighbours.

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The danger of a seemingly underwhelming textbox.

Some cards look like they’re not as good as they really are. Me and my group occasionally suffer from what I’d like to call the ‘textbox smokescreen syndrom’. This is what happens when you undervalue a card based on their text box, forgetting (or deprioritizing) the mana/body-ratio the card has. The most recent time I did this was with Murder of Crows. It is an Air Elemental, which is perfectly fine to begin with. I’ll gladly take cards with those stats. However, my initial response to the card (which was when I saw it on the official spoiler) was disappointment because of the text box. I didn’t think highly of it even though I like both looting and free repeated triggers.

When I found Murder of Crows in my prerelease pool, it was only then that I discovered what an utter beast the card is. I just (wrongfully, even) wrote the card of because of the card box. I remember once getting passed a late Maelstrom Djinn. “Sheesh, he dies in two turns. How bad is this card?” (This was my initial reaction, but somehow I regained my sanity and gratefully picked it up.) Well, it’s still good enough to deal ten damage to your opponent in those two turns!

The consequence of this is that some cards have a textbox you’d call underwhelming, forgetting the fact that it could very well be just the body that counts. Or, in the case of Murder of Crows, the abilities are also legitimately insane. Always question your first reaction.

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Dipping your toes in Blue.

It should come as no surprise that Blue is my favorite color in Magic. Most of my decks either have blue or resemble playing with a Blue deck. And for some reason, I keep end up sleeving Islands for most of my draft decks, too. I suspect part of this is the fact that some of my friends just don’t like blue. These two facts are a beautiful set-up to a great Blue draft and subsequent deck. On top of that, Blue cards are hard to evaluate if you aren’t very familiar with the color. Blue oftentimes suggest a less aggressive approach, sometimes even going for a completely different angle. In any other block, Armored Skaab would be horrible. In Innistrad and with the right deck (and mindset), Armored Skaab turns into a double-function cornerstone of the U/x graveyard deck. It holds the ground very well and his ability resembles drawing cards (in the right kind of deck).

Again, and I want to stress this, I love my playgroup. They all are great guys and each have different Magic qualities. Their level differs, but they all know their way around the draft format and are versed in the world of cardboard (and other offline games). Are they stupid for passing good Blue cards? About as stupid as I am for passing good Green cards, really. Drafting in my group is all about playing with what you’re comfortable with. When your favorite color isn’t the easieast way to go, you end up with a highly unconventional deck that could very well take down the whole thing. When you know the preferences of each other, maybe you could use that to your advantage. Not only am I more inclined to take a blue card, but when I know one of my neighbours would really love the green card I was also considering, I’m better off passing the Green one and taking the Blue one. Again, draft is all about coöperating, and knowing your fellow drafters adds a whole other angle to drafting the same way DFC’s do.

*  *  *

Will those darn kids start respecting the dead?

Ah, kids. Living in the present and ignoring the past. It turns out, ‘those kids’ will have to be careful with what’s buried, because in Innistrad, the dead are just as important as the living. I talked about it above, about how Armored Skaab is such a good card in Innistrad. Who’d would ever want to mill themselves? The answer to this question, at least in Innistrad, is you! (Possibly.)

Just like not all of my fellow drafters are familiar with Blue, so too will some of them not know how to really draft a graveyard-based deck. Knowing an important axis like this of the format could reap benefits, as not all of your co-drafters will know how to do that profitably. I’m hoping for a general undervaluation of all things dead and me trying to grave-rob my way to victory. (Saying this makes me think of H.P Lovecrafts ‘Herbert West – Reanimator’, which in turn gives me the chills every time I think about it.) Let’s hope I’m the only one lest things get ugly.

*  *  *

Three or four?

My final point is about the amount of packs we’re going to draft. We are currently (currently, as in the time I’m writing this, not the time you will read this) discussing the pro’s and con’s of adding a fourth booster to our draft. We are not with eight drafters, but with six. 3 x 8 is the same result as 4 x 6, so the amount of boosters is the same. Each player, however, gains another 14 cards to build their deck with.

I’m one of the proponents of the fourth pack. You’re not scrabbling for playables as with 3 boosters (in the case of 8 drafters) and you have more time to find out what’s open, and even more time to hate some more cards. No, drafting with 4 boosters is not the default, but neither is drafting with six people. Whavetever happens, though, I’m down with it. 3 packs will be a lot harder to draft, while 4 packs give you more time. We’ll see what happens – I’m going to have fun no matter what!

*  *  *

Tune in next week for Intihuatana, and maybe I can find a way to recap the draft in some way. I’m thinking about noting all my picks, but knowing myself, I’ll probably forget (or scrub out). See you next week!

what do crabs and cobra’s have in common with cats and clocks?

