I know there are a lot of people here who have created spectacular Homebrew decks which 'wowed' a few good players in their local tournaments.
This thread is to showcase your story. The deck that made your day. This doesn't have to be some big deck that viraled through the interwebz.
My stories:
Back in Time Spiral / Lorwyn standard. Eventide is not yet released. I played a Regionals Tournament in which I brought my homebrew Snow Ramp Corrupt deck.
The top decks at the time were, if I remember correctly: R/G Ramp, U/B Fae, U/W/x Reveillark and RDW.
My deck was G/B, in which the Green had mana-ramp, recursion and Garruk Wildspeaker and the Black was all about Damnation, Tendrils of Corruption, Corrupt.
I won every game until 4-0 (8-0-0 Games) and my deck has become the talk of the tournament. We sat down to our 5th match and I played vs. R/G Ramp (he also 4-0'ed) in which I won game one very easily, but slowly. By this time, about 10 people started to crowd our table to watch our game. I was unfortunate that I lost 1-2 in the end to him drawing 7 out of a possible 8 Chameleon Colossus spanning those games. Afterwards people (top South African Players) asked me for the decklist because they were fascinated at how it worked.
I didn't qualify for Nationals as I lost the next match 2-0 to U/B Fae and I edged out of the invitations by one spot, sigh.
I have two more stories but I'll leave it for later, please share your awesome homebrew decks that wowed the day.
I became known as the local brewmaster for a bit... two decks shine for me...
A friend of mine pointed out a neat interaction between Gaea's Blessing and Mesmeric Orb. I slapped together this fun W/G Mill deck and ran with it. So things like Ghostly Prison, Eternal Witness, Terravore (because everyone runs lands), some flashback cards, and a Worship/Pristine Angel lock for good measure. One day I walk into the shop and they were getting together a Legacy tournament, so I thought WTH? There were some pretty good players involved and at the time Dredge wasn't on the radar so graveyard hate wasn't an issue... so I entered. And swept the thing with my janky WHITE AND GREEN MILL DECK. People were blown away by it, and supremely frustrated by it. Needless to say, I retired the thing once Dredge became popular and graveyard hate was more of an issue. This was also before Tarmagoyf. When he was spoiled I almost put it back together using him, but then thought "why bother." Had I done so, I would have ended up paying about $10 for a playset at prerelease...
Second deck... CHK/RAV Standard. It was pre-Ghost Dad and I had this dream (literally) about using a silly little token/Nantuko Husk deck abusing Natural Affinity. I threw the deck together and did really well with it, even beating some local pros with the brew. Memorable moments... causing the Heartbeat player to scoop game two because he had no answer for me using the Heartbeat to ramp into a Grave Pact/Natural Affinity interaction. They didn't have many creatures in the deck, so every land I would sac to the Husk, they'd have to sac a land... In some casual testing I ran up against a Tooth and Nail player who dropped a Darksteel Colossus. I ended up swinging with my 22/22 trampling husk next turn and he was forced to CHUMP with it. Still killed him as well!
I spent hours and hours making a really good Shape Anew/Blightsteel Colossus deck prior to the MBS release, without spoiling myself and the whole nine yards. Thought I was really onto something. Then the Fat Pack was released, and that combo was right there in the book.
The first was Kawagama/Rav Std season and everyone was playing heartbeat or zoo in my area. I built a BUG deck that had many faces. It played snakes for a massive army, Natuko husk to eat said army and get huge, and crafty pathmage to make husk unblockable. All of it protected with counters and removal. I won a couple local tournaments with it.
My second deck was built for my son for a local tourament. This was during Rav/TSP standard season. Future sight had just came out and pickles, Dranlu, and teachings were all the rage. We built a deck around Goyf (at the time no one thought anything of him) and watchwolf and surrounded them with control/counter magic. He destroyed the field. He lost 1 game all day. Many of the better players at the tournament asked for deck list.
