New Decks! Red Arti-Sack

My new card desk :)

So I got my box and a few extra packs of New Phyrexia this weekend, time to see what fun decks I can come up with! So far I've got about 4 or 5 new deck ideas that have stacks of cards waiting to be honed into their 60 card line-up. Two have more or less been constructed but still need play-testing to figure out how certain cards actually play out in real gameplay. The second deck I built, which still needs the most work, is a mono-green infect deck that focuses strictly on getting as many cheap infect creatures in play as possible. The key idea here is to have 20 lands, Lead the Stampede and Genesis Wave, and then nothing but infect creatures (8 different play-sets, 32 cards), but more on this in a different post (once I've worked on it a bit more).

Today I am much more excited about a deck I came up with when I started trying to use a combo my brother pointed out to me at one of the pre-release with Immolating Souleater and Assault Strobe. The basic idea here is to play the Souleater on turn 2, and then turn 3 cast Assault Strobe on it (using the remaining one or two mana to buff the Souleater once) and then pay between 14 and 16 life (depending on how much mana you had) to buff the Souleater that much more. Since it has Double Strike it will then deal 20 damage, which is a 3rd turn kill from a two card combo. While this is an amazing combo, it can be rather difficult to ensure that the Souleater will actually hit your opponent safely (no blockers and no creature destruction/burn spells), and since there is obviously a ton of extra room in the deck I had to fill out with ways to deal with my Souleater combo not working.

There are three apparent ways to handle this issue, two making the combo require an extra card, and one just adding more kill conditions. The first improvement can be placed in either of the other two since it doesn't require an extra color and is simple. Here we just add a way to make a creature (or two) unable to block by using Smoldering Spires and/or Panic Spellbomb, either of these can be easily used on third turn to prevent a single creature from blocking the Souleater, and still leaving room for lots of diversity.

Probably the most common way people will use to make this combo better will be to add blue in the deck. Most good players will try to splash blue in almost every deck they make if they can find any excuse at all to do so. The card that will entice everyone will be Distortion Strike, which is already used in blue-black infect, so everyone knows about it. This does not delay the third turn kill, it does require a blue mana and an extra card (but note that it still does not need more than 2 lands). This strategy enables the deck to contain blue control spells and other helpful cards.

The third strategy is what I am going with so far, and that is to add a bunch of artifacts with come into play or goes to graveyard effects and Ferrovore. Now I have a bunch of red/artifact control by using cards like Necropede and Perilous Myr, and card advantage with Ichor Wellspring. I also have a fairly strong secondary kill condition. I decided just having the Ferrovore wasn't enough to guarantee that I would be able to sacrifice artifacts when I needed to, so I added Piston Sledge since it just makes any creature I put it on better and I can always sacrifice it to Ferrovore if I needed to for some reason (if it wasn't equipped and I didn't have any other artifacts in play). Since I have so many artifacts going to the graveyard all the time in longer games I added Slag Fiend as a third kill condition.

I haven't had the chance to play-test my build against an actual deck yet since I've been busy all weekend moving into my new place, but from the solitaire hands I've played out it looks like it is very consistent and always has a lot of card draw and control on the board. I am playing with possibly adding Smoldering Spires and/or Panic Spellbomb to the deck to enhance the possible early game strategy with Souleater, but so far I haven't been able to justify it.

MTG: Play Formats

This weekend I will be attending two New Phyrexia Pre-Release, Sealed tournaments. These are a lot different than the normal FNM tournaments I go to. Today I am going to explain various types of MTG play formats, there are several main types, Vintage (Type 1), Legacy (Type 1.5), Extended (Type 1.x), and Standard (Type 2), there is a list of banned/restricted cards here. There are also some "fun" formats, like Peasant, where you're only allowed to have common (and sometimes uncommon) cards in your deck, Highlander (decks have to be exactly 100 cards, and all cards are restricted), as well as various combinations such as Peasant Highlander, and a special version of Highlander called Elder Dragon Legend (EDH), which has a lot of its own special playing rules.

