At the Kitchen Table

When I started learning/playing Magic: the Gathering, I did so by buying a Simic Mutology precon deck from Dissension. Before long, I was stomping, howling, and grafting up a storm.

Before long, as I think all new players without strong guidance are wont to do, I was visiting the local shops, flipping through binders of singles looking for cool cards to add to my deck. Green seemed especially attractive. Green is great for new players: green is fairly simple mechanically. So I added elves and growth effects and some Fog. Of course I never took any cards out. That would be insane. So what began as a reasonably cohesive 60 card deck turned into a monstrosity that creeped to a staggering 125 cards at one point.

It was then that we started reading and learning about the theory behind deck building. Especially useful was the Saturday School column on the Magic site. (It’s not a current column and isn’t easily accessible from the site with searching as the previous link does.)

We were in the middle of the Timespiral block at this time and I took interest in Thallids. At least the Timespiral and Planar Chaos incarnations.

One aspect of Thallids that reached out and grabbed my inner Timmy (and also here)(I’m now more of a Jonny/Timmy) was the idea of amassing an overwhelming force of saproling tokens.

With this in mind, along with lessons learned from our reading, I set out to build my own deck. I went through several incarnations, all primarily green but with splashes of white or black. Along the way I discovered cards like the Urza lands (tower, mine, and power plant), Doubling Season, and Supply/Demand before ending up with this:

Saprotron

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Basic Lands (6) 4 Forest 2 Plains Lands (20) 4 Urzas Power Plant 4 Urzas Tower 4 Urzas Mine 4 Brushland 4 Saltcrusted Steppe Creatures (10) 4 Thallid 2 Verdeloth the Ancient 2 Thelon of Havenwood 2 Thelonite Hermit Artifacts (4) 4 Coat of Arms Enchantments (8) 4 Overgrowth 4 Doubling Season Sorceries (8) 4 Rampant Growth 4 SupplyDemand Instants (4) 4 Scatter the Seeds

I got infamous at FNM at Gametronics for my frustrating saproling decks. I never really did all that well, but nobody liked playing me. I had fun. The idea of the above deck is to generate a horde of tokens, then drop a coat of arms and send the swarm into the red zone. There are many ways to make tokens, including the basic spore counter route. Additionally there is Scatter the Seeds, Verdeloth the Ancient, Thelonite Hermit, and Supply/Demand. The key to using this deck effectively is to get a ton of mana available, through Urza lands, and Saltcrusted Steppe, have one or more copies of Doubling Season on the battlefield (still getting used to saying that) and casting a massive Verdeloth or Supply.

The final game I played with this deck is worth telling the tale of. I was playing a friend at FMN, Bubba … great guy and skilled player. It was the last game of the last match of the night. Bubba was also playing a green/white token deck, but a very different one. He had four copies each of Soul Warden and Essence Warden. I think he had Call of the Herd and some other token generators. We got ourselves into a stalemate situation where we both had some tokens out. His life total was creeping up with each token due to several copies of both wardens. I was avoiding generating tokens so as to not give him life, so I had charge counters piling up on my Steppes and spore counters piling up on my Thallids. I should mention that I had two Doubling Seasons on the battlefield. We eventually got to the point where we switched to keeping track of my various counters and his life total on paper.

The stalemate continued for some time. We were at the 45 minute mark. I drew. Finally! Yes! Coat of Arms at last. I cashed in all the spore counters, and poured all available mana into Supply, resulting in 101 saproling tokens on the battlefield, dwarfing is line of a couple dozen guys. Pass turn. I distinctly remember that Bubba was at 512 life. One of the kids yelled out “Bubba’s at 512 life!!” Everyone else at FNM came over to see what the commotion was (ours was the last game running and the rest of the folks were hanging out, trading, and such). He stared in amazement and passed the turn, not able to do anything. I untapped and put Coat of Arms on the table. “I attack you with” … the sound of math happening … “101 101/101 … saprolings.”

That’s something I love about this game, the memories of epic games and plays with friends.

When I started getting back to Magic: the Gathering, it was mainly with Duels of the Planeswalkers (when it became available on the PC (by way of VMWare Fusion)). I found myself especially liking the Eyes of Shadow deck, so when I started using Magic Online more I picked up the Planeswalker decks & expansions to use in the beginner room while learning the system.

Here’s the original Eyes of Shadow deck in MTGO (note that the paper version of the deck is a bit different):

Eyes of Shadow

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Basic Lands (24) 24 Swamp Creatures (16) 2 Abyssal Specter 4 Drudge Skeletons 2 Dusk Imp 1 Nightmare 4 Ravenous Rats 1 Sengir Vampire 2 Severed Legion Artifacts (2) 2 The Rack Enchantments (6) 2 Megrim 2 Underworld Dreams 2 Unholy Strength Sorceries (9) 2 Consume Spirit 1 Final Revels 4 Mind Rot 2 Raise Dead Instants (3) 3 Terror

While I found this deck to be fun, it is a little unfocused for my tastes. The Racks, Megrims, and Mind Rots made me think about a discard rebuild. The available cards in the Planeswalker pool gave me what I needed to come up with this:

Since the focus is moving away from creature damage to discard related damage, out go the Nightmare, Severed Legion, Sengir Vampire, Unholy Strength, Final Revels, and Raise Dead. This gives some room to play with. I bumped up removal by going to 4 copies of Terror. To really penalize a small hand I added 2 Racks to max out with 4. To beef up the discard focus, I went to 4 Megrims and added a Mind Shatter. Unfortunately Mind Shatter is restricted in Planeswalker constructed. I added 2 additional specters and a Cunning Lethemancer to further drive discard.

Eyes of Discard

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Basic Lands (24) 24 Swamp Creatures (15) 4 Drudge Skeletons 4 Abyssal Specter 2 Dusk Imp 4 Ravenous Rats 1 Cunning Lethemancer Artifacts (4) 4 The Rack Enchantments (6) 2 Underworld Dreams 4 Megrim Sorceries (7) 2 Consume Spirit 4 Mind Rot 1 Mind Shatter Instants (4) 4 Terror

Being a monoblack deck, mana color isn’t an issue. The mana curve is quite low, allowing you to play pretty much anything after a few turns. If anything, I might be tempted to add an additional Swamp to give a bit of protection against missing land drops with Consume Spirit and Mind Shatter sitting at the high end.

It’s a fun deck to play. The skeletons and rats provide early game defense and maybe even some beats. The rats, of course, start trimming your opponents hand. You can wait a while before worrying about putting out the racks, but some Megrims and Dreams are good to get out as early as possible. Don’t worry about having Megrims in play before casting your Mind Rots, especially against a blue deck. You want to strip out as many counters as possible as early as possible. If you can empty their hand and keep it empty, you have a serious advantage.

So far it’s done fairly well, albeit in the beginner’s room.

A while back, I posted about giving up Magic the Gathering. Now I’ve decided to get back into it. This time digitally. I will not be buying or playing much paper magic (other than casual games with friends).

A few things conspired to bring this about. First of all I really miss the mental challenge of building decks and playing. Next was getting VMWare Fusion up & running with WinXP on my Macs. And then Duels of the Planeswalkers (DoP) has migrated from the XBox to Windows/Steam. Finally there’re a chance I’ll be doing some MTG related work in the future.

So I’ve been dusting off my skills with DoP, and gathering up a small Magic the Gathering Online (MTGO) collection. I have my EDH Sliver deck built and ready to play.

I’m dastels on MTGO if anyone fancies a game.