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Welcome to the Chris Millar Quotes File!
Chris Millar wrote about Magic: the Gathering for the wonderful House of Cards column on www.magicthegathering.com from January 2006 to August 2008, and his sense of humour tends to the bizarre and surreal, as do his decks. This file is just a collection of some of his most insane moments.
You can see a list of all the articles Chris has written for Wizards here.
This file is maintained by Alex Churchill / alextfish, who also created the random Magic card generator and contributes to several other silly threads about Magic.
Now, on with the quotes!
I have to say, it's nice to finally upgrade this old House of Cards to a proper laboratory. I mean, who ever heard of mad science and bizarre experiments being conducted in a house (outside of my fridge)? Mad vacuuming, sure. Mad dinner parties, obviously. But mad science? That requires a less-inviting space, decorated with unlabeled jars containing mysterious fluids, open flames, strange devices crackling with electricity, and adequate living space for a grotesque assistant.
I got to talking with my friend Greg, a guy who can't say no to life-gain and who also happens to enjoy thwarting my well-laid plans with the unluckliest of tricks (I'm looking at you, Razor Barrier!). We talked about our lives, our careers, his new baby, and how the "married life" was treating him... for about five seconds. We quickly turned our attention to more important things, like making 500 Rat tokens and 400/400 creatures.
It starts with Boon Reflection, naturally. Well, "naturally" if you're Greg. It isn't a game of Magic if he doesn't need a calculator to track his life total.
Surely, though, getting all ten of the "God Auras" on a Reaper King is impossible, right? Well, we'll see about that. After all, to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd. And, once again, this is just dumb (but in a good way).
And Chris ended his final regular article for magicthegathering.com with a list of thanks, in which list I was somewhat startled to spot:
to alextfish, for keeping my spirits up
You're extremely welcome, Chris, and I could say the same many times over to you!
Welcome to Elf Week! Can you think of a better time to dip into the old mailbag? I can, but that would mean I'd have to rewrite the previous sentence. Never look back!
"I have neither a surname nor a job title, making me a lot like Bjork, Bono, and other Earth Elves you are probably familiar with.
I am writing on behalf of all the other made-up Elves to thank you for your continued dedication to Elfkind and your tireless efforts in Elf-advocacy."
I made a mental note of its existence and combotacularity, but like Magic's Mental Notes, it ended up in the bin with a bunch of other cards.
the Magic players I know are banding with others (i.e. getting married).
Mr. "Jolly" Rogers, whose goals in life include getting namedropped in an article on this site and eventually settling down with a nice girl who loves playing Vintage (Well, at least one of those things is going to happen).
I took off my jacket, loosened my tie, rolled up my sleeves, and proceeded to shake what is, nominally, my groove thang. If you've ever seen So You Think You Can Dance, you will have a good idea of what I didn't look like. Rugs were cut, moves were busted, and, as far as I can tell, my reputation survived an embarrassing display that can be fairly accurately described as C-3PO crossed with a boxing kangaroo.
I don't know about you, but I find it rather annoying when I play a Marshdrinker Giant and nothing happens. With Streambed Aquitects' ability to make Islands out of everyday household materials (like Forests), you'll never have this problem again!
In perhaps the most unlikely alliance, Hatchet Bully and Woeleecher combine to make mini Lightning Helixes for a mere !
The good thing about this combo is that it features many more tentacles.
If there's one thing red creatures love more than barreling headlong into the red zone, it's not being able to do so because of some crippling psychological issue. How else can you explain this sad-sack bunch of excuse-makers? Okk, Orgg, Veteran Brawlers, Mijae Djinn, Goblin Goon, Lesser Gargadon...
Howdy, folks! As some of you might be aware, a new expansion set for the collectable card game known as Magic: The Gathering has just been pre-released. Its name is Eventide, and it takes place in a dark and mysterious land full of cantankerous old ladies and mischievous donkey-headed people. It's basically Anytown, USA, but with talking donkeys.
It has some pretty cool things going on inside of it, too, just like your body! Also like your body, you won't be able to play with it for a couple weeks. At least, that's how my doctor explained it to me.
I'll go out on a limb and suggest that everybody likes a wombat. I mean, how could you not? While they might sound like one of the silliest creatures ever invented, they are, in fact, the most cunning and lethal of all the subterranean marsupials. They are completely adorable, and yet, if provoked, they will dig a tunnel and then poop a cube on your lawn without the slightest hint of remorse. They are even crepuscular! I don't know what that means, but frankly, it sounds terrifying. On top of all these vaguely sinister, but totally true, Wikipedia-vetted attributes, the magical wombat also likes to wear pants. Lots of pants. I don't know how they do it with those short little legs of theirs, but like poodles in sweaters and chimps in tutus, these wombats can't get enough of the pants-wearing. The fatter the pants, the better.