So, let me start by saying that about 90% of my homebrew decks started with "I want to try to play MonoBlack with Corrupt" (and, since TSP, Tendrils of Corruption).
Most of them never really went anywhere, but some of them worked out quite decently.
My favorite one was actually an Extended Pauper deck (new Extended, TSP onwards). BW Nightsky Mimic was a competitive deck in this format. I decided to make my version of it - a "MonoBlack BW", allowing me to play Tendrils of Corruption and a consistent manabase, while still having a lot of spells and creatures to trigger the Mimic and make use of the aura.
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During TSP/LOR Standard I was really tired of playing against Reveillark and Faeries all of the time. I made a UR snow mana ramp/control deck that used cards like Sower of Temptation/Threaten to steak their dudes and Greater Gargadon/Perilous Research as sac outlets. The best part was ME getting the Reveillark trigger when I Threatened a Reveillark and sac'd it, getting to bring back more of my own Sowers and Mulldrifters.
I homebrew quite a few, but the one that stands out the most was my Titan Replicate deck. It took me to 4th place overall out of 40 at our FNM. I ran Titans and Rite of Replication that I kicked. I beat Mythic Conscription and a couple of other Top Tier decks at that time.
I haven't been able to replicate those results since (see what I did there!)...
One FNM, I took a red/blue Darksteel Colossus/Proteus Staff deck that ran Wand of Elements and Guardian Idol as staff targets (instead of the typical blue/white version). I ended up taking second place out of about 30 people and since I was about 14 at the time, I felt pretty baller.
The second time was more recent. Right after Scars of Mirrodin came out, I built a black/green control deck that took 5th out about 40. It was all ramp, discard, creature kill, and Grave Titan/Gaea's Revenge as finishers.
It was a good test of other peoples' rules knowledge and threat evaluation. Mostly, they failed at it. Some moments:
Burning out a Millfolk deck with Mogg Fanatic with no cards in library and a Mulldrifter trigger on the stack.
Another rogue player running a Forced Fruition deck. I had been doing very little up to his turn 6 (my multiple Damnation draw being useless here) and figured he'd be safe tapping out for a turn as I only had Deathrender and a Birds of Paradise in play. So I cast the Damnation to draw 7, render in Gravedigger, get back and replay a Husk to draw another 7 and go infinite.
Playing against a U/W Lark deck, he managed to bounce the wrong permanent on a critical turn. Then I had to explain to him how Husk+Deathrender+Twilight Shepherd was infinite. He ended up calling the TO over to confirm.
TO: What's goin on?
Me: Husk, Deathrender, Twilight Shepherd, sac Shepherd, resolve persist first before Deathrender trigger, after it persists - in response to Twilight Shepherd ETB trigger, sacrifice it again, Shepherd trigger returns itself from GY to my hand, Deathrender resolves puting Shepherd back into play.
Him: Does that even work?
TO: Yep. Sorry bro, you're dead.
I rarely played in tournaments so 90% of my decks were casual decks.
My favorite deck that I made was a R/G/W infinite combo deck utilizing Aluren, Furious Assault, and a gating creature. The basic concept was get the Aluren out first. That makes everyone happy. Then play the Assault. The only creatures I showed were elves, so the opponents didn't think too much of it. I then cast Orim's Chant on the counter player or, if there were none, on the removal player. Then I start to go infinite by gating the Kavu orFleetfoot Panther.
My other favorite deck was a W/B build utilizing Darkest Hour and Light of Day. It works because my playgroup were mostly Timmies and I was the only Johnny. I supplemented the deck with Northern Paladin (for removal) and Aurora Griffin (allowing me to attack unblocked). Also ran a mini-moving Massacre with Urborg Shambler (just in case of elves).
When I quit the game, I sold my Gating Assault deck to one of the guys for $100. The deck was great to play with and also made me money.