Before I tell you what the answer to that question is, let me take you back to the deck I showed two weeks ago. It was The Walking Dead Flare, and sadly, the deck is a bit like the second season so far. You’d think it’ll be exciting and good, yet here you are with something that is not at all similar to your expectations. Unlike The Walking Dead, I’ve already given up on the deck. Maybe Zombies aren’t meant for me to build a deck with (the first time I did wasn’t noteworthy either). Or it could be that my pull towards slow decks got the better of me. It’s probably that, but the Zombie-deck is once again buried. Maybe Undead Alchemist can unearth it some day. Maybe even Sewer Nemesis – who knows.

Anyway, back to my introductory teaser and weird-looking title. First, let me answer my question. It isn’t just a question. If you thought of my article Fish and Crabs, you probably knew that my question had something to do with that deck. It was a while back that I wrote it, but not as long as I have had the idea to make a landfall mill deck. The idea was there a long time, but the options where so overwhelming I actually feared building the deck. Luckily, using three seperate articles as a way to keep track during my deckbuilding (Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3), I eventually succeeded.

The long preface the eventual deck went through reminded me a fair bit of the deck I’m still trying to build, but have no idea where to start. Where my mill deck had to deal with crabs and cobra’s, this time it’s cats and clocks. Folks, meet…

…Intihuatana

Well, this title really doesn’t give a whole lot away. The equation I’ve been trying to solve for a long time is that of Sundial of the Infinite. Back when I first write about M12, I already had a few things to say about the ‘dial:

And now comes the single most frustrating yet most enticing card in the whole set of M12: Sundial of the Infinite. I started brainstorming like no man’s business, only to find out each time it didn’t work. The first blow to the head I got was that Sundial does not stop effects that last until the end of your turn. Goodbye Angel’s Grace (which would’ve been insane), landfall, pump spells, manlands, bushido, among others.

I learned that the best thing to look for where effects that triggered on end steps. This led to the second hit: cool things like Pyromancer’s Swath and Form of the Dragon trigger on each end step, meaning you only get to delay the inevitable for another turn, not forever. At the end of your opponent’s end step, it’s all over anyhow.

Luckily, Nacatl War-Pride does work. You attack, and with the end step-trigger on the stack, you end the turn. Next turn, things start exploding. If your opponent doesn’t have any creatures, just give him some with Forbidden Orchard or Hunted creatures. And if you draw a Hunted without War-Pride, just end the turn with the ETB-trigger on the stack – voilá, a big guy without a drawback!

But what about that title? Well, the name Nacatl reminded me of the ancient Incan civilization. So started looking for a way to refer to Sundial of the Infinite in a way that makes sense in the Inca Empire. This is how I found Intihuatana, an ancient stone device located on Macchu Picchu used to denote the time. Now how’s that for a deck name?

Intihuatana in a few words

After a long process of looking for cards, I finally settled on that one interaction between Nacatl War-Pride and Sundial of the Infinite. War-Pride makes a number of copies of itself equal to the number of creatures the defending player controls. Each Nacatl can only be blocked by exactly one creature. At the end of turn, your copies vanish. Or don’t they?

Nacatl War-Pride says “Exile the tokens at the beginning of the next end step”. This is known as a delayed triggered ability, meaning it triggers only once. Ending the turn before this trigger resolves means you’ll lose the tokens at the end of the next turn. However, activating Sundial with this trigger on the stack means it doesn’t resolve, yet it won’t trigger again. The result is a lot of Nacatl War-Prides who all make tokens the next turn. Talk about explosive!

I chose a few subthemes to go with this, thrown together in a white, green and blue shell. I’m sorry – no decklist today. I do, however, have a lot of options to go through in my quest for another deck that will work (in contrast to my recent zombie disaster). Let’s start with, of course…

The Core
Sundial of the Infinite
Nacatl War-Pride

While the Sundial is unmistakably the single most important card of the deck, the support it gets from Nacatl War-Pride is the engine that should get this deck going. The engine is pretty straightforward, so instead of wasting words on that, I’ll show you the rest of the deck and how the varying parts are supposed to support the Nacatl Sundial-engine. Something of note, though, is the fact that Sundial doubles as an anti-EOT-player measure. Better cast those Fact or Fictions on your own turn, pal!

Other win conditions
Hunted Phantasm
Hunted Troll
Cloudthresher

These are cards that have a function similar to War-Pride but are less explosive. In a way, they are also less dangerous. Both Hunted creatures are cheaper, which means a removal spell hurts less (more on this later, though). Cloudthresher, meanwhile, is a big creature with an immediate effect that can be cheated out with Sundial. When you evoke it, activate Sundial with the sacrifice-trigger on the stack. The Hunted creatures work similar – when they enter the battlefield they trigger, and that is when you activate Sundial. Cheap creatures on a discount!

