Sunday, April 24, 2005
Lightning Sprites
Type 1.5
Fleshing out my collection of Type 1.5 decks with this fast small creature deck. Took the opportunity to put in some cards that I've been wanting to play with and test against, like Blood Moon and Ball Lightning, and some others that are mostly just for fun, like Ghazban Ogre and Fire Sprites. But there is some logic behind those cards. You can't play the Ogres unless you're ahead in life, but with this deck if you're not out in front at the start of the game you're probably gonna loose anyway. Ball Lightning's is an aweful lot of red mana, the Fire Sprites are there to help out. And when you've got Granite Gargoyles flying around an extra red mana never hurt. I guess that's about it. Not a very complicated deck, but plenty of fun.
Hard to Kill
Type 1.5
This deck is a bitch. Despite it's colors (white, artifacts and a touch of blue) it is the antithesis of all things good in deck construction. It leans heavily on card combinations: Mishra's Factory + Consecrate Land = invincible creature, Greater Realm of Preservation + Sleight of Mind = Circle of Protection from anything. It also sucks mana resources, you just can't draw enouh to fuel the Greater Realm, Jade Statues, Mishra's Factories and Jalum Tome.
So what does it have going for it? The 4 Jalum Tomes work nicely in a card combo deck. Playing 4 of them you'll probably draw 1 or 2, but when you draw an extra one the original just recycles it. Same goes for that extra Greater Realm or Slight of Mind. Unfortunately, with the heavy mana dependancy you won't be cycling away extra land very often.
But the bottom line with this deck is that it's really hard to kill. Hard to kill the creatures, they're only vulnerable when you activate them, so they can usually only be killed by instants. (The creatures are also uneffected by your Wrath of Gods.) And it's hard to kill you with what is in essense a circle of protection from 2 of the 3 most damage oriented colors.
Here's my play strategy with this deck. ASAP get up a Greater Realm and Sleight it. Hide behind it while you build up mana resources, Mishra's and Jade Statues. When you're ready, and only when you're ready, clear your opponent's creatures with a Wrath of God and go on the offensive.
Monday, April 18, 2005
Old Man Wolf
Type 1.5
This deck has several roots, most having to do with my trying to make something work that just shouldn't. I enjoy trying to make blue/green work in a type 1.5 or type 2 where those two colors are particularly weak together, lacking direct damage and card destruction cabability.
I have also been trying to make a working poison deck for some time. That is, a deck that kills via 10 poison counters, never via damage. So I found myself trying to crack two deck construction problems at once, poison and blue/green. I built a short lived deck called "Poison Control", using Marsh Vipers and Serpent Generators to poison them to death, and Control Magic, Clones and the like to hold them off and clear the way for my poison guys. It didn't work (of course) but on the way I found a nifty little card that I'd never thought about using before: Old Man of the Sea.
Old Man of the Sea is a 2/3 blue creature for 1. He's kinda neat in that he can steal your opponent's creatures, but only if his power is greater than theirs. But that's fine, we're playing green right? If there's one thing green is good at it's making creatures bigger.
Playtesting is where a number of kinks were worked out and the deck really started to evolve. The first was that, while it's easy enough to Giant Growth an Old Man to be big enough to steal a Sengir Vampire (or whatever), at the end of the turn it goes right back. Two solutions presented themselves, and I ended up using both. The first is to come up with something mean to do to those creatures you steal, so you can keep stealing more. Diamond Valley (sac a creature to gain it's toughness in life) proved just the place to dump the bodies. I also started to explore longer term enhancements for the old man. For example, Aspect of Wolf works better than Giant Growth because the old man can grab something and hold on.
But I generally dislike enchant creature spells. They are the easiest way to make something big fast, it's very easy to lose two cards for one if they kill the creature. Let that happen a couple times and you've lost. So I started looking in to alternatives. At about the same time I found another card, Tracker, that fits perfectly into this theme. He's a 2/2 for 2. For you can tap him to have him exchange damage with a target creature.
When I was in Maine a couple weekends ago my brothers showed me some of the latest magic cards. They have this new kind of artifact called "equipement." They're basically a bunch of pumped up varients on Tawnos's Weaponry, artifacts that enhance creatures in a semi-perminant manner, but don't die when the creature does. Leif uses them to great effect in a thallid deck, basically taking a dispossible 1/1 token creature and blowing it up to large proportions. Then if you kill the token creature he just recycles the equipment onto another token creature. A nice little decentralized threat concept.
So I did it, I actually put Tawnos's Weaponry in a deck, along with a few Giant Growths and Aspect of Wolf. Wyluli Wolf even made a showing, a little green guy that lets you pump up another creature +1/+1. Control Magic and Serendib Efreet give it that power edge it needed to contend with non-gimmick decks, while birds and elves give it the speed edge it needs. If you draw a mana creature in your starting hand you can play just about any card in the deck the second hand (Old Man, Tracker, Serendib). All in all, for a fun blue/green deck it can be rather effective and is just a blast to play.
Saturday, April 16, 2005
Bailey's Oubliette
Type I
Deck image: baileys_oubliette.jpg
Magic has come up in conversations at work only a handful of times (not counting my geeking out at Josh about the computer game). When it does you can almost guarantee the first word out of Jeff's mouth will be, "Oubliette". So, based on that and various other statements here is my best guess at the type of deck he would have played.
Update: I showed my attempt to re-create his deck to Mr. Bailey himself and he managed to remember which cards he actually did play with. Turns out I was only off by 12, not bad out of 60. And he must have been playing back around Unlimited, because when he played there weren't "Artifact Creatures" yet, meaning that a Juggernaut was just an artifact and unaffected by Balance.
Here are the corrections:
-3 Island -3 Swamp -1 Psionic Blast -1 Demonic Tutor -1 Mind Twist -1 Sol Ring
+4 Balance +4 Serendib Efreet +2 White Knight +1 Recall +1 Nightmare
Clearly the numbers aren't adding up, but that's the gist of it. He played with far less mana than I would considering that his deck requires 2 each of all three colors to cast his spells, and didn't play some cards that seem like no brainers, at least they do after they've been restricted. Anyway, I might come back and try to reconcile those extra 2 cards I appear to have left in when I'm less tired, or maybe not. Little slice of MtG history either way.
