MTG Salvation

This is a more specific continuation of this thread.

I've thrown together an initial attempt at a decklist. At the time of posting, this hasn't even been put together, much less tested. For the purposes of constructing this deck, I'm limiting myself to Scards block and M12, so that I don't have to redesign come October unless Innistrad has something juicy.



Wincon: Darksteel Plate + Worldslayer + Creature (or drop the plate if the creature is Darksteel Juggernaut). Mental Misstep to stop my opponent doing anything with the 1 mana he might drop on his turn.

Buried Ruin to help get artifacts back that I've lost. Puresteel Paladin or Brass Squire helps get the high-cost equip out of the way. In order to help guarantee the Paladin's metalcraft, I've added extra artifacts. Since I hope to have a decent chance at metalcraft anyway, Etched Champion seemed a good choice (built-in evasion to hit with Worldslayer), and Dispatch becomes the best removal in the game if I have metalcraft (even better than StP and path, since they won't get life or a land). Hero of Bladehold will hit for 7 each turn after slaying the field if she's the slayer.

Pacifism and Dispatch (with or without metalcraft) helps clear a path for my Worldslayer creature, and if I've got indestructible creature(s) anyway, Day is perfect. (I would have used Oblivion Ring over or in addition to Pacifism, but Worldslayer would nuke my O-ring, giving my opponent their exiled permanent back.)

My one beef is not getting Worldslayer onto the field until turn 5, with no ramp and no Stoneforge Mystic. I've considered splashing Green for Rampant Growth. Something along these lines:


I'm looking forward to suggestions for how I can abuse Worldslayer better, how to improve on this deck idea. Is it worth splashing for Rampant Growth, is there a better strategy for ramping out Worldslayer and a creature to attach it to? Is there a better color than white to do this job?

Maybe, but if I want to try and make this standard, I'd like to future-proof it a little bit, limiting myself to Scars block and M12. I'd rather not redesign the deck in just a couple months, especially if there end up being cards I need to go buy as singles.

Also, if I'm running Puresteels for the metalcraft ability, I need a sufficient density of artifacts to trigger it. I'm also thinking mono-white with this, plus 4x Mental Misstep in case they do something like drop an island and Unsummon or Steel Sabotage, which would effectively set the game back to turn 1 (Kaaaaarn!). Buried Ruin seems good for retrieving a Worldslayer that gets dumped before I can use it, and Day of Judgement seems good for a deck that's willing to wipe the board, and intends to have indestructible creatures.


Is there any good way to get Worldslayer out before turn 5, though? The great part about Stoneforge was being able to drop an uncounterable equipment on turn 3 without any ramp at all. I suppose I could splash green for Rampant Growth; would that be at all worthwhile?

...

And at this point I think I'm getting too far into deck construction strategy, just short of posting a decklist. I'll move to a subforum.

Worldslayer

I really want to figure out how to abuse this card, because it's just a little nutty, but on its own it doesn't leave you any better off than your opponent.

My first thought was ripping apart a Cawblade deck and dropping in a few copies of Eldrazi Monument, to play right before hitting your opponent with the equipped creature. Your creatures live, the monument is destroyed, and you don't have to start sacrificing things. Then just continue wailing on the opponent as they desperately try to set up.

I threw together a hastily-crafted version of that, but even with Stoneforge Mystic it wasn't really fast enough; I keep wanting to equip the sword and cast the monument on the same turn, which I never had the mana for. And, of course, Stoneforge is banned from standard, so that strategy won't build a Standard deck. And a lot of that idea is rotating out of Standard soon, anyway.

My mind has turned to a single creature equipped with Darksteel Plate, rather than an army of creatures protected once by Eldrazi Monument. Swing with the one creature each turn, blowing up whatever they try to lay down to defend themselves. Stick in Mental Misstep since they'll be limited to 1 CMC anyway after the first hit with the sword.

Any suggestions on ways to abuse it? Any good way to get it into play on the cheap (replacing Stoneforge)? What about equipping on the cheap with Brass Squire or Puresteel Paladin? Perhaps stick Worldslayer on a Darksteel Juggernaut and just force the startegy to occurr whether I want it to or not.