The latest non-Wombat wombat, Evershrike, puts on its pants just like the rest of us: one leg at a time. Except, once its pants are on, it kills your opponent with a series of aerial strikes. Even better, fallen Evershrikes can will themselves back to life provided there is suitable legwear available. Now that's dedication to fashion. But which pants do we pick? Well, I'm pretty sure Evershrike was born to be played Edge of the Divinity. Born, hatched, or brought by the Everstork; it doesn't matter.
The last aura that I included is Mantle of Leadership. On its own, it isn't that exciting. Evershrike will become a 4/4 flier (with the chance to get much larger) for an initial investment of seven mana. Kind of blah. What makes it less blah, and, frankly, what makes anything less blah, are all the Goats!
Springjack Pasture further smooths the flow of Goats from the aether to your kitchen table.
I have a little rule of thumb when it comes to evaluating Magic cards: If it costs 101 mana, it had better win you the game. I hope we can all agree on that statement. Of course, until the release of Helix Pinnacle that rule was never really put to the test.
It isn't the first card that takes triple-digit mana to kill an opponent by itself. Both Searing Touch and Death of a Thousand Stings could already make that particular claim.
One, if you need 101 mana to win the game, you'd better include some ways to generate a lot of mana. I learned that one the hard way. Two, if you're going to try to win the game with a 101-mana spell, it would be wise to avoid dying while you're still paying for it. That's as true in Magic as it is in life.
We're nearing the halfway point of the Eventide preview season and I have to say it's about time we previewed an Ouphe. The bar has been set pretty high after Shadowmoor brought us a pair of nice utility Ouphes, the card-drawing Dusk Urchins and the life-gaining and pun-loving Kitchen Finks. Joining Spellwild Ouphe as Ouphes who don't particularly care about the activated abilities of artifacts (ignoring for now the Brownie defectors), these new tribe members showed that just because your creature type sounds incredibly silly doesn't mean you can lay the beats and provide hours of entertainment for the whole family. (I guess Tarmogoyf already proved that.)
Blue and green is probably my favourite colour combination. Of all time. Sure, ebony and ivory hold some appeal, as do silver and gold. Blue, green, orange has its moments, but, ultimately, I think the orange is unnecessary. With blue and green alone, you've got a mitt full of cards, a boatload of mana, a bushel basket full of beef, and a whole can of whoop-ass.
Besides their unique strengths, as you can see from this diagram, the areas where blue and green overlap are totally awesome! At least for the Johnny.
Just think: If you start with a single, solitary counter, and you take that counter and double it each turn, by the end of the month you'll have more than a million dollars!
I'm particularly excited about the idea of using Gilder Bairn, Presence of Gond, and Door of Destinies together (with other Elves, naturally). Tap the Bairn to make an Elf, untap it to double the number of charge counters on Door of Destinies, lather, rinse, and repeat. Pretty soon you'll have an army of enormous Elves (and very shiny hair).
Charge counters are another "standard" counter, at least since Mirrodin. There is ample reason to double these counters as well. You might want to produce lots of mana (Altar of Shadows, Black Market, all the Mana Batteries), gain tons of life (Clearwater Goblet), kill creatures (Infused Arrows, Heliophial), make a whole bunch of Snakes (Orochi Hatchery), make a whole bunch of very big Snakes (Riptide Replicator), or just do whatever it is that Ventifact Bottle does.
Before Y2K, there was Armageddon Clock. One of them has pretty much no effect at all and the other is a computer glitch. Counting down to Armageddon is fun and all, but the fact that any player can turn back the clock is a little disappointing. Add Eon Hub to skip the upkeep, and your mutual destruction is practically assured. Heck, you could use Gilder Bairn's Ouphe-y brethren (Brown Ouphe) to counter any attempts to remove the doom counters. Armageddon Clock also happens to be the only magical clock that actually works with Clockspinning (except for Mistform Ultimus, of course).
If ever there was a card that was made for Gilder Bairn, it's Coral Reef. Not only is it a permanent that comes into play with counters and can redistribute those counters to other creatures, but it also provides a handy tap outlet for your Gilder Bairns. What can you possibly use polyp counters for, you ask? Well, for starters, you simply buff up the backsides of your creatures. Like I always say, a 1/4 Gilder Bairn is better than a 1/3 Gilder Bairn. Those +0/+1 counters can turn certain creatures into face-smashing monsters if you can somehow switch their power and toughness (Thanks, layer 6e!). Your polyp-enhanced Aquamoebas and Turtleshell Changelings will become serious threats if they can get through unblocked.
I used to like to play decks that pretty much do nothing. For a while, I had an oversized blue-white deck that did little more than stall the game with an arsenal of counterspells and recurring Hesitations and Standstills (Thanks, Hanna!). Meanwhile, I would be playing cards like Portent and Ransack to ensure that my opponent drew nothing relevant (i.e. nothing but lands). It wasn't a particularly good deck, mind you, but it was fun to see exactly how long I could get away with doing nothing. Story of my life.
Besides having one of the coolest made-up words ever for a name, Scuttlemutt can pull up Scarecrosoft Paint and change the color of any creature you want.