I am know as the master of vampires at my FNM because I build a vamp deck in M10 and hated the idea of so many spells so I threw 30 creatures in it and took first two weeks in a row due to the sheer amount of quick drops when a noctunus his plat it was game over. After he rotated out I redid the deck and made it sac vamps using bloodghasts with blade of the bloodchief, pawn of ulamog, and bloodthrone vampire and took first with that a couple times stopped playing it and a couple months later the deck took like 4th in a major tournament and one of my friends walked up to me and was like "Dude somebody is playing your deck!"
I started a little after rise of eldrazi came out.
my new LGS had a few very competitave player that if i remember correctly ran jund. ( I hate that deck).
I got a foil aura gnarlid so i bought the totem power deck to go along with it.
I ended up with a green and white deck that had stuff like loam lion and mul daya channalers for early game and ramp.
My kill card was my 4 aura gnarlids.
Theres nothingl like watching the jund player loose to an aura gnarlid enchanted with eldrazi concription.
I miss my deck....
Playing against a U/W Lark deck, he managed to bounce the wrong permanent on a critical turn. Then I had to explain to him how Husk+Deathrender+Twilight Shepherd was infinite. He ended up calling the TO over to confirm.
TO: What's goin on?
Me: Husk, Deathrender, Twilight Shepherd, sac Shepherd, resolve persist first before Deathrender trigger, after it persists - in response to Twilight Shepherd ETB trigger, sacrifice it again, Shepherd trigger returns itself from GY to my hand, Deathrender resolves puting Shepherd back into play.
Him: Does that even work?
TO: Yep. Sorry bro, you're dead.
Heh, very nice. I would have assumed the most challenging part of the combo would be assembling everything into play, but getting people to actually figure out what the hell was going on must have been harder.
Back when Nova Chaser was type 2 I had made what I called Machine Gun Elementals at my LGS
My deck could reliably go Turn 1: Harbinger, Turn Two: Smokebraider Turn Three: Soulstoke Turn 4: Nova Chaser from Soulstoke onto the Harbinger, Swing, EOT tutor up another Nova Chaser. If I was feeling really dirty it'd be Supreme Exemplar. The deck shifted into a mid-range build out of the sideboard with things like Timbermare and Verdant Force. It surprised quite a few people in my playgroup. Of course with the advent of faeries it went down-hill like mostly anything else that Faeries got their little claws into for a while.
A couple months back before the bannings I was back at my old stomping grounds and made a Jund Ramp deck (RBG) with was basically a bunch of ramp spells Cultivate, Explore, Garruk and Titans (Grave, Inferno) & Wurmcoil Engine since I refused to buy Primeval. The only deck that beat me all night was the guy playing RUG Control who eventually won the FNM. 95% of the time you could drop a turn 4-5 titan unimpeded. Also had about 15-20 people watch me play it at the New Phyrexia regional pre-release before I took down Tom Lapille (Gunslinger), for the second time.
I used to play a u/g deck during mirrodin block with 4 bop, 4 troll ascetic, 4 thieving magpie, 4 eternal witness, 4 echoing truth, 2 sword of fire and ice, and 2 umezawa's jitte. I would actually use echoing truth to bounce multiple copies of eternal witness and get back echoing truth. It was a blast.
Back when Scars of Mirrodin was brand spanking new, I went a little crazy, and ran a B\W Controlled Infection deck. It was the nuts! I had been out of the game for a few months, since I was waiting on SoM to release, and when I came back I forgot about Eldrazi ramp being good, so I lost to that. Everything else was a cakewalk. I took 2nd at the event because of loss, and I learned just HOW good Tectonic Edge is on that very day. Then the format stabilized and the deck took a dive. I wonder if I could reprise it and make it awesome post rotation...
My favorite brainchild ever was a deck I called "Endless Dominion."