Normal rulings for most all formats are you are allowed to have 4 of any card that is not a basic land (you can always have as many basic lands as you want/need) unless a card is banned or restricted. If a card is banned you obviously just aren't allowed to play with it, restricted means you can only have one copy of that card in your deck. In formats like Highlander and EDH where all cards except basic lands are restricted you can only ever have one of any card in your deck.

Standard and Extended are the two formats usually used for DCI sanctioned tournaments, this includes FNM and larger tournaments (such as Regionals and State). Usually Standard is used for FNM, and as of late Extended has been used in the bigger tournaments. Standard allows cards from the latest core set, the most recent block to be fully released, and the block that is currently being released (set blocks are usually made up of 3 sets, released in the Fall, Winter, and Spring). Each year when the new core set is printed the previous one becomes banned (except for cards that were reprinted in the new core set, which is very common), and when the first set of the next block is printed in the Fall the older of the two current blocks that are legal becomes banned. There is always one core set, one complete block, and between 1 and 3 sets from the currently printing block that are legal in Standard. Extended works the same way as Standard, except that it includes one extra core set, and an additional 5 blocks (backwards, chronologically, not just random sets/blocks).

"Coin Flip" decks: RDW

Flipping coins to win! There are actually decks that revolve around this, a friend of mine had a pretty fun one, they revolve around cards like Desperate Gambit, and as the name suggests, relies heavily on luck. There is a card that increases your chances with the flips, Krark's Thumb, but other than that it's pretty much just dumb luck. Regardless of the amount of fun flipping coins and hoping to win is, I didn't mean it quite that literally. I commented that I play a deck called "RDW" (Red Deck Wins), and sometimes it functions extremely like a coin flip deck. The difference comes on what you get lucky with, instead of flipping a coin you're relying on getting a good opening hand and having the next couple cards be helpful.

In an RDW deck (and somewhat with other fast-paced aggro decks) the idea is to win by turn 3 or 4, if you can't win by then you're probably going to lose. Now remember real "coin flip" decks had Krark's Thumb to increase their chances (effectively doubled exponentially for every Krark's Thumb in play actually), normal decks have another way of increasing their chances of winning their coin flip, have a simple win condition, and play lots of cards that do the same thing. With RDW in particular this is fairly easy since it only needs two things really, as many small creatures in play as possible, and a way to increase their effective attack power. OK, so one more thing, speed, everything must be very cheap to play (mana-wise). Well it's Red, so we automatically get cheap creatures, Goblins, so we're already off to a great start, then we can look at artifacts and we get Memnite and Ornithopter, those are FREE! Since we added some artifacts we get another bonus, Kuldotha Rebirth, now we can turn that Ornithopter into three 1/1 Goblins, all on turn one.

Alright, so we have fast cheap creatures, now we just need a way to increase their Power... it used to be the only real way we had to do this was with Goblin Bushwhacker, which is amazing, because those three 1/1 Goblins we had on turn one are now four Goblins that are all 2/1 and can attack on turn two! This isn't quite enough though, remember what I said about playing lots of the same card. Unfortunately there aren't any other cards that do the same thing as Goblin Bushwhacker, but we do get a new mechanic as of Mirrodin Besieged, Battle Cry. Battle Cry is a mechanic on creatures that says "when this creature attacks all other attacking creatures get +1/+0", so now we have something very similar to Goblin Bushwhacker on cards like Signal Pest and Goblin Wardriver.

So now we have 6 cards that you want play sets of, there's room for 4 more play sets, two go to Goblin Guide and Goblin Warchief. The other two should go to burn cards to keep your opponents board clear. (I use Lightning Bolt and Forked Bolt.) After that it's all about figuring out exactly how many lands you want and maybe having an extra creature or two.

I played my RDW deck at the last FNM, took 3rd place, someone else I know was playing a deck almost identical to mine, he lost almost every round. What it really comes down to is "shuffle shuffle shuffle - 'Did I get a good hand?!' - if you did, yay you win, if not, mulligan and hope for better luck, or just hope their deck is REALLY SLOW". A few games I let someone get up to 6 mana, yeah I lost.