Besides all of the not blocking going on, there's a subtheme of discard lurking in there. Piracy Charm performs its triple threat role with charm (naturally), and Noggin Whack nails your opponent's hand with a brick (fish included).
Though he was once merely a river guide, the Aurora must have transformed Sygg into a bloodthirsty, no-holds-barred cutthroat! I guess he wasn't paid enough. Yes, it seems ol' Syggy took one of those pirate self-help classes (Discover the Inner Seafaring Cutthroat Within You!) and transformed his life. The program was offered to Throat Slitter, who seemed a perfect fit, but he turned it down. I wonder why!
Ever since Lorwyn hit the shelves, Wanderwine Prophets have been the subject of jokes around the Magic community, cruel jokes like "Why did the Merfolk cross the road?" (So the Prophets have nothing to champion!)
Silvergill Adept (who puts the Mer in Merchant of Secrets)
What can I do with allied colours? Well, now that I know the five of them like to go to make-out parties with Mark Rosewater, I have a few more options. But as fun as elaborating on this scenario would be, I think I'll build some decks instead. After all, what would a house of cards be without a deck or two or five? An apartment of cards, sure. Possibly a lean-to of cards. Let's not overthink this.
Worldpurge: Combining blue's love of bouncing permanents, shuffling, and emptying mana pools with white's love of seven-mana sorceries
You can, for example, attack with a bunch of 1/1 Kithkin Soldiers, then, during your second main phase, play a Cloudgoat Ranger (or whatever) and respond to that by playing Worldpurge out from under your hideaway land!
Hey, gang, it's good to be back. The aches in my Johnny muscle have largely subsided and the pipes that drain into my bottomless well of puns have been unclogged. My instinct for tortured metaphor is keener than ever, and I'm ready to go.
The biggest problem with puns, as I see it, is that there is no victim. How can I possibly feel smugly superior to someone with this kind of tiresome word-play? Of course, some would say that the English language is the real victim. Others might suggest that we all suffer whenever a pun is uttered. I've even heard it said that God kills a kitten every time one word is recontextualized because it sounds like another word. Now, that might be going too far, even for me, but you have got to applaud God for his initiative.
I modeled the decks after the ones in Chris's columns. That's why they're so inefficient and watered-down with singletons. It's like sending your army into battle with one guy who is really good at juggling. Because you just never know when that particular skill will come in handy. It's amusing, perhaps, but only if you aren't the juggler.
Welcome back to yet another House of Cards on yet another Thursday, which is right in the middle of yet another week. I could go on with dozens of unnecessary yets, but then I'd have the Yeti family crime gang after me, something I'd like to avoid. Just the other day I caught Stalking Yeti in his famous pastime of, um, stalking. In any case, today's column will be filled with plenty of tasty selections for Johnnys around the Internet. Ahead lies synergy, strategy, and an infinit-
Eh? What's that? You were expecting someone else? Biggish, and likely to be found in a cold environment? Well, I've no idea who you're talking about. I just hope the Yetis didn't get to him.
Apparently, from the mindset of the Scuzzback gang, it's always "raid o'clock." After waiting about three days for my watch to show this time, I became impatient and subsequently decided to smash it to smithereens. I similarly destroyed my digital and cuckoo clocks (I have a lot of timepieces) before my hourglass, of all things, gave me the time I was looking for. (I would point out the fact that I broke the hourglass and spelled out "raid o'clock" with the sand, but this joke has gone on far enough.)
Footbottom Feast - the Lorwyn reincarnation of Bone Harvest, but with less bone and more, um, footbottom
Dubbed the Bogardan Phoenix Sons by someone with too much time on his hands (um, me), creatures with the persist mechanic return to play when they hit the graveyard
Dubbed the Super Quagmire Lampreys by someone willing to use any excuse to bring up Quagmire Lamprey (um, me), the creatures with wither are great sources of negativity (perhaps because of their withering sarcasm).
You can even Torture your own Poppet for profit!
Giant Oyster as master healer? Only in Magic.
Since Shadowmoor is a set where "colour matters" (I think I heard that somewhere), it only makes sense that a card like Painter's Servant would make an appearance therein. As Mark Rosewater stated in a recent article, "Whenever we have a "______ matters" theme, I'm compelled to make the card that lets you turn everything into a ______." I could not be more supportive of this tactic. The recurring "underscore matters" theme is perhaps my favourite of all the "punctuation matters" themes. It edges out the "parentheses matters" theme (devoted, presumably, to exploring reminder text design), or the "colon matters" theme (exploring, um, certain activated abilities).
In the end, ever the waffler, I flipped an endlessly sided coin to make my decision for me.
What, you've never wanted to play Quirion Dryad in a mono-green deck before? I know I haven't until now.
Shadowmoor has been completely spoiled, but, don't worry, that doesn't mean it isn't fresh.
Creatures that provide some repeatable way to damage Deep-Slumber Titan are one step up in my book, entitled Chris Millar's Compendium of Arbitrary Distinctions.