Quote from ovid

i just don't think it's enough at the moment to go mono black because the boosts are in green... as a standalone set... this (SoM) feels like a pretty bland "mercadian masques" set in comparison to the zendikar madness we had last time.

I run mono-black infect with Adventuring Gear for pumps (plus landfall package, of course). It does decently well, though I haven't tried it at a tournament. Adventuring Gear will be rotating out, but if you want to continue a mono-black infect through Innistrad, it really depends on what Innistrad has, which we know very little about. I don't think it has too big a problem right now, though.

Quote from sober_leprechaun

The Glimmervoid! Radiate is hilarious every time!

Love Glimmervoid Basin! The last time I played a game that landed me there, I used Recollect and just put my graveyard into my hand.

(It was a comparatively small graveyard and a small hand to start with, so I only ended up with 9 or 10 cards after the Recollect, but even so it was funny.)


I also like Sanctum of Serra, especially if I'm behind in the game. The potential to push your life back to 20, and to Wrath the field is great.

Quote from Diminished Returns

So the question is: How hard/expensive is it to find some sets of the over-sized plane cards? I looked on eBay and there were some lots (and full sets) for various prices, but I would be interested in just getting about 20 so that I could play with one friend and then decide from there if I want to pursue more.

I gave a cursory look at the marketplace here and didn't see any for sale/trade. . . Does Wizards still make these cards?

AFAIK, they're not being made any more, same for Archenemy (and soon/already, Commander). Personally, I purchased my Planechase stuff at Troll & Toad; $20/box (10 Planar cards plus 60-card deck), or $79 for all 4 together. Then I bought Horizon Boughs, Tember City, Celestine Reef, Mirrored Depths, and Tezeem (the promo-only planar cards) as singles, IIRC from SCG for $5-7, but it might have gone up since then.

I don't know from personal experience, but I assume if you can find singles or lots of the other planar cards, it'd be cheaper (or cheaper per card) than the promos.

Quote from TheWillRogers

i'll have to disagree.
vs
gonna have to go with the pre-release, it's a far more epic shot and it doesn't look like something i see Saturday morning on a For-Kids cartoon.
also, emo hair? WTF is with that?

I'll go with the regular art, cuz then it matches my oversized version

(then again, I missed the prerelease due to a convention and only got oversized Glissa from the Player Rewards, so I had to trade for my prerelease Glissa, prerelease Hero, and oversized Hero)

Quote from Claybird

I milled my opponents pretty hard at the New Phyrexia pre-release. They were definitely pissed, one guy threw his cards.

I stuck a few Mind Cranks in my mono-red sealed deck at the NPH release. One game I brought out a Mind Crank turn 2 and another one turn 5 and started milling the crap out of my opponent with burn and attacks. Eventually it came down to 7 cards in his deck, an army of creatures on his side of the field, and an Iron Myr (plus two Mindcranks) on my field. No cards in either of our hands. Topdecked an Artillerize.

We both laughed at that game. I lost the match, but it was close.

Quote from Moo Cow the great.

Karn Liberated doesn't do enough on it's own to build around. It's a very good singular card, but it doesn't lend itself to working an entire strategy around. It's a nice singleton in decks like W/U and B/U that plan on grinding into a long game and can trump Titans. Perhaps also in Eldrazi Green or Turboland strategy which has issues with certain permanents and can accelerate it out on turn five or so.

Outside of that, you shouldn't actively be trying to make Karn the focal point.

I would agree that Karn isn't worth focusing an entire deck on. A deck that already has proliferating/ramp could easily use him for another bomb drop, though.

I run Karn in my no-colored-spells casual Myr deck, mostly for removal/disruption which the deck is otherwise fairly lacking. In my case, I don't care about the restart at all; If I do manage to get him to that many loyalty counters, a restart would just be win more, with a small chance at throwing the game away when I could just win with what I've already got on the field (such as a Battlesphere and 10 million Propagators)

Quote from Id, Demon of Elru

Memoricide is better. It doesn't require a bunch of caveats and addendums to work.