Creature control
Domestication
Captivating Glance

These are two cards that are cheap ways to take control of opposing creatures. They have a negative end step-trigger (sometimes) that can be circumvented by activating the gool ol’ Sundial.

Exiling (semi creature control)
Mistmeadow Witch
Otherworldly Journey
Turn to Mist
Flickerwisp
Mimic Vat
Galepowder Mage
Glimmerpoint Stag

Captivating Glance and Domestication where two cards that focus just on opposing creatures. These exilers above can also exile one of your own creatures in order to reap benefits from an enter the battlefield-trigger. But the prime use of them is to exile an opponent’s creature and end your turn when the trigger to return them to the battlefield (again, a delayed triggered ability, just like War-Pride’s). It’s too bad Momentary Blink can only touch my guys! Mistmeadow Witch is expensive to use but repeatable. Mimic Vat is a nice way to profit from a creature that died, making tokens that Sundial can keep around forever. My biggest concern is, will there be enough creatures dying?

Catchall
Aethersnipe

This card was a bit hard to classify. It’s a nice answer to any kind of permanent, has synergy with Sundial, and with Mimic Vat. Should I run enough creatures with evoke, Mimic Vat might merit its inclusion.

Draw
Grafted Skullcap
Mulldrifter

Again, two (draw) spells that go up in value thanks to Sundial. Of these two, Mulldrifter is clearly the best and has no risk in casting it. Mulldrifter has evoke, so you know how that works by now. Grafted Skullcap is another card that benefits from ending your turn at the beginning of your end step (or sooner), but with a high drawback. Although now that I think of it, if you cast Grafted Skullcap while being able to activate Sundial, you’re safe. Say your opponent bounces your Sundial in response to you casting Skullcap – just activate Sundial, and you’ve traded the Skullcap (spells on the stack when the turn ends are exiled) for a bounce spell. Not great, but not horrible either.

Mana
Llanowar Elves
Cultivate
Borderland Ranger
Farhaven Elf
Ondu Giant

I was planning on running a lot of, or at least some, mana acceleration. The decks looks like one mana-hungry beast. Besides three ETB-mana dudes, we also have a Llanowar Elves and a Cultivate on here. The ETB-guys have the most allure because of both my exilers and Mimic Vat. I would love casting Mimic Vat and then stuffing a chump-blocking Farhaven Elf under it. Lastly, you might wonder why I have Llanowar Elves over Birds of Paradise. It’s simple – Birds dies to Cloudthresher.

Protection
Lightning Greaves

Remember how I said it sucks to lose your War-Pride to a removal spell? See how you have to wait a turn to attack with it? Enter Lightning Greaves. It does both things: it grants protection and haste. In a deck relying on attacking with a few key creatures, that’s hardly a problem. In fact, I think Lightning Greaves is vital to the deck.

This is me, signing off

Well, that about sums it up for this week. I’m glad I found inspiration again to write, since hopefully I can bring you a decklist next week, and for the week after I already have another vague idea. It’s good to have some luxury like this again. See you next week!

First incarnation

I’ve talked of this before: that new set smell. New cards just beg you to play with them, even when there are seemingly better alternatives availabe. The new cards have an irresistable lure to them. This is exactly what happened when figuring out what shell to have Toshi wear. Yeah, I can call him Toshi. We go way back. Anyway, Toshiro Umezawa likes a full graveyard, and I like blue. So Gifts Ungiven was a given (oh, the paradoxical pun). But I made a pretty fundamental mistake by going the Ire of Kaminari-approach. It, too, likes a full graveyard, but Toshi likes to empty it rather than keep it full. This flaw was a big part of the deck all the way through it’s first incarnation. At times it was bothersome, but even a meagre Ire for five or so could close games if need be.

The rest of the deck was support for Toshi – spells, and Night of Souls’ Betrayal. Betrayal makes it so that Forbidden Orchard triggers Toshi whenever it taps for mana. Engine found! Courtesy of the new set smell, I filled out the rest with a hefty Arcane package. Arcane was a subtype of various instants and sorceries in the Kamigawa-block to denote spells from the spirits, as opposed to the regular denizens with their regular instants and sorceries. Another example of the new set smell, Mirrodin-block’s Echoing Decay and Echoing Truth were perfect solutions to a swarm of Spirit tokens in the absence of Night of Souls’ Betrayal.

