MTG Salvation

In 2013, I saw some card sleeves for Game of Thrones, HBO's adaptation of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. Although I'd no prior plans to do so, I immediately built a deck each for House Stark and House Lannister.

The BATMAN vs JOKER duel decks presented here have a similar genesis. My friendly local game store was selling card sleeves with a creative representation of the Joker on them (with the Joker's face made up by a colony of bats in flight) and I thought, "Huh, maybe I'll make a Joker deck."

After a few days idly thinking about the right commander to represent the Joker, I decided to go by the colors of the Joker's color palette, G and v. Um... Oh, that's right, there's no violet in Magic. Quickly, I thought back to preschool: What colors mixed together create violet? And with that, I'd found my second and third colors, R and U. That left one choice for a commander, really, Riku of Two Reflections.

I do a fair amount of research for all of my theme decks. Delving deeper into the Batman mythos, there were plenty of references to the yin and yang relationship between the Joker and Batman. That got me thinking even more. Why don't I create a deck for Batman, too? Riku's colors, my own penchant for puns, and the codependent hero-villain relationship between Batman and the Joker made Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter a shoo-in to represent the Dark Knight. W and B complete the Magic color pie and nothing says, "Batman" like a brooding vampire.

Thinking about the two characters as both reflections (heh) and opposites of one another, I concluded that each deck would be commander-centric, with the Joker deck focused on nonpermanent spells and the Batman deck focused on permanent spells. Huh, nonpermanents, eh? Can we say, "SPELLSLINGER!"? But, which spells to sling? Since there are no violet spells in the game, I elected to go with as many cards as possible. That got me thinking about going all in on a multicolor mechanical subtheme. So I did, with spells like Cloven Casting, Pyroconvergence, and Urza's Filter (a great card to reduce commander tax). The Joker deck multiplies the mayhem, with many Fork effects.

Now, what to do about the Batman deck? Batman's utility belt and all of Batman's other gadgets are iconic emblems of the franchise. Gadgets, gadgets, hmmm. Equipment! Yup, the Batman deck would be straight up VOLTRON. I only chose equipment that matched up with actual tools used by Batman in the comics, television series, and films, such as the Batmobile, their grappling hook, and the Batwing. (Why give Vish Kal flying? 'Cos their armor's really heavy.)

I took a few other flavorful details into account with both decks. Each deck features Eldrazi to recycle spells, one for retroactive continuity and another for the never ending stories. Since the two decks are meant to square off against each other, and since neither character wants to kill the other, there are no spells with the words, "Destroy target creature," or "Destroy all creatures." Instead, the creature hate is restricted to things like lashing out and watching the world burn, or just being arrested and serving a lengthy prison term. Since our villain and hero are not invulnerable, there are no cards to grant them hexproof, indestructible, protection, or anything of the like. Likewise, no vigilance. Wanton destruction and crimefighting are exhausting! Also, with Batman wanting to clean up Gotham, their deck gets Ghost Quarter, whereas the Joker deck gets Strip Mine.

Finally, given how dark and gloomy it always seems in Gotham City, the Batman deck contains no Plains cards. This was intentional. The difficulty casting the deck's W removal spells was no accident. After all, the Joker's slippery!

The Joker deck is spellslinger combo and the Batman deck is equipment Voltron. Both decks are capable of comboing out for the win if necessary.