Rotation is a funny time. I’m generally sad to see cards leaving but at the same time I’m excited for the Brewers’ Paradise that is a new format and ready to see cards leave that have been annoying me for the past two years.
The best thing about the week before rotation is off course pre-release weekend, but I wanted to try and convince our group to make the last Scars block FNM into something…different. A couple of days beforehand, I posted this to our Facebook group:
The response was incredible, and some of the ideas made my own mono-white control plan seem tier 1 by comparison. I needed to go deeper. I needed to unleash the full power of The Jank.
Weapon Selection
Fortunately, this is my wheelhouse. Given free reign and no need to worry about things like the metagame and optimal card choice, my brain takes off. Having seen Blair’s Lab Maniac plan and Lawrence’s [card]Lost in the Woods[/card] deck, I was resolved to play something very, very silly. That basically ruled out Puresteel Sunrise, which would actually be too strong for a field of fun decks. Sure I want to win, but having set the rules I could hardly go and play something I was reasonably sure would win hands-down. Normally that would send me off in a frantic flurry of binder-browsing to come up with an idea for a deck. Not today! I had three plans already: [card]Door to Nothingness[/card] combo, Melira Unlife and something with [card]Quicksilver Amulet[/card] in it.
The Door deck would focus on [card]Myr Welder[/card], using cards like [card]Trading Post[/card] to put Soliton, [card]Gilded Lotus[/card] and possibly [card]Door to Nothingness[/card] in the graveyard before exiling them with Welder and making infinite mana and activating Door (or Welder which had imprinted Door). Playing mono-grey (or even 50 shades of it) would allow me to run 4 of each basic land, which of course helps me activate Door naturally. To further add to the hilarity I added [card]Etched Monstrosity[/card] (because 10/10s are fun), [card]Semblance Anvil[/card] (free [card]Wellspring[/card]s!) and 2 of each of the Empires cycle (because I wanted to play them). A [card]Blue Sun’s Zenith[/card] and a [card]Heavy Arbalest[/card] (more combo pieces) rounded out the list.
Melira and [card]Phyrexian Unlife[/card] make just about the most fragile “I can’t die” combo around. If there was nothing else to put in the deck, I wouldn’t consider it. However Melira also combos well with [card]Phyrexian Hydra[/card] and [card]Etched Monstrosity[/card], and [card]Cryptoplasm[/card] can copy a Monstrosity and be a 10/10 right away. I’ve built this deck before but never had the stones to play it. The main strike against it is that it hasn’t changed since I first put it together, which makes it kind of…uninspired.
My final idea was to go as big as possible. [card]Quicksilver Amulet[/card] is very powerful once you untap with it, but it struggles in that you have to have an expensive creature in hand for it to be good. If you then don’t draw the Amulet, the deck just does nothing. There are ways to mitigate that of course: [card]Counterlash[/card], [card]Djinn of Wishes[/card] and a little ramp will help me get the finishers into play in a hurry, and cards like [card]Chronomaton[/card] and [card]Disciple of Bolas[/card] should keep me alive. The ability to play [card]Griselbrand[/card] AND Jin-Gitaxias in the same deck was appealing, but I was running short and time and couldn’t manage a sideboard for the deck before leaving.
And so we leave Weapon Selection without…you know, selecting a weapon. Huh. My plan was to head down to the store, play a few games with each deck and decide which one I liked best.
Battle Hymn
With a marathon weekend of FNM and 5 prereleases ahead of me, I needed some good tunes to get me in the mood to play ALL the Magic. I went with a song I first heard while playing Legends of Wrestling 2, a song I spent months looking for. This is Colorblind by Alien Breed.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQHsJF9EL5w&version=3&hl=en_GB]
War Report
As I am known locally as a master of jank, there was a fair bit of interest in the deck I would be playing. Never one to shy away from the spotlight, I grabbed poor unexpecting Lawrence and roped him into a few games to test the decks I had carefully constructed. He started off with a top-tier Zombie build, which of course crushed me, but once he broke out his jank deck things got way more fun. The Door deck was a laugh but felt a little too inconsistent. I tried the Amulet deck and…wow. At one point I drew 21 cards in a turn and attacked for over 100 damage. Everyone watching had a huge smile on their face, including Lawrence who was on the receiving end. I had my deck!
2 [card]Chronomaton[/card]
1 [card]Laboratory Maniac[/card]
3 [card]Vessel of Endless Rest[/card]
4 [card]Quicksilver Amulet[/card]
3 [card]Distant Memories[/card]
2 [card]Disciple of Bolas[/card]
3 [card]Sturmgeist[/card]
4 [card]Djinn of Wishes[/card]
2 [card]Counterlash[/card]
3 [card]Rune-Scarred Demon[/card]
3 [card]Sphinx of Uthuun[/card]
3 [card]Griselbrand[/card]
2 [card]Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur[/card]
1 [card]Omniscience[/card]
4 Darsklick Shores
4 [card]Drowned Catacomb[/card]
3 Swamp
2 [card]Reliquary Tower[/card]
12 Island
I added the [card]Reliquary Tower[/card]s after that test game with Lawrence, as I had 39 cards in hand at one point and did no damage due to [card]Lost in the Woods[/card]. The Lab Maniac went in for the same reason. [card]Sturmgeist[/card] was a lot of fun for sure, casting a [card]Disciple of Bolas[/card] to sacrifice one of my two, double the cards in my hand and cast another one was pretty brutal. I figured [card]Distant Memories[/card] would be a fun little mind game to play with my opponents, fetching something I might not need in an effort to draw 3 cards. Would it function as well in actual matches?
Nope. Sadly I only faced 2 people playing jank decks: Kyle and Roger. I lost to Kyle, regretting instantly my decision to leave out [card]Massacre Wurm[/card]s as he was playing MyrBall. When I played Twinja Andrew and his Elf deck next round, I missed those [card]Massacre Wurm[/card]s even more. I still had fun playing the deck, it’s just a shame that I had to play against so many real decks on the way.
Future Sight
Here’s where things get interesting. With a new standard on the way, I want to try something totally different with this column. I had the idea of making an achivement list, and each week I would build my deck to try and get as many of them as possible. New achievements could be added all the time, and I would need to at least have a .500 record for my achievements that week to count. It seems like a fun way to encourage me to think when building my decks.
I’d like to solicit some help from you, the readers. If you can leave some ideas for achievements in the comments, it would be a great help. I won’t use them all, but they could be as easy as “go over 40 life in a game” or as hard as “win a game on your turn without attacking once.”
Side Note: Prerelease Weekend!
Oh man. So much Magic. I played in 5 prereleases from 12:01 Saturday morning until 11 Sunday night, trying each guild once. Well I say that, but my Azorius pool was such a mess that I went 5 colours and 60 cards just to get something out of it. Funnily enough that was the most fun I had all weekend.
My individual results were mediocre, but I was undefeated all weekend in Two-Headed Giant with two different partners. This set looks and feels amazing to play, and I was always excited to open every booster. We had so much fun with it that our FNM this week is actually Sealed…which is a first. I cannot wait!
Thanks, as always, for reading. I love you all!
Chris is a deck brewer, podcaster and lover of bacon. He’s recently realised he isn’t completely terrible at this game.