A handy side-effect of Arcane spells was the Splice-mechanic: pay a card’s splice cost to add its effect to another spell. Glacial Ray adds two damage to any spell for 1R, while Evermind turns every spell into a cantrip for 1U. Eerie Procession is your Arcane-tutor that gets you the right spell at the right time. The three

This first version took some tuning but turned out pretty okay. The core of Toshi/NoSB/Orchard stayed the same while some pieces fluctuated. Gifts was in and out at various stages and in general I just experimented with several cards. Playing with Gifts and Procession, one has quite a bit of leeway to test one card or another. How does Darkblast function? How many Arcane spells do I need? Can I function without Toshi? It was a fun discovery, this whole process. The best part for me was being able to do so much at the end of turn – you only need one Arcane instant to fire of a big spliced up spell at the end of a turn.

Deviation from the first incarnation

Somehow, the deck took a turn for the worse. It could’ve been the weakness of the deck – a 1/1 Toshiro Umezawa with NoSB out – was discovered by my opponents, or that I just relied on him too much.

I started changing the deck, and the number of Toshi-copies dwindled from four to three to two. One copy of NoSB came out, too, until the point where I needed to make a decision: do I go on with or without Toshiro? This choice was postponed a few times and that was not in the best interest of the deck. Toshi wasn’t meant for the deck anymore so he had to come out. In the end, he did.

With these spots in the deck becoming vacant, I had the chance to really amp up the Arcane factor of the deck. The deck went from Toshi-deck to Ire-deck.

Second incarnation

And yet, this deck too came to an end. I guess it was being bored with the same-o same-o each game. And not in a good way. There are quite a few decks that play highly repetitive but I really enjoy – Toshi.dec (I was still calling it Toshi, even without him) wasn’t one of those.

I missed Toshi.

So I decided to give the whole idea that spawned the deck in the first place a second chance. I noticed how I hadn’t cast Gifts Ungiven in a very long time, and I wanted to give that one another go-round too. I took the whole deck apart and started anew, from scratch. This was a painful experience, tearing apart something I had loved to play with for so long.

I went with a five color brew that tried to maximize both Gifts and Toshi. I had several white and green cards to ensure the win-win Gifts packages and I discovered that Tenza, Godo’s Maul was a pretty good way to lengthen Toshi’s lifespan.

But as with all of my decks and ideas that looked really good on paper, this one failed miserably. I felt miserable too – I took apart one of my greatest victories in deckbuilding and just couldn’t recapture it. I was looking for that feeling I once had but could not find it. It was gone.

Deviation, the final incarnation

The first version of the deck wouldn’t be good enough any more in my meta. I also discovered I wasn’t capable of building a new deck based on the idea behind the first deck. I set about to revive the deck in another way: give the Arcane-version a new spin.

I had all the cards from the previous Arcane build still tucked away together somewhere. The 5CC Gifts Toshi deck didn’t actually need any of the same cards, so that was one thing that I had going for it. A little light in a sea of failed experiments.

I started putting the pieces back together and removing the bad parts, most notably the sextet of Signets (really; what was I thinking?). To see what the deck consists of at this very moment, you’ll have to read along below. I’m proud to say that while this deck (as always) might be a little weak against hyper-aggro, it also has a lot of inevitability to it. Each turn I get is one more I get closer to victory. Once I can start with the big Arcane spells, there’s no stopping the deck.

Tragedy Bound

A note on the deckname first. Back when I wasn’t using my first name on MSN Messenger, I always used short names of songs I liked at the moment. Tragedy Bound is the name of a The Bravery song (which I still like a lot by the way). My Messenger-picture used to be Kagemaro for quite a while. When I first played Kagemaro against a friend of mine, he immediately proclaimed “Tragedy Bound!”. I liked the name so much for the deck, as it sums up pretty well what is gonna happen to my opponent, that I kept it. Thanks Jeroen!

4 Eerie Procession
1 Evermind

These two cards are an important part of what makes the deck tick. Eerie Procession can get specific answers (more on those below), but it is most often used to find Evermind, which in turn makes every spell a cantrip. The goal is to have to stop casting at sorcery speed as fast as possible, and Evermind helps a lot there.

4 Reach Through Mists
3 Peer Through Depths
2 Sift Through Sands
1 The Unspeakable

This suite of cards is there as support of the cards mentioned above. They help sculpt your hand, and there’s even the off-chance you get some unspeakable discount! Reach and Peer are also ideal cards to splice onto into oblivion, since they’re so cheap.

3 Ire of Kaminari
4 Glacial Ray

These are the main finishers of the deck. Ire can easily dome one for six or seven, but you can also build up and go lethal out of nothing: my record is sixteen damage with one card. Glacial Ray is easily spliceable, which adds up damage quickly.