The basic premise was to tinker a Gilded Lotus into play ASAP, then abuse it via Twiddle/Dream's Grip to make a bunch of mana to cast Eye of the Storm. Once you have a Twiddle on Eye of the Storm, things get crazy. The deck was full of cheap one-shot draw/dig effects, so once you got this set up you could cast a TON of spells in one turn.
Now comes the fun part. Cast Mind's Desire. Your storm count will be humongous and your hand full of cheap spells to continually feed Eye of the Storm until you've exiled your entire library.
60 copies of Pull from Eternity brings all the cards you exiled via Eye of the Storm and Mind's Desire back from exile and dumps them in your graveyard. Then, Sway of the Stars shuffles all permanents, hands, and graveyards into their owner's libraries. Then Temporal Cascade shuffles each player's hand into his or her library. Finally, you resolve all the copies of Eternal Dominion.
Congratulations! You just reset the game, except that you happen to start with every permanent in every opponent's deck in play under your control.
It may be the most convoluted and easily-disrupted combo ever, but the sheer audacity it takes to even try to pull off an epic win like that is well worth the effort. It actually worked the very first time I tried it, too!
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This thread is to showcase your story. The deck that made your day. This doesn't have to be some big deck that viraled through the interwebz.
My stories:
Back in Time Spiral / Lorwyn standard. Eventide is not yet released. I played a Regionals Tournament in which I brought my homebrew Snow Ramp Corrupt deck.
The top decks at the time were, if I remember correctly: R/G Ramp, U/B Fae, U/W/x Reveillark and RDW.
My deck was G/B, in which the Green had mana-ramp, recursion and Garruk Wildspeaker and the Black was all about Damnation, Tendrils of Corruption, Corrupt.
I won every game until 4-0 (8-0-0 Games) and my deck has become the talk of the tournament. We sat down to our 5th match and I played vs. R/G Ramp (he also 4-0'ed) in which I won game one very easily, but slowly. By this time, about 10 people started to crowd our table to watch our game. I was unfortunate that I lost 1-2 in the end to him drawing 7 out of a possible 8 Chameleon Colossus spanning those games. Afterwards people (top South African Players) asked me for the decklist because they were fascinated at how it worked.
I didn't qualify for Nationals as I lost the next match 2-0 to U/B Fae and I edged out of the invitations by one spot, sigh.
I have two more stories but I'll leave it for later, please share your awesome homebrew decks that wowed the day.
A friend of mine pointed out a neat interaction between Gaea's Blessing and Mesmeric Orb. I slapped together this fun W/G Mill deck and ran with it. So things like Ghostly Prison, Eternal Witness, Terravore (because everyone runs lands), some flashback cards, and a Worship/Pristine Angel lock for good measure. One day I walk into the shop and they were getting together a Legacy tournament, so I thought WTH? There were some pretty good players involved and at the time Dredge wasn't on the radar so graveyard hate wasn't an issue... so I entered. And swept the thing with my janky WHITE AND GREEN MILL DECK. People were blown away by it, and supremely frustrated by it. Needless to say, I retired the thing once Dredge became popular and graveyard hate was more of an issue. This was also before Tarmagoyf. When he was spoiled I almost put it back together using him, but then thought "why bother." Had I done so, I would have ended up paying about $10 for a playset at prerelease...
Second deck... CHK/RAV Standard. It was pre-Ghost Dad and I had this dream (literally) about using a silly little token/Nantuko Husk deck abusing Natural Affinity. I threw the deck together and did really well with it, even beating some local pros with the brew. Memorable moments... causing the Heartbeat player to scoop game two because he had no answer for me using the Heartbeat to ramp into a Grave Pact/Natural Affinity interaction. They didn't have many creatures in the deck, so every land I would sac to the Husk, they'd have to sac a land... In some casual testing I ran up against a Tooth and Nail player who dropped a Darksteel Colossus. I ended up swinging with my 22/22 trampling husk next turn and he was forced to CHUMP with it. Still killed him as well!
