If you’ve clicked the link for this article hoping for some alter eye candy, then this may be a bit of a letdown.

While I thoroughly enjoy the artistic side of Magic, be it painting, writing about it or admiring others’ work, I’ve wanted to branch out and write about something entirely different for some time now. KYT has thrown me a bone several times over the last couple years to do just that, though the timing was never right for me to pick it up and run. Luckily, I’m now in a position where this is possible, and he’s generously kept the door open.

*****

I’ve mentioned in my articles over at GatheringMagic that I’ve had a pretty radical life change this year. Going from a daily grind at a retail flooring store to an outside sales rep (my business card actually says Account Executive, cool eh?) for a flooring distributor has led to a huge transformation in almost all aspects of my life. This new career has afforded me the luxury of travelling around South-Eastern Ontario, with the added bonus of being able to stop in to a variety of gaming shops along my route. One such shop being the Kingston Gaming Nexus.

Finding a place where gamers coalesce on a non-Friday weeknight generally ends in sorrow. It was an absolute blessing that I happened to find this store, John “Wheels” Wasson and a thriving player base for Thursday night casual Standard. I won’t go into the basics on the store, as that can be found in my last review article; scroll down to April 26th. Suffice to say, I have been, and will continue to play Magic much more frequently than I’m accustomed to thanks to this discovery.

In chatting with John through Facebook, I was assured that these casual Standard get-togethers were exactly that; casual. I asked him straight up if I should bring my competitive deck, or a fun homebrew. The homebrew got the big nod from him, so I had some work to do. I had a competitive W/u humans list that I had been piloting for the previous month or so, but with AVR having just been released, I also had some ideas floating around my noggin.

Quick aside: I love brewing. I used to brew my own decks all the time ‘back in the day’ because the tournaments we had locally were filled with homebrews, before the netdecking phenomenon brought the iron bars down on our collective creativity. I do, however, recall Duelist-decking (The Duelist was a TCG specific magazine, for all you youngins.) Olle Rade’s Pro Tour Columbus 1996 winning deck; “Spiders” (second deck) for a rare large-scale tournament in Toronto when I was fifteen.

I had purchased a fat-pack, as is routine, when Avacyn Restored came out. Besides being seemingly higher EV per pack than from a usual box, I love getting the visual spoiler booklet that comes with these things. It makes for great toilet material, right?! During some downtime at home, I thumbed through the spoiler looking for cool cards that I wanted to do neat stuff with, and quickly settled on [card]Demonic Taskmaster[/card]. A 4/3 Flier for 3cc? Yes please! Now with any sweet broken card comes a drawback, but our goal as brewers is to find the situation that changes the drawback to a bonus feature. This wasn’t too difficult, as we just needed to focus on death-trigger creatures.

I continued through the spoiler; I also immediately fell in love with [card]Demonlord of Ashmouth[/card]. This guy is essentially taskmaster on steroids, so he had to be included too. Cool, we have the idea of the deck right there. The name of the game was to profitably sacrifice dudes to our heavy hitters who would then fly in for the win. Seems good.

In the early stages, I focused on mono-black, as I really wanted to be running four [card]Geralf’s Messenger[/card]s. He was obviously my best creature that wasn’t Ashmouth and BBB casting cost is pretty restrictive if you plan on dropping him ASAP. Avacyn Restored also gave us [card]Soulcage Fiend[/card], which explodes upon death, making him an auto-include as well. That’s where the black well ran relatively dry for me. I mean, I would be adding some removal spells of course, but there was nothing else in black I really wanted, so I started pondering splash colours.

My initial thoughts led me to [card]Lingering Souls[/card]. It goes without saying that it’s a really stellar card, and I wouldn’t feel so bad about eating the occasional soul with my hungry, hungry demons.
The list so far looked like this:

4x [card]Demonlord of Ashmouth[/card]
4x [card]Demonic Taskmaster[/card]
4x [card]Soulcage Fiend[/card]
4x [card]Geralf’s Messenger[/card]
4x [card]Lingering Souls[/card]
Xx Removal spells

This looked pretty solid, until I realized I was packing 16 three-drops and 4x four-drops with no action in the first two turns. Yikes, that’s not where you really want to be when there will be Delver’s soaring in by the time I cast my first spell. I needed to speed things up, and in a big way.
Without changing the idea/core of a deck, what’s the first thing you do? Ramp!