3 Kagemaro, First to Suffer
1 Goryo’s Vengeance

The deck has a habit of maintaining a healthy amount of cards throughout the whole game. It was when I thought of that that Kagemaro sprung to mind, and Goryo’s Vengeance wasn’t far away. If I have these two pieces assembled, creature decks are stopped dead in their tracks. Actually, they’re just dead. When you keep looping Kagemaro’s activated abilities, odds are he can start attacking too, since he has haste and the board should be empty. Just remember to always leave up black mana or you’ll lose him forever.

1 Consuming Vortex
1 Rend Flesh
3 Hideous Laughter

These are just more creature solutions. The amount is singletons in this deck is ofcourse courtesy of Eerie Procession. Hideous Laughter is like a Kagemaro-lite.

1 Cranial Extraction
1 Psychic Puppetry
1 Eye of Nowhere

These are more catch-all solutions to whatever problem you’re facing. Cranial is good against control, Puppetry can disrupt control (mana) and aggro (attackers) alike, and Eye of Nowhere can go after permanents (most notably Planeswalkers).

This all adds up to this deck here. If only you could sleeve it up and feel the awesomeness. Fun fact: this deck is 100% foil, which makes it even more my baby. In case there’s a fire or something and there’s just one deck I could save, it would be this. No doubt about that.

Tragedy Bound
Lands (26)
4 Crumbling Necropolis
1 Dimir Aqueduct
1 Grixis Panorama
5 Island
1 Izzet Boilerworks
1 Mountain
1 Reliquary Tower
1 Shivan Reef
6 Swamp
1 Tainted Isle
1 Tainted Peak
1 Underground River
1 Vivid Creek
1 Vivid Marsh

Creatures (4)
3 Kagemaro, First to Suffer
1 The Unspeakable

Other spells (X)
1 Consuming Vortex
1 Cranial Extraction
4 Eerie Procession
1 Evermind
1 Eye of Nowhere
4 Glacial Ray
1 Goryo’s Vengeance
3 Hideous Laughter
3 Ire of Kaminari
3 Peer Through Depths
1 Psychic Puppetry
4 Reach Through Mists
1 Rend Flesh
2 Sift Through Sands

Final note

As you know, this article is the second time in as many weeks I have written about an old deck. I fear the Magic writers block has gotten to me, and I don’t know if I will be able to continue writing on a weekly basis. Interest in the game is slowly dwindling, too – while I still love the game, a bit of the thrill is gone. An ever decreasing amount of players I play cards with could be the instigator of this.

On top of that, I have been working a lot more these past few weeks (and upcoming ones), and I’m figuring out what it takes to start as a freelance writer. What this means is that I don’t know how my writing will continue. I hope for your understanding while I figure out how I want to move forward with writing and Magic. See you soon, I hope!

The Backstory

It all started when New Phyrexia was on the brink of it’s release, right after the infamous Guillaume-gate happened. I wrote about a few cards from the set in a manner that sorted the interesting cards by potential deck rather than by color, as is usual (I’m such an innovator… Chapin who?). Cards like Slag Fiend, Phyrexia’s Core and Scrapyard Salvo hinted at a sacrifice-deck I was interested in. I recognized Slag Fiend as a potentially huge guy for just one red mana.

Those cards where so interesting to me because Furnace Celebration was on my shortlist of cards to build around. It just so happened that Slag Fiend and friends where the incentive to fire this puppy up. Furnace Celebration is a card that often gets put into a set to give drafters a direction to build a very specific but potentially powerful deck around. And wouldn’t you know it, those are exactly the cards that I like in the Realm of Sixty Cards.

Breaking down the deck

Unless most of my articles, this one is based on a deck that was built some time ago, and therefore has had the chance to beat on some real-life opponents (and beat it does). And unless most of my decks, this one is pretty to very aggressive. I’ll break down the list card for card. Afterwards, I’ll give some advice as to how to play the deck and what to watch out for.

4 Furnace Celebration

Ofcourse we start with this key enchantment. To be honest, it really isn’t that key (which is a sign I’ve circumvented the first pitfall for build-around-cards: don’t be overly dependent on your namesake card). It’s more like a late-game way to get through those final points of damage, or to remove those blockers for your offensive force to attack your opponent. I’ve been thinking a lot if we could ditch one or even two copies but haven’t arrived at a satisfactory answer yet.

4 Slag Fiend

This one is a peculiar card. It’s not a one-drop, but calling it an X-drop implies it costs X mana. Looking back at its impact on the tournament scene, I wonder of it would’ve hurt to give him Tarmogoyf-stats: */*+1. Still, as it stands now, Slagmogoyf is often a 4/4 or more for one mana, which means it’s a card control has to counter, but because it’s so cheap you can often cast another threat the same turn.