If damaging your own, non-Fungusaur, creatures with these cards seems silly, you have other options. As I like to say, this is Magic. You don't have to do anything I say. I am not your mother. You can even ignore the suggestions printed right on the card.
Bad rares are like poker hands. You've got to know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em. Perhaps you could fold 'em into a Menger sponge, but I'm not sure if that is what Kenny Rogers was trying to get at. On top of knowing all this, you've also got to know when to walk away and know when to run. That's a lot to keep track of, but if you can keep all four of those wise nuggets in your head, you will certainly experience less frustration when you're trying to break a particularly stubborn reject rare. Sometimes, if you can break on through the Wall of Resistance, you will come out the other side face-to-face with either the Wall of Hope or the Wall of Wonder, depending. That's how I felt after spending a head-poundingly long time trying to figure out if Twinning Glass was just an awkward version of Mirari combined with a not-quite Retraced Image-on-a-stick, or if it was something far, far worse. The answer, you might be surprised to learn, was 42. Ah, but what was the question?
To be honest, I thought the Mysterious Case of the Twinning Glass was closed.
But then something strange happened. I felt a curious stirring in my utility belt (that's where I keep my Lorwyn Player's Guide)
It seemed so good and so obvious that I quietly thought to myself, "Oh, my God! Why didn't I think of this before?" before leaping out of the bathtub and running through my living room shouting, "Hypergenesis!"
For those who don't get it: Hypergenesis is the Time Spiral update to Eureka...
Twinning Glass also has some fringe uses. If you're playing a mirror match (How apt!), but you have Twinning Glass "technology," you can piggyback your opponent's spells. I was almost tempted to build a 500-card deck (with Planar Portals) to see if this was even remotely viable, but I was simply too exhausted from leaping out of the bathtub earlier.
Nope, I'm going to call the creature without a name something a little more exotic than Akroma, Angel of Wrath. Despite already being used as a pseudonym by a friend of mine, I'm going to call our nameless friend "Searing Wind."
That's the thing about spring. It's full of possibities. The days are longer, the weather is warmer, the Leafs are golfier. Animals feel friskier, human beings feel livelier (and probably friskier), magicthegathering.com gets preview-ier, and my segues become hackier.
That's right, just play something like Birds of Paradise into Yavimaya Dryad into Spectral Force, and by turn four you could be attacking with 24-power worth of simulated man-broccoli!
I usually like to have some unifying theme to my articles, even when it's not required, so consider these decks Ideas I Stole From Mark Gottlieb's magicthegathering.combos - Morningtide Edition. "Stole" is probably too harsh a term. "Pirated" or "ninja'd" would no doubt conjure images of Mistform Ultimus, something I'm usually up for avoiding. I'd use "purloined" but that sounds too, uh, suggestive. The thesaurus turns up "defalcate," my new favourite word of all-time, but that one probably doesn't apply in this context. How about I say "extrapolated" instead?
Obviously, if you have Ashes of the Fallen in play naming Goblins, Wort (or Boggart Birth Rite) will allow you to return any creature you want. It didn't take me long to realize that this is long way to go for what is essentially the same effect as Oversold Cemetery, but since when does a Johnny do anything the easy way? I'm writing this article while wearing mittens, for example.
I'm not normally a huge fan of land destruction decks (though they have their place, to be sure), but this one is so dumb and unnecessarily complicated that I simply can't not enjoy it.
This is unlike my old process, whereby I sat around and played a one-man word association game, repeating the word (in this case "shaman") out loud until some hitherto hidden connection revealed itself. I abandoned the technique since there was potential for embarrassment when you chanted made-up words like "Meadowboon" with different intonations or inflections... alone... in the public library.
Ah, the infinite. Is there any number you don't encompass? In the vernacular of the Magic player, infinity is an "arbitrarily large" number. To give you an idea of how this term is used, I might say, for example, "My student debt is arbitrarily large" or "I feel ill after eating an arbitrarily large amount of Laffy Taffy." I might also say, "I'm going to use Weirding Shaman to create an arbitrarily large number of Goblin Rogue tokens." In fact, I will say that.
I'm sure there are plenty of ways to go about doing this. You could tweak the combo that Mark Gottlieb wrote about in last week's feature article. He combined Weirding Shaman with Doubling Season and both Phyrexian and Ashnod's Altar to make infinite mana. With a second Doubling Season, you could make infinite Goblin Rogues. At five cards, however, the combo seems more than a little convoluted. That's why I'm going to make my arbitrarily large number of Goblin Rogues with, um, six cards. Okay, things didn't work out quite as planned (I'm going to fire my efficiency expert), but you can still make a lot of tokens.