Trade thread - not up to date
The first was Kawagama/Rav Std season and everyone was playing heartbeat or zoo in my area. I built a BUG deck that had many faces. It played snakes for a massive army, Natuko husk to eat said army and get huge, and crafty pathmage to make husk unblockable. All of it protected with counters and removal. I won a couple local tournaments with it.
My second deck was built for my son for a local tourament. This was during Rav/TSP standard season. Future sight had just came out and pickles, Dranlu, and teachings were all the rage. We built a deck around Goyf (at the time no one thought anything of him) and watchwolf and surrounded them with control/counter magic. He destroyed the field. He lost 1 game all day. Many of the better players at the tournament asked for deck list.
Most of them never really went anywhere, but some of them worked out quite decently.
My favorite one was actually an Extended Pauper deck (new Extended, TSP onwards). BW Nightsky Mimic was a competitive deck in this format. I decided to make my version of it - a "MonoBlack BW", allowing me to play Tendrils of Corruption and a consistent manabase, while still having a lot of spells and creatures to trigger the Mimic and make use of the aura.
The snow mana was for Skred (amazing btw).
The deck lost pretty hard to RDW but had surprisingly decent match ups versus any non red deck.
The Saga of Arkay
I haven't been able to replicate those results since (see what I did there!)...
heavy discard deck which wins by Rout+kicker at my enemy EOD and then desolation angel+kicker in my turn.
Wrath of God + Rout + discard 2 cards effect ; guarantees a lot of card advantage.
One FNM, I took a red/blue Darksteel Colossus/Proteus Staff deck that ran Wand of Elements and Guardian Idol as staff targets (instead of the typical blue/white version). I ended up taking second place out of about 30 people and since I was about 14 at the time, I felt pretty baller.
The second time was more recent. Right after Scars of Mirrodin came out, I built a black/green control deck that took 5th out about 40. It was all ramp, discard, creature kill, and Grave Titan/Gaea's Revenge as finishers.
http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=353661
4 Birds of Paradise
2 Deadwood Treefolk
4 Gravedigger
1 Faceless Butcher
2 Gutless Ghoul
1 Mogg Fanatic
4 Mulldrifter
4 Nantuko Husk
1 Reveillark
1 Twilight Shepherd
4 Damnation
4 Into the North
Artifacts
4 Deathrender
2 Prismatic Lens
Lands
1 Arctic Flats
1 Frost Marsh
1 Highland Weald
4 Llanowar Wastes
3 Shimmering Grotto
5 Snow-Covered Forest
2 Snow-Covered Island
1 Snow-Covered Swamp
3 Underground River
1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
It was a good test of other peoples' rules knowledge and threat evaluation. Mostly, they failed at it. Some moments:
Burning out a Millfolk deck with Mogg Fanatic with no cards in library and a Mulldrifter trigger on the stack.
Another rogue player running a Forced Fruition deck. I had been doing very little up to his turn 6 (my multiple Damnation draw being useless here) and figured he'd be safe tapping out for a turn as I only had Deathrender and a Birds of Paradise in play. So I cast the Damnation to draw 7, render in Gravedigger, get back and replay a Husk to draw another 7 and go infinite.
Playing against a U/W Lark deck, he managed to bounce the wrong permanent on a critical turn. Then I had to explain to him how Husk+Deathrender+Twilight Shepherd was infinite. He ended up calling the TO over to confirm.
TO: What's goin on?
Me: Husk, Deathrender, Twilight Shepherd, sac Shepherd, resolve persist first before Deathrender trigger, after it persists - in response to Twilight Shepherd ETB trigger, sacrifice it again, Shepherd trigger returns itself from GY to my hand, Deathrender resolves puting Shepherd back into play.
Him: Does that even work?
TO: Yep. Sorry bro, you're dead.