4 Greater Gargadon

Greater Gargadon provides so much for this deck, more more than you’d initially think. It’s, just like Slag Fiend, hell on control, since you have this loominh threat that you can bring down upon the battlefield as soon as they let their guard down. It’s also a perfect decoy to help Slag Fiends come down safely, plus it pumps the little Goyfs while also setting up free sacrifice. Suspending Gargadon is uncounterable and the sacrifice is free – an ideal card to help complicate matters for the opponent.

3 Piston Sledge

Three mana is the top of the curve for this deck, and often you don’t ever draw your third land. When you do, Piston Sledge is another great sacrifice outlet that doesn’t require mana beyond the initial down payment of 3. The best part about Sledge is that when you cast it, you get a free equip out of it. Two Gargadons with a Piston Sledge is instant death for the opponent – and yes, this has happened one time.

4 Shrapnel Blast

I could kid myself and try Artillerize, but there’s just a card out there that’s miles better, and that’s Shrapnel Blast. Two mana and oftentimes an upside (like drawing a card off of Ichor Wellspring, or buffing Slag Fiends beyond the power of a blocker) for 25% of you opponent’s life total is a bargain. No further explanation necessary.

4 Mortarpod

While Slag Fiend and Gargadon are the only real creatures, there are enough token-makers to have a board presence. Mortarpod is one of these and also doubles as a sacrifice outlet. The extra toughness it provides is surprisingly relevant a lot of times.

4 Awakening Zone

This card is great. It provides a stream of creatures that can instantly sacrifice themselves and can even pay for half of their own Furnace Celebration-trigger! The biggest disadvantage is that the tokens aren’t artifacts, which gets in the way of Piston Sledge sometimes. On the other hand, those little slimy abominations are very good at carrying said Sledge.

4 Pyrite Spellbomb

Another essential piece in the puzzle. It’s cheap and can draw a card should you need a land. It’s an artifact that fills the graveyard and can also take out a creature (or a two-point bite out of your opponent’s life total).

4 Ichor Wellspring

I would love to run more of these, but sadly, Mycosynth Wellspring is not very good in this deck because I can’t afford to run many basics (spoiler: I’m running one Forest and one Mountain). A card that has the potential to draw to cards for just two mana with no discard or shuffle-back is interesting to say the least.

2 Chromatic Star

You should see these as extra/mini Wellsprings, since the mana-fixing is often neglegible. With this much cantripping in the deck, you draw the right cards a lot of the time. Artifacts like this, that have an upside when they’re binned, are invaluable to a deck like this one.

3 Beast Within

The final slots, usually reserved for lands, are dedicated to Beast Within to have a nice answer to troublesome permanents. It’s also a nice way to get more mileage out of your Wellsprings and Spawns, generating a 3/3 blocker at a moment’s notice.

Let this cook for a while, stir it regularly, and finish with a dash of lands to end up at this deck:

Furnace Fiend v2.0
Lands (20)
4 Copperline Gorge
1 Forest
4 Great Furnace
2 Karplusan Forest
1 Mountain
4 Phyrexia’s Core
4 Tree of Tales

Creatures (8)
4 Greater Gargadon
4 Slag Fiend

Other spells (32)
4 Awakening Zone
3 Beast Within
2 Chromatic Star
4 Furnace Celebration
4 Ichor Wellspring
4 Mortarpod
3 Piston Sledge
4 Pyrite Spellbomb
4 Shrapnel Blast

Quick thoughts on the mana base

I’m a verbal opponent of decks with 20 lands. This is by a distance the number one mistake newborn deckbuilders make. However, a deck like this can get away with cutting lands in favor of threats. That’s because with one land, you can cast 16 of your 40 spells (40%). With two lands, you’re at 28 out of 40, or 70%. Ten of your spells cantrip (four of those, the Wellsprings, have the potential to do it again), so reaching three mana shouldn’t be difficult.

The mana base is pretty stuffed; so much, in fact, that I can’t run Mycosynth Wellspring (which sucks). On the other hand (and this is me thinking out loud), there’s no need to have untapped green mana available on the first turn. I only need red, for Slag Fiend and Greater Gargadon. Hmm – I might just tinker around with this deck some more! I still haven’t had a deck with Mycosynth Wellspring that worked.