A pair of Dross Harvesters provide some measure of redundancy, as you will gain 2 life at the front end of the combo (when you sacrifice a creature). Similarly, a pair of Heartstones (reducing the cost of Weirding Shaman's ability to 
) will eliminate the need for a second Carnival of Souls and the second Soul Warden, Angelic Chorus, or Dross Harvester. While they won't allow you to make infinite tokens with Weirding Shaman on their own, a trio of Heartstones will let you turn one black mana into one black Goblin Rogue, which, as you might expect, can get out of hand pretty quickly. I had devised a handy spreadsheet outlining all of the possible combinations and permutations, but my dog ate it or I'm lying.
Branches? Branches? We Don't Need No Reach of Branches!
Er, wait. Yes, we do. It's Shaman Week, after all, and Reach of Branches is the first name in Shaman token making.
There are a couple other Intuition targets in the deck: Wonder (because some of us like flying trees) and a flashback-able Parallel Evolution (because the people who like flying trees really, really like them).
This is only a small sampling of cards you can profitably pair with the latest Reach. Feel free to, uh, branch out into other territory. Or punch me.
Speaking of arcane means, I'd like to travel back to the land of Kamigawa, where mana costs ran wild and free and fish hovered in mid-air a lot more than usual.
Any non-Elemental card reduces [Sunflare Shaman's] potency, but limiting yourself to Elementals might reduce your deck's potency. "If only there was a way to turn all of the creatures in your graveyard into Elementals," I transitioned awkwardly. Actually, there is: Ashes of the Fallen, which also happens to combo with Horde of Notions to allow you to play any creature spell from your graveyard for a measly 
.
"Now, if only there was a way to put a whole bunch of creatures into your graveyard at once," I mused dreamily. Well, there is one of those, too: Iname, Death Aspect! Play Iname, fill your graveyard with Spirits (which will become Elementals as well, because of Ashes of the Fallen), and then fire off your Sunflare Shamans for some arbitrarily medium-sized amount of damage.
Howdy, all. Welcome to the Penultimate Pre-Preview Week Week! It promises to be a great time for those who prefer their preview cards to be a fortnight away, as well as for those who like the word "penultimate."
The other five will provide grist for the Millar. I've always thought this column could use more grist and more references to myself in the third-person.
I Never Meadowboon I Didn't Like
It's high risk, high reward, but that's what you should expect if you're getting your ideas from a snake.
Now, I don't want to brag, or come across as a dude with a big head or something, but I often think of myself as a giant. That's because I'm a tall-ish person. In my youth, I had nicknames like Stretch and, uh, Millar, and my friends and family conspired to strap cinder blocks to my head to stop me from growing. They were thwarted at every turn by a little thing called the law, but I like to think that it was because they actually like me. In any case, I was spared the nickname Cindy until I was a full-grown adult.
According to the Local Institute of Ego-boosting Statistics, tall men are supposed to make more money and have more success with the ladies than short men. If that's true, I wish I could set up a meeting between these statisticians, my boss, and some ladies.
One thing these number-crunchers always fail to mention is all that extra money and all of those extra special ladies don't mean much when you're laid up because of the frequent concussions suffered due to low-hanging light fixtures, store signage, air ducts, water pipes, and the general miserliness of the nation's entryways and exits.
There are still some Giants that are flying under the radar. It's a very high radar, presumably.
Three plus six plus six plus six should be enough damage to kill all but the most robust of opponents, provided that my math is correct. I tried to verify this, but my abacus crashed while performing the calculation. Also, I don't know how to use an abacus. Great word, though.
Of course, this is assuming that all of but one of your Skarrgan Skybreakers are still in your library, which is not guaranteed by any Stretch, least of all me.
Favor of the Mighty? Flavor of the Week
As I sought out underused Giant cards to build around this week, I thought about Favor of the Mighty. It certainly has its uses. I've been using mine to make sure my trade binder is fully stocked.
Acts of Justifiable Countrycide
One Giant that is most assuredly on everybody's radar is one-time Swimming With Sharks previewee Countryside "Wesley" Crusher. This souped-up Trained Armodon has unleashed greater torrents of gamer drool than any souped-up Trained Armodon in the history of Magic, including Akroma, Angel of Fury and Akroma, Angel of Wrath (they're really souped-up Trained Armodons). Countryside Crusher combos with everything from Greater Gargadon to Lesser Gargadon to fifty-five Mountains and a random card of your choice.
Oros provides two key things. One, he's an enormous flying beatstick (not to be confused with an enormous flying beetstick, one of the many weapons in the boggart arsenal)
Welcome to Rogue Week! It's time to take a look at the crook, the thief, his lowlife, and their robbers.
First, a fascinating piece of trivia: Did you know that the word "rogue" does not appear in the flavour text of a single Magic card? It also appears in the name of a lone Elephant card as well as every article title this week. Sadly, the word is also missing from each of the English-to-Pun dictionaries that I use to write my column, so all of you pun enthusiasts will have to go without. Pun haters rejoice.
One-mana 1/1s with comes-into-play abilities are pretty rare (though usually common).
