MTG Salvation

For those who don't know what Horde magic is the following two links will be helpful: the original outline on Quiet Speculation and the discussion of it on these forums.


To summarise the rules as I see it!
1. Survivors get first THREE turns in a shared style like two-headed giant.

2. Survivors have 20 life per person, the Horde's life is its deck scaling up with 45/69/75/100 for 1/2/3/4 people.

3. The Horde loses if it has no more cards in deck.

4. At the beginning of each Horde turn, flip cards until you see a non-token card. The Horde then must play all the tokens first (not cast) and then play that spell.

5. All creatures the Horde flips over have haste and must attack. If a Horde creature has an activated ability ignore it. If it's a triggered ability choose the target at random.

6. The Horde has infinite mana and can use regeneration abilities as many times as it likes.

That's not too complex right?

There is also a provisional MTGS community banlist, in the second link above.

If you read the Quiet Speculation list provided you might come to the conclusion I did, it's really week and any semi-competitive Commander deck should be able to beat it. I tried to do this in two ways:

1. Up the number of giant tokens so there is a ratio of 3-1 small to giant tokens.

2. Run every lord and avoid running bad creatures for the occassional dud turn.


Here is my list:



Regarding this list there were some difficulties with card acquisition, namely:
1. I wanted another Plague Wind over Damnation, but couldn't get one on short notice. Having played more I would also make it All is Dust and not Damnation.

2. Phyrexian Crusader is anti-synergistic with the deck and should really just be an additional wrath effect, lord or Lightning Reaver.

3. Sutured Ghoul could be cut, due to anti-synergy with Unbreathing Horde, but it hasn't been issue yet.


In the past weekend I went to Grand Prix Brisbane and convinced a couple of friends to play against my Horde deck after a woeful performance on day one. The results weren't much to go on, but it revealed the basic system was flawed.

In game one, the Horde opposed a single Karador deck and was able to swamp him with multiple lords. Lightning Reaver was also amazing. The rules worked fine here.

In game two, I opposed three players, although I used 100 cards and the Horde was against Kaalia of the Vast, Rith, the Awakener and Karador, Ghost Chieftain again. Being given three turns allowed the players to massacre the horde as Rith ramped up with Sakura-Tribe Elder, Solemn Simulacrum and Mirari's Wake and soon Eldrazi were beating face.

We stopped after that as it was pretty lopsided, but the lessons were learnt and to me they are:

1. Do not give the Survivor's three extra turns, two at the most would be fine and perhaps one would still be competitive. The more people there are the worse it scales for the Horde.

2. Pack plenty of wrath effects and potentially tricks like Anathemancer. Eldrazi and fatties are hard to deal with on just a one for one basis.

3. Variance is an issue. Several times I could tell I wouldn't flip any zombies before hitting a real card, so removed it to try ensure at least one zombie hit play and often it was just one of them. I have seen a recommendation for changing rule to until one non-token and two tokens are hit instead of current rules, which would have merrit.

Despite these complaints it was a lot of fun and I will be working on trying to make Horde competition for more than just one person. This is my first blog and I hope to write more here.