Playing the deck

Greater Gargadon is a typical red card – high risk, high reward. Greater Gargadon silently became the core of the deck, the card that warped the whole deck strategy. It is your biggest threat and therefore should be treated with respect. You can carefully craft your turns around him while leaving the opponent wondering: when will he pull the trigger? You have to be careful, though, and factor in how you will develop your board should Gargadon get countered or killed. Do you want to risk flat out losing? Do you really want to sacrifice all your lands so that you will have to rip like a king to start casting spells again?

Without Gargadon, you have a more than admirable force of creatures to go to town with, with Awakening Zone providing a stream of them and Piston Sledge pumping them all to reasonable size (or more).

I really like this deck. It’s an aggressive deck but sometimes it plays like a combo deck. Do I go for it? Where’s that Wellspring I need to start drawing cards? Can I pump my Fiends up to lethal proportions? Do I tap out or leave open Beast Within? There’s a lot of choices involved, which makes it a perfect deck for me.

That, and the aggressive player in me secretly likes bashing. Just plain, good old-fashioned bashing. HAUMPH.

See you next week!

A Murder of Zombies

As is almost a custom with my decks, the final deck didn’t really look a lot like what I envisioned in the beginning. In fact, this Zombie deck started out as a Murder of Crows-deck! Yes, really. Although it had a Zombie-component in Zombie Infestation, the deck was mainly blue. It was a deck that cared about discard, mostly because of Squee, Goblin Nabob. Squee turns discard into a profit. Another big part of that was Vengeful Pharaoh. While its effect is certainly powerful, the card going to the top of your deck can hurt you when you’re digging for another card. That’s where Murder of Crows and Merfolk Looter come in: they ensure you draw more than one card each turn, which always digs you past that Pharaoh waiting atop your library (and as an added bonus, they dump him right back where he belongs – the graveyard his tomb).

Ofcourse, Murder of Crows needs dead flesh to start working. That’s where cards like Stitcher’s Apprentice, Viscera Seer, and even Grimgrin come in. The latter two allow you to sacrifice a creature whenever you please, while Stitcher’s Apprentice can get Murder of Crows going even when you don’t have creatures to spare (make a Homunculus, sac a Homunculus).

What was starting to happen was that the deck became more and more black. You see, Murder of Crows is very distracting. It’s mana cost might make you think it is a blue card, when in fact, it is a black card. It cares about creatures dying and it fills up your graveyard? This could very well have been a twisted necromancer of some sort! So while blue had some decent cards to go with that murder (seriously, Murder of Crows is beyond perfect as a card name – look up how a pack of crows is called and you’ll know why), it was black who had the real stuff. Slowly but surely, a lot of graveyard-related cards entered the deck. Recursive creatures (Rotting Rats, Reassembling Skeleton), more graveyard fillers (Zombie Infestation, Viscera Seer, Corpse Connoisseur), and ofcourse gravedigging (pretty much half of the black cards in existence).

Morbid of Crows

I started this deck like I worked on my previous two decks (Lesson Tree: Teh Jab and The Royal Wave), but as to change things up, I will not go into the process very detailed. I’ll just talk about the direction of the deck, and what each group of changes was trying to accomplish. This deck was struggling for its identity all along the way, and to be frankly, I’m still not entirely sure about the deck. But I’m getting ahead of myself – let’s start at the beginning.

After a few go-rounds with a deck full of singletons, it became clear I was once again trying to do way too much. I was trying to mill cards (mostly to find Squee’s and reanimation- and recursion-targets), discard cards (because of Murder of Crows) and sacrifice creatures (again thanks to Murder of Crows). This was simply too much, and I had test games to figure out what I wanted to do about that. Before I made any real cuts, though, I cut a few cards that were underperforming and added either new cards, or second copies of existing ones. This was a way to further test the ideas that worked at first glance. Furthermore, to test the Squee-Infestation interaction, I needed to get them to four copies each ASAP.

The deck was manifesting itself as more of a Zombie Infestation-deck rather than a Murder of Crows-deck. This meant that the sacrifice aspect was something that could go, although it has a reasonable amount of synergy with Zombie tokens.

Some of the cards I added were cards that supported the discard/selfmill-theme. Rotting Rats was a great way to fill my own yard and that of my opponent – twice. Corpse Connoisseur is a graveyard tutor, often finding a Squee, but also the occasional silver bullet Zombie (with Unholy Grotto in play). I also had Cunning Lethemancer, but once I read that it doesn’t trigger for each player at their own upkeep, my interest quickly dwindled.

The deck was turning out – again – to become a great Forbidden Alchemy-deck. You almost always pick either mana or enchantment, since your creatures and instants/sorceries work just as good from the graveyard. While Alchemy was great and all, Deranged Assistant wasn’t. I thought I really needed the mana, but that was hardly true, so it stuck around longer than it should’ve. The deck turned from a Murder of Crows-deck looking for a comfortable idendity into a Zombie Infestation-deck looking for one.