There was no way I was going three colour and playing Geralf’s, so the white got chopped entirely, making way for a small green presence. A full suite of [card]Birds of Paradise[/card] came in to get me some second turn Taskmaster action, which seemed pretty awesome. Then I thumbed through the green section of our standard binder and saw [card]Garruk Relentless[/card]. He creates food for my demons, shoots stuff dead and at the very least, sponges up some damage. We only had three in the collection, so all three were slotted in.

It also occurred to me that everyone and their brothers were playing [card]Strangleroot Geist[/card], so he got instantly slotted in…until I realized that he cost GG, making Geralf’s and Ashmouth pretty rough. I’d have to stick to cards that had a single green in the casting cost to make this monstrosity tick…

I did a search for “put into a graveyard from the battlefield” and found a couple winners in [card]Viridian Emissary[/card] and [card]Perilous Myr[/card]. Emissary does a great job bashing in since the opponent fears killing him to keep me from ramping and the myr works great as a defender, threatening to take things down three times his size. Both of these guys are fantastic scraps of demon food, so I figured three of each would round out my creatures nicely.

With the Birds and Emissary’s in the deck, 24 land should do, so I needed to select the last eight spells. Removal is an absolute must, and [card]Go for the Throat[/card] is probably my favourite. [card]Tragic Slip[/card] is fantastic in a deck like this, where there’s always something going to the bin. I started with two of each for variety.

Flipping back through the AVR spoiler lead me first to [card]Essence Harvest[/card]. Typically not a fantastic card, but having a little life gain to counteract the [card]Soulcage Fiend[/card]s that I’ll be gnawing on seems like a great idea. Also, looking through the creatures I’m using, everything has a larger front end than back end. By the time I’d be harvesting essence, I can’t really see it being for less than four. At four power I’d have an undying Geralf’s or a Taskmaster and at five or six power I’d have the Demonlord. Two Essence Harvest go in.

As I get to the artifact page in the spoiler I happen upon the most ridiculous card for this deck, and most of you would instantly label me a scrub if this thing hit the table; [card]Scroll of Griselbrand[/card]! The scroll is a [card]Blightning[/card] for two colourless, let that sink in… I have eleven demons in the deck currently, that’s certainly enough to run something like this, so two went in.

When building a deck, I always like to diversify spells a fair amount in the early stages. This lets me see through testing what works and what doesn’t. If the Scrolls are garbage, no problem, I can pop in another couple removal spells or whatever I seem to be missing to fill the gap.

With the spells locked down, it was time to work on the mana base. I have 24 slots for land, and four of those will obviously be [card]Woodland Cemetery[/card], leaving me with twenty spots to fill. There are not many options for non-basics in these colours, but [card]Grim Backwoods[/card] seemed like a perfect fit to the deck. If for whatever reason I was not able to sacrifice a guy to demons, this would serve nicely. It would allow me to knock off a Myr or Geralf’s to stick the bad guy for two damage, and I’d get to draw a card for it! Two of those make the deck. I don’t want to go any higher than two as having two on the board would be practically useless and it doesn’t produce coloured mana.

This leaves eighteen basics. I went with 10x Swamp and 8x Forest. I really want more swamps than this, but also need the green on the first turn for birds, or second turn for emissaries. I figured going heavier on green like this was okay, seeing as the green is being used to get land/produce mana anyway.

The final sixty looks like this:

[deck]
[Creatures]
4 Demonlord of Ashmouth
3 Demonic Taskmaster
4 Soulcage Fiend
4 Geralf’s Messenger
4 Birds of Paradise
3 Viridian Emissary
3 Perilous Myr
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
3 Garruk Relentless
2 Scroll of Griselbrand
2 Tragic Slip
2 Go For The Throat
2 Essence Harvest
[/Spells]
[Land]
4 Woodland Cemetery
2 Grim Backwoods
10 Swamp
8 Forest
[/Land]
[/deck]

I goldfished this for a while and was pretty happy with how it was playing. Seeing as this gathering I was going to was super casual, I figured people would get a kick out of my deck while still managing to do fairly well. Regardless of the outcome, I was sure to have fun with this deck because I built it.