As Doug Beyer mentioned yesterday, the Rogue creature type didn't even exist until Mirrodin, when Neurok Spy put them on the Magic map. Where on the Magic map? If I'm not mistaken, they're located in a little village on the outskirts of Beebleton. All I know is that until recently, Rogues had a thing against shiny baubles, and, to a lesser extent, beebles.
February's got a little bit of everything: ice, snow, a smidgeon of forced romance, and, let's not forget, slush. It's like a nonstop party, especially if you're a polar bear in a long-term relationship.
But what about the unchased rares, the ones who spent last Thursday at home with a cup of chamomile and a tub of ice cream? Who's going to show them some love and shuffle them up? A little love is all they need and love don't cost a thing (well, maybe half a ticket).
Unfortunately, despite all of my love for Baru (and despite his synergy with Everbark Shaman), I had to leave him out in favour of some other tricks. Feel free to add him back or build another deck entirely. It's February, the time of limitless possibilities.
As Mark Rosewater mentioned on Monday, +1/+1 counters have been a part of the game since Alpha. You can trace their lineage from Fungusaur through to Fungal Behemoth and on to Fungus Sliver, while making numerous (and, happily, fungus-free) detours along the way.
Mark also noted that the +1/+1 counter can have many different flavours, from the representation of out-of-control fungal growth to the representation of controlled fungal growth and everything in between. At once highly adaptable and intrinsically flavourless, +1/+1 counters easily assume the flavour of their surrounding elements. They're kind of like tofu that way. Or chameleons. Or, I guess, chameleons made of tofu. Either way, fry some up for me!
Our friend the +1/+1 counter is a very plain, very workmanlike counter. It doesn't have the cachet or sophistication of the loyalty counter, the indie cred of the polyp counter, or the unprecedented pitiability of the tide counter. It doesn't have the infectious charm of either the -0/-1 counter or the -2/-1 counter. It doesn't have the clockwork precision of the +1/+0 counter, the dash and pizzazz of the +2/+0 counter, or the solemn dignity of the +0/+2 counter. What it does have is its own theme week, so I'd better get cracking.
Luckily, piling beads, pennies, or marbles on to creatures is such an entertaining enterprise that it didn't take much arm-twisting or editorial whip-cracking to get me to travel down this familiar path one more time. Plus, it's pretty much guaranteed that we're going to be playing with Elves and various green fatties, my two great loves (followed closely by chameleon tofu).
When Lorwyn came out, the cycle of Elemental Incarnations (Dream, Death, Despair, Destruction...Oops, wrong cycle.)
Seriously, how sick is Ashling the Pilgrim with Vigor? The cards have been out for months now, but I didn't think about putting them together until just now. If you can set Ashling off without killing Vigor, the Legendary Elemental will get all of its counters back! The next time you fire off its ability three times in a turn, you will deal twice as much damage as the first time.
Class of the Titans
Well, Warrior is a class of the Changeling Titans, at least.
there's Trained Armodon's vanilla 3/3 buddy, Nessian Courser (which sounds more like something that would break down in the Enterprise's engineering room than a Centaur Warrior)
Boldwyr Heavyweights! Like many undercosted fatties before it, such as Eater of Days and Sky Swallower, Boldwyr Heavyweights fall pretty squarely in the Johnny camp. Not only do they boast uncommonly high stats for a four-mana creature, but they clearly have a peculiar, albeit nonabstract, diet. All this is not to say that Spike won't take the portly pair out for a night on the town... literally.
Shadow of Doubt kills the drawback entirely, but makes your Giant cost an awkward 
Until next time, make lovviors, not warriors.
Welcome to Limbo Week, the only week of the year where lowering the bar is a sign of success!
This is one of those weeks between official previews and the actual release of the set where the columnists play party games on a carnival cruise ship as we drift through the first circle of Hell. You'd think after having been through this several times before that I would be used to it, but I'm not. It's still pretty terrifying and, fortunately, not the least bit true.
"Dip into the old mailbag!" It's been a while (forever), since I've done that, seeing as I don't even have a mailbag. It's old-fashioned and inefficient filing system, if you ask me. As a modern man, hep to all of the latest developments in written communication, all of my mail is safely stored on the Internet somewhere.
Of course, it should not be a great surprise that Ms. of the Mornsong is garnering some serious attention from those deckbuilders who like to walk (nay, run!) on the wild side. Heck, I'd even say she (It's a she, right?) is garnering some attention from me, if I really knew what "garnering" meant. I think it has something to do with parsley.
It just so happens that both the desirable effect and the nasty drawback are two edges of the same sword. You know, a double-edged, symmetrical one. What the right hand giveth, the left hand also giveth, but to someone who is trying to kill you with Magic.
Of course, despite the fact that Maralen has the same effect on each player, you do have a 2/3 as well, making her not entirely symmetrical. It's more of triple-edged sword, I guess, with one edge that can be used to fend off grizzly bears.
Even more devastating, however, is putting Maralen into play in response to cards like Brainstorm or Careful Consideration. In the case of the former, your opponent will not draw three cards, but will put two cards from their hand on top of their library. With the latter, your opponent will not draw four cards, but will discard two or three cards, depending. Ouch.