My favorite deck that I made was a R/G/W infinite combo deck utilizing Aluren, Furious Assault, and a gating creature. The basic concept was get the Aluren out first. That makes everyone happy. Then play the Assault. The only creatures I showed were elves, so the opponents didn't think too much of it. I then cast Orim's Chant on the counter player or, if there were none, on the removal player. Then I start to go infinite by gating the Kavu orFleetfoot Panther.
My other favorite deck was a W/B build utilizing Darkest Hour and Light of Day. It works because my playgroup were mostly Timmies and I was the only Johnny. I supplemented the deck with Northern Paladin (for removal) and Aurora Griffin (allowing me to attack unblocked). Also ran a mini-moving Massacre with Urborg Shambler (just in case of elves).
When I quit the game, I sold my Gating Assault deck to one of the guys for $100. The deck was great to play with and also made me money.
my new LGS had a few very competitave player that if i remember correctly ran jund. ( I hate that deck).
I got a foil aura gnarlid so i bought the totem power deck to go along with it.
I ended up with a green and white deck that had stuff like loam lion and mul daya channalers for early game and ramp.
My kill card was my 4 aura gnarlids.
Theres nothingl like watching the jund player loose to an aura gnarlid enchanted with eldrazi concription.
I miss my deck....
RBUThraximundarUBRRUNiv-Mizzet, the FiremindUR
BWGhost Council of OrzhovaWBWUBRGChild of AlaraGRBUW
WBRKaalia of the VastRBWGBSapling of ColfenorGB
Heh, very nice. I would have assumed the most challenging part of the combo would be assembling everything into play, but getting people to actually figure out what the hell was going on must have been harder.
At a recent FNM, I played a GRu Mass Polymorph/Furnace Celebration deck with Awakening Zone as the centerpiece. One of my opponents seemed impressed when I got Iona, Shield of Emeria, Emrakul, the Aeons Torn, and Terastodon into play all at once. I guess that's what happens when you Polymorph for 3 with 3 creatures in your deck.
My deck could reliably go Turn 1: Harbinger, Turn Two: Smokebraider Turn Three: Soulstoke Turn 4: Nova Chaser from Soulstoke onto the Harbinger, Swing, EOT tutor up another Nova Chaser. If I was feeling really dirty it'd be Supreme Exemplar. The deck shifted into a mid-range build out of the sideboard with things like Timbermare and Verdant Force. It surprised quite a few people in my playgroup. Of course with the advent of faeries it went down-hill like mostly anything else that Faeries got their little claws into for a while.
Hot Japanese Cards! http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=312961
The basic premise was to tinker a Gilded Lotus into play ASAP, then abuse it via Twiddle/Dream's Grip to make a bunch of mana to cast Eye of the Storm. Once you have a Twiddle on Eye of the Storm, things get crazy. The deck was full of cheap one-shot draw/dig effects, so once you got this set up you could cast a TON of spells in one turn.
Now comes the fun part. Cast Mind's Desire. Your storm count will be humongous and your hand full of cheap spells to continually feed Eye of the Storm until you've exiled your entire library.
Once your entire library has been exiled by Mind's Desire, cast Eternal Dominion, but while it is on the stack, stack as many copies of Twincast on it that you care to cast. Then, use copies of Quicken to stack the following spells in order: Temporal Cascade, Sway of the Stars, and 60 copies of Pull from Eternity.
When the stack resolves this is what happens:
60 copies of Pull from Eternity brings all the cards you exiled via Eye of the Storm and Mind's Desire back from exile and dumps them in your graveyard. Then, Sway of the Stars shuffles all permanents, hands, and graveyards into their owner's libraries. Then Temporal Cascade shuffles each player's hand into his or her library. Finally, you resolve all the copies of Eternal Dominion.
Congratulations! You just reset the game, except that you happen to start with every permanent in every opponent's deck in play under your control.
It may be the most convoluted and easily-disrupted combo ever, but the sheer audacity it takes to even try to pull off an epic win like that is well worth the effort. It actually worked the very first time I tried it, too!