*****

Thursday rolled around and I found a parking spot near the shop downtown around 6pm and headed in a little early. I managed to find the cards I needed on my travels throughout the week save one; a single [card]Demonic Taskmaster[/card]. Avacyn Restored was only out for about a week at this point, most of the dealers I went to hadn’t cracked many packs yet, and I just hadn’t seen any players around with trash traders lately. I had already purchased a box AND a fatpack at this point, managing only to pull two of these uncommons through 45 packs!

Of course, nobody there had them either, including the store. The local Medina, John Wasson shows up to run the tournament and I tried to shake him down for some uncommon love. His response was something along the lines of: “Why would I bring junk like that with me? What the heck are you playing?” I excitedly explain my master plan as he thumbs through the cards. He agreed that it seemed pretty neat, and suggested I just buy some packs until I get the card I need.

In most circumstances, I’m relatively immune to peer pressure. I’ve managed to stay clear of any drugs, cigarettes and the drunken bar scene despite attempts at luring me in from many parties. But when it comes to spending money on Magic, I have a really tough time saying no. I brought up the topic of Fat-Pack EV to John and he seemed to agree that although the packs work out to be a little more expensive, the rewards are generally greater from the Fat-Pack. With John continuously nagging me to make a purchase, I went back and forth in my mind about just dropping another $40 on a Fat-Pack, or buying a single booster at a time until I hit Taskmaster gold. Ultimately, the Fat-Pack won out.

John and I brought the damn box over to the table and got ready for the sub-game of “find the lame uncommon”. He cracks the first pack and BAM, there’s the Taskmaster! I’m feeling pretty good at that point, I got what I wanted out of this $40 investment so far, sweet! He then offered to buy the rest of the packs off me for $3 each.

“Hell no, that’d be stupid.”

Should have taken the deal…

[card]Vexing Devil[/card]
8x $1 rares

Including the uncommons we figured the [card]Vexing Devil[/card] alone was worth more than the rest of the Fat-Pack combined. Ouch.

Seeing as I already had the AVR spoiler booklet from my first Fat-Pack, I let John keep it as a token of my loathing and sleeved up my forty dollar [card]Demonic Taskmaster[/card].

I don’t like reading tournament reports with play-by-plays of each match, and I definitely don’t take notes of matches as they happen. I never took notes in high school or college, so this is definitely not changing anytime soon. I’ll just do a rundown of highlights from the night and hopefully that will suffice.

My first game was quite notable, as I had a keepable seven and he mulled to three if I recall. I curved out and did everything I had planned to do with the deck, winning handily. I mulliganed at least once in every subsequent game for the rest of the evening. I didn’t win a single match. I won a few games here and there, while blaming ridiculous draws and mulligans, but I was pretty disappointed.

I played a few extra games with a couple guys that felt bad for how brutally they smashed me, and I won more in those games that didn’t count than I did in the tournament. So the deck wasn’t all that bad.

The lads at the shop were giving John a hard time for telling me it was a casual brew tournament, though he protests that this particular evening was more competitive than usual. There were lots of Delver and Huntmaster laden decks, as well as some humans and other tier 1-2 lists, but only one other ‘brew’ in the room, and I didn’t even get to play him. Ah well.

I recall going over the matches in my head on the drive back to the hotel and realizing that my Birds ate a [card]Gut Shot[/card] or similar spell almost every time. I based a lot of keeps (because they were mulliganed at least once) on having the Bird to make up for shitty land situations, so when the bird promptly died, that basically won them the game. So, at least I learned something from this; when evaluating your hand, assume the Bird will get insta-killed. Is it still a keep?

My first magical foray into the Thursday night casual standard in Kingston was pretty good.
Although the tourney turned out to be a bust, I had a stellar time meeting and hanging with a new crew of Magic folk, and a heck of a good time piloting a homebrew for the first time in many years.

Who knows what may happen next time?

Cheers!

Jeremy Froggatt
@JerFroggatt

Jeremy Froggatt

Jeremy Froggatt is a loving husband and father of three. In his limited spare time, he immerses himself in Magic, be it playing, painting or writing.