This will happen to you, too, if you play these cards while Maralen is on the board. Luckily, due to miracle of Constructed Magic, you don't have to put these kinds of cards in your deck.
Welcome to Morningtide Preview Week, Part II: This Time It's Later in the Year.
a fancy and/or schmancy preview card
Upon seeing this card, my first thought was, "Wow, a green Sylvan Library." That statement is understandably a little confusing, since the Library has all of the trappings of a green card. Among said trappings are the fact that it's got a little piece of broccoli in the top right corner, it, for lack of a better word, is "green," and it has "Sylvan" in the title, which, as you may know, comes from a French word meaning "little piece of broccoli."
Even with all of those points in its favour, however, Sylvan Library isn't really a green card. For one thing, what is a library doing in the forest? Are the Elves and the Beasts checking out copies of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Beaters or the latest Harry Potter? Despite those books being good reads, I highly doubt it. It makes no sense. Clearly, libraries should be on islands, where their contents can be perused by sentient fish and four-armed purple guys.
You see, in Toronto where I live, we had something like 35 centimetres of snow unceremoniously dumped on us. Worse, it seemed like every stop on my holiday tour of duty had been blanketed by more and more snow with less and less ceremony. The heavens just opened up and said, "Deal with it." When I reached my final port of call, I was chagrined to discover that not only was I using terms like "port of call" and "chagrined," but that the poor town had been swallowed up by more than 50 centimetres of the white, fluffy stuff. For those not familiar with the metric system, that's the equivalent of about three miles. It was deep. At a certain point, it would not have surprised me at all if the neighbours started loading various forest creatures onto a snowmobile, two by two.
Sure, you might counter my bottomless self-pity by pointing out that all of my snow has already melted, and, yeah, my roommate could commit justifiable homicide if I were to take credit for doing any shoveling whatsoever, but the fact remains that, like a certain Boggart dwelling, I am very anti-shovel. (Yes, it took two paragraphs to get to that joke. It's so worth it, though.)
The deck can come out of the gates extremely quickly. Even if you don't store your decks in some kind of gated enclosure, the deck still has game
Welcome to Treefolk Week! With Snow Week and Hoser Week already in the books, I guess dedicating a whole week to trees is the only way we've got left to pander to the Canadians. And pander I shall!
I'm going to start with a little combo I came up with two seconds ago: Tamanoa + The Rack. It's like The Rack has lifelink! The resulting deck will of course be named Tamarack, after the small, slender tree found primarily in northern half of North America. That's double north. A member of the larch family, the tamarack is easily recognizable (even from great distances) by its delicate deciduous foliage.
If you just enjoyed that fun tree fact, you're in luck: there's plenty more where that came from! It's called the Internet (or, I guess, the forest). Poke around in it for a while. You'll find all kinds of neat things. In the meantime, I'm going to play Magic cards.
Of all the new Treefolk in Lorwyn, Doran, the Siege Tower is clearly (and somewhat ironically) the most powerful. The 2007 Magic World Champion, Uri Peleg, took home the big trophy playing a Standard deck containing four copies of the sick son of a beech.
Worst of all, [Doran] makes the most peace-loving character in Magic into a killing machine. Poor Karn, Silver Golem. No more Mr. Passive Resistance, he's out to (reluctantly) kick some butt. With Doran at his side, Karn battles opposing critters as an 8/8. He'll still try to go easy on them, but that just makes things worse.
During my search for cards to pair with Doran, I plugged "+0/+X" into a number of card databases. This led me to Living Armor. It also turned up this trio, all, remarkably, from Legends: Kry Shield, Subdue, and Great Defender. Boy, they don't make 'em like they used to. Thank God.
Yew Willow Pine? Yew Butternut!
Wow, that was a stretch even for me. It doesn't even make much sense when translated. Unfortunately, I spent a frighteningly larch amount of time on TreeCanada looking fir potential tree-related puns. I've already used alder best ones, but I maple some of the less poplar ones out of my bag of tricks and yews them later. Cedar sycamore hemlock.
Ol' Doran isn't the only all-walkin', all-talkin', all singin' tree whose board-way melody we should all be paying some heed. No, not Singing Tree.
Besides making your piddly 5/7s into 6/8 behemoths, T.P. makes them indestructible to boot. An unrepentant tree-hugger (What did you expect?), he keeps your Forests safe from harm as well. As long as he's around, you don't have to worry about Orcish Settlers, Boggart Loggers, Goblin Gardeners, or Akki Florists.
I Will Not Lignify That With a Response
Your once combat-fearing "Wall of Hats" is now a 5/9 beatstick, ready to storm into battle (with appropriate headgear, presumably).
You can also use [Merfolk Thaumaturgist] to wipe creatures off the board in conjunction with either Lignify or Ovinize. With Eternal Witness and Vedalken Mastermind on the board, you can keep doing this, turn after turn. You're a dead yew. You're a dead ewe. Have fun with homophones!
