Magic The Gathering: The Hilarity of Annoying Green Decks.

So one of my longest lasting hobbies is collecting and playing Magic The Gathering (MTG), I play weekly at a local shop for Friday Night Magic (FNM). I usually play fairly competitive Standard decks, but about a month ago I was starting to get angry with my decks not working the way they should (unlucky draws, etc), so I began making "fun" decks each week and have been playing them for the past three weeks.

For anyone that is unfamiliar with MTG, here is the Wikipedia article.

One of the easiest ways to make a simple/quick deck is with green cards, so the first two decks I made were both mono-green, and were basically just simple, sub-par, "aggro" decks (I make creatures, and then attack my opponent with them to do damage). I actually tried making both of the decks as a single deck to begin with, but it turned out there were two different ideas floating around, so I separated them by the two key cards that I thought made them funny decks, Primal Cocoon, and Timbermaw Larva, each of which never normally see play in competitive Standard.

The Primal Cocoon deck ended up revolving around Omnath, Locus of Mana, Sacred Wolf, Overwhelming Stampede, and a whole bunch of mana producing Elves. The idea was to get a Primal Cocoon or two on a Sacred Wolf and let it sit there for a few turns while I defended myself with Fog and a big Omnath, until I could cast a Stampede and have all my elves get +X/+X for the size of my then enlarged Sacred Wolf. The concept is actually really terrible, since most good control decks won't let me have such a narrow win condition, and good aggro decks are going to kill me before I can get very far. I ended up actually going 2/3 with the deck (I won 2 of 5 rounds), as it turns out, Omnath is very powerful by himself, since he just gets bigger and bigger, and you always have mana available to cast defensive spells, like Fog and Vines of Vastwood.

The second deck, based on Timbermaw Larva, was entirely Forest centric (green basic land). The whole idea was to use cards like Harrow and Cultivate to pull all of my Forests from my library into play, have a Timbermaw Larva in play with a Strata Scythe equipped to it. Then when I attack with the Larva it is huge, and if need be I had a few cards that could give it Trample, if they had creatures to block with. This deck ended up having an even more narrow kill condition, and it actually was a lot slower, since the creature base costed a lot more mana, I think I won a single round that night. I did however discover that Fog is hilarious, and no one likes playing against someone that can cast it over and over (I had started seeing this the previous week, and it really sunk in by this point in time). This got me to start working on the best and worst deck yet!

Last night I played something which was dubbed "Power Fog" by the end of the night by everyone that saw me playing it. Since the previous two weeks I had noticed everyone hated it when I prevented all combat damage they dealt multiple turns in a row, I decided to make a deck that... well, did nothing BUT prevent combat damage, on every single one of their turns. I came up with 7 different cards that prevented damage; Fog, Tanglesap, Blunt the Assault, Harmless Assault, Safe Passage, Haze Frog, and Soul Parry (only prevents from two creatures, but it's cheap). I ended up not running full play-sets of everything, cause there wasn't enough room in the deck, and I needed to actually have a kill condition still. I had originally intended to win purely with Haze Frog, just cause it was funny, but then someone suggested Luminarch Ascension, which was ingenious. I also found Goldenglow Moth, and since it gains you life when it blocks, and not when it takes damage (since you can declare blockers, and then prevent the combat damage with an instant), it is just a constant life-gain, which really helps prolong the game. Finally I got the deck together and started play testing with my roommate, where we immediately noticed that while I could prevent damage for quite awhile, my opponent would build up a massive army and eventually swarm me to death when I was finally out of prevention cards, so I had to add Day of Judgment. We also realized that I had very little way of dealing with direct damage and control decks, so I had to add in Leyline of Sanctity. Finally the deck was about as good as I was probably going to get it (it wasn't, there were a few changes I could've made that I found out about last night, but they were fairly minor). At the tournament I won a single game, not even a round, one game, however, everyone I played against and everyone that was around to watch each of my matches found every game to be hilarious. Mission accomplished.

The problem with the deck was I would eventually run out of cards, since I didn't have any means of gaining card advantage other than Day of Judgement, which isn't a draw spell, and the only possible kill condition was the Luminarch Ascension, which was fairly easy for people to not let me activate, or even have, often times. Still, probably one of the most fun nights I've had at a tournament in awhile :)