Too much sac(s)

The push from this deck towards filling the graveyard strangely moved the deck away from sacrifice rather than to it. It used to have either 4 Viscera Seer or 4 Carrion Feeder, but one time I just took them all out. I found my desired angle and I wanted to stick to it. In the end, only Grimgrin remained as a card that needs bodies to feed on, but that was fine. Rarely did Grimgrin stay tapped, since Zombie Infestation is very flexible in making tokens EOT, leaving not much of a window for removal. Also, wasting removal on tokens is something most players dislike, to put it mildly.

If the deck was a roulette table, I made bets of confidence on Unburial Rites and Zombie Infestation, two different lines of play for the deck that work without and with eachother. This gives me a good chance to win a game even if a player manages to block one of those two routes. And if they don’t, they’re likely to face both a lot of Zombies and an unpleasant gigantic critter of some sort. Changes of them winning? About as big as the chance of Squee staying dead forever.

Unburial Rites was a pretty convincing reason to add a few white sources. This made Forbidden Alchemy even better: you can keep a land or something else (say, Zombie Infestation), mill a big guy and Rites, and reanimate the guy next turn (you are ofcourse casting Alchemy EOT).

The deck didn’t just play Zombies, it had a reasonable Zombie tribal theme. Unbreathing Horde likes ‘em, Lord of the Undead does to, and Unholy Grotto is just as happy to pick those Zombies out of their graves. Sadly, Unbreathing Horde didn’t become as good as I thought it could be. Without a card like Buried Alive (a card which I won’t play in a deck with Squee because it’s just so boring), Zombie Infestation is slower than the Horde would like. More on this card below – it’s the one question mark left unanswered.

The Walking Dead Flare – v5.0
Creatures (25)
3 Corpse Connoisseur
1 Grave Titan
2 Grimgrin, Corpse-Born
2 Lord of the Undead
4 Merfolk Looter
4 Rotting Rats
1 Sheoldred, Whispering One
4 Squee, Goblin Nabob
3 Unbreathing Horde
1 Vengeful Pharaoh

Other spells (11)
4 Forbidden Alchemy
3 Unburial Rites
4 Zombie Infestation

Lands (24)
4 Arcane Sanctum
2 Drowned Catacomb
4 Island
2 Nephalia Drownyard
1 Plains
6 Swamp
3 Terramorphic Expanse
2 Unholy Grotto

Strategy talk

Let’s talk strategy now. The list above is, as is usual with my decks, ready to go to battle. First, let’s discuss the one big uncertainty in this deck, and that is the trio of Unbreathing Hordes. It works so good on paper – dead and milled Zombies still boost it, you get a bonus from Zombie tokens too, and Lord of the Undead makes sure it doesn’t ever die (in will eventually become a 1/1 thanks to the Lord, in which case you still prevent damage but don’t remove a counter since there aren’t any). But in practice, oftentimes the Horde just came down as a 4/4 of 5/5, which isn’t impressive (for a creature without evasion). I’m thinking of expanding the reanimation suite (say, one more Grave Titan and the fourth Rites, maybe leave one Hordes in), but I could very well add some more defense in the form of some Armored Skaabs and/or Vengeful Pharaohs. I’ll leave that to some real games to decide.

Without having played any real games with this deck, I feel that it’s biggest strength is its ability to attack on two fronts: with a slowly growing mass of Zombies (how thematic!) on one end and a big reanimated creature on the other. The trick is to know when to move in on one and leave the other be. Luckily, they are both pretty well-connected. Making Zombies doesn’t cost you mana beyond that two mana up-front payment of Zombie Infestation. After that, you’re able to discard and mill away, because both your reanimators and reanimatees work just as well from the graveyard. The best line of play for this deck, I believe, is turn two Infestation, followed by turn 3 EOT Forbidden Alchemy (preferably dumping Unburial Rites and Random Fatty X in the graveyard), then flashing back Rites on turn 4. Ideally, there are some Squee’s involved there as well.

Zombie Infestation is at its best against control, since it’s cheap and just lies there, making Zombies. It’s a bit worse against creature decks, but still good, since your deck is built on making more and more Zombies over time. Each Squee you draw speeds up the process, and there’s enough digging tools in here to make sure you find him. Another great control beat-em-up is Rotting Rats, which should nab a few cards from their hand (although I might add more discard to support the Rats – maybe a reanimation target?).

Overall I’m curious to try it out. It’s been a while since I’ve had a Zombie deck, and I think I’m going to like this one a lot more than my previous one. Although I didn’t succeed in building that Murder of Crows-deck.

See you next week!