Often at this time of year, Magic columnists (Anthony Alongi is the only one I can think of right now, but I'm sure there are others) will build some holiday theme decks. The theme might be something as simple as adhering to a strict red-white (See: Claus, Santa)
or red-green colour scheme.
Heck, you can include all three colours! Nothing says holiday spirit like some Fiery Justice.
Gallowbraid and Morinfen aren't just the names of a death metal band and an arthritis medication. They're also black fatties with painful upkeeps, famous for being in a deck called, I believe, Aesop and Son. I could be wrong on that one.
One of my favourite games ever involved recurring a [Veteran Explorer] repeatedly against an Affinity deck. I sure did have a lot of mana when I lost.
"Doesn't tap to attack" means "doesn't cause Maraxus to shrink." I believe that's somewhere in the reminder text.
Lorwyn has been out for several weeks now, which is plenty of time to decide whether or not some of our friends with gold expansion symbols deserve the self-esteem-crushing label "reject rare." The cards I'm going to talk about aren't "rejects" as much as simply "under the radar." But "under-the-radar rare" just doesn't crush the self-esteem in quite the same way. No one said I was "under the radar" in high school, for example.
[Incendiary Command]'s like a Lava Axe, a Lava Storm, a Lava Blister, and a [insert name of future red card-drawer with the word Lava in the title]—all in one! It provides some pyroclasmic redundancy, is rarely useless, and is perhaps the only red card in this paragraph that can destroy a Plains (think Savannah or Temple Garden), a plainswalker, and a planeswalker.
Not only does Noxious Ghoul make for a great insult if you happen to live in Elizabethan England (in my mind, it's second only to Filthy Cur in this respect)
When I wade through a massive collection of decklists (like the States / Champs results) I'm always on the lookout for oddball strategies, people playing my pet cards, or both at the same time. Basically, I hope to see some players / deckbuilders with great intestinal fortitude and/or loose screws.
Granting haste to your guys is cool, but granting them "skillhaste" is probably cooler. That goes double if no one knows what you're talking about (That's always cool, right?)
Last of all, I always like to include some fatties with my Elves (I guess it's my Christmas spirit).
This article started out with a huge and somewhat deranged caustic rant aimed at Mistform Ultimus, which I'm not going to pick quotes from because the whole thing is borderline-quotable and also rather strange. Then he continued:
By the way, welcome to Pre-Changeling Week! Due to some unforeseen temporal anomalies (Hey, wasn't that last block?), I won't be around next Thursday for Changeling Week proper. Some turkey will be filling in for me. Until then, let's build some changeling decks and steal all of Rosewater's puns.
How would you like to attack with an army of enormous indestructible creatures with double strike and, uh, banding? That's just what you can do with Mirror Entity, Timber Protector, an equipped Raksha Golden Cub, and Soraya the Falconer.
Perhaps the most dangerous changeling-enhancer is world-fameless samurai master, Iizuka the Ruthless. I'm not sure why he's so ruthless, but it probably has something to do with people spelling his name wrong all the time. Two consecutive i's? Really?
There has been some controversy lately about the fact that there are no Goats in Lorwyn. No true Goats. No pure-blooded, dyed-in-the-wool Goats. I've known about this since I read a thread in the Future Set Speculation forum entitled "No Goats in Peanut Butter." True fact and words to live by.
The reason for the controversy is that Goatnapper has nothing to 'nap. He's all dressed up with no place to goatnap. Sure, he can kidnap changelings, but it's just not the same. With no Goats, you get some initial head-scratching, followed by a realization: "Oh, right. Changelings." With one goat, you get some initial head-scratching ("Is that it?"), followed by the same realization. Plus, you've also got this poor Goat running around with a huge bullseye on it. That sounds like a win-win to me.
On top of all that, having a genuine Goat would make it easier on the dimwitted Goblins. Imagine this conversation in the Goblins' secret hideout:
Goblin Bookie: So, did you kidnap the Goat?
Goatnapper: Yes. [Opens burlap sack, pulls out Amoeboid Changeling]
Goblin Bookie: [Stunned silence] Um...Oh, right. Changelings. You milk it.
There are a couple other one-sided Wrath combos involving Shields of Velis Vel. Goblin Pyromancer or Tivadar's Crusade will do the trick if your opponent is playing Goblins (and he or she most assuredly will be).
Lorwyn's primary white tribe, the Kithkin, are perhaps the weeniest of all white weenies. Certainly weenier than Samurai. However, what they lack in stature, they more than make up for in smallness.
what are the Kithkin anyway? Are they just dwarves with a no-facial-hair policy, like the New York Yankees? Are they really three apples tall, as some reports suggest?
Kith Me, I'm from Irish Mythology
Luckily, one of the Johnnier Kithkin cards (Militia's Pride) happens to facilitate and enhance a beatdown strategy with the added bonus of maximizing shenanigan-potential. I'm not alone in this