If you know your opponent's deck (in competitive Magic by the time you can play Memoricide, you should know the key cards in their deck even if those cards haven't been played) and it's late enough in the game to play it, Memoricide is better. But Surgical Extraction can burst out turn 1 if you've got something like Despise/Duress/Inquisition of Kozilek.

For a long while, I was running a casual mono-black deck based on Sheoldred and lots of sac engines. I had 4x Duress and 2x Surgical Extraction in the deck, and at my estimation I could get at least one of each in my hand on my first turn 20-25% of the time. Since an opponent will usually keep an opening hand with, y'know... good cards in it, Duress->Extraction can hose them for a while. Depending on the deck and their hand, it might hose their entire strategy.

It's not for everyone, or for every black deck, but I like it.

Quote from archdukeofevil

I have to admit, I admire your optimistic view on players. But if any person goes into these things with the intent every normal player would have.. IE win! They are not going to help Scott win with the 'hopes' he might share his winnings because you helped him get there. Thats... to be not very nice, idiotic and foolish. No human being would do all of that and deep down inside you know it.

Another question: Who paid for the entry fees? My girlfriend joins me at prerelease/release events, and I usually pay the entry fee for both of us. She gives me all of the cards she gets afterwards, so it's in my best interest to do what I can to get her to do well. In a 1v1 tournament, what I can do is limited (frequently just to playing cheerleader for her after I finish my match), but the concept's the same.

Whenever I play EDH with more than 3 people, I expect to get bullied by teams, especially if I play my infect deck. They're not necessarily a static team as described, but I steel myself for the possibility, and try to build my decks to withstand it.

Quote from Temmen Erava

That said, I'm still not sure how to word something such a change elegantly into rules text, and I think it is a little better to keep the rules as they presently are, because it's (at least from my perspective) simpler and keeps the format accessible to new players who might want to try it out.

"Hybrid mana symbols may be treated as either color when calculating color identity, if and only if the card is multicolored."

That lets you run in a mono-white deck, or in a red/blue deck, but keeps things like Beseech the Queen in black decks.

Quote from Prince Tristan

The lack of Sensei's Divining Top is a bit surprising.

I had considered Top a lot. I've even got one available to put in the deck. But I realized that Top (along with a number of other 'rearrange the top of the deck' cards I had been considering) wasn't what I was really looking for; I want to be able to look at my top N cards, and be able to put most or all of them on the bottom, depending. Rather than "1: Rearrange the top 3 cards of your deck" (Sensei's Divining Top), I'd rather have "1: Put the top 2 cards on the bottom of your deck. Or the top one. Or the second-from-the-top." (Crystal Ball). Scry is serving as a slow tutor, in that regard.

For a while now I've wanted to build an EDH deck which leans heavily on the Scry and Fateseal effects (and abilities which do very similar things) to drill deep into my deck (scry) and control the future of the game (fateseal). I picked Blue/Black partially because Sealed Fate is UB, and it seemed like a precursor to Fateseal, and partially because Black has some nice removal and it's got the nicer tutors, IMO. Of course, after iterating over the decklist a few times on my own, I've removed Sealed Fate, but the helpfulness of Black is still nice, and I like Oona as the general.

The deck is still preliminary, but I'd love to have some help designing it. I don't own all of these cards, which is kind of the point to the design process, I think.



My two main win conditions are:

• Fateseal something other than a basic land to the bottom of an opponent's library, then cast Tunnel Vision, naming that card. All of my tutors are able to fetch Tunnel Vision, and for multiplayer games (or in the case of a counterspell) I've got 5 ways to put Tunnel Vision back in my hand, plus Junktroller can put it back in my deck. A big problem is hitting something like an Eldrazi titan, so Praetor's Grasp/Jester's Cap/Sadistic Sacrament is meant to curb that possibility.
• Grim Monolith + Power Artifact combo, activating Oona's ability.

My strategy for this deck basically consists of memorizing what I put on the bottom of each opponent's deck, and using repeated Scry abilities to effectively tutor for what I want by sliding card after card after card to the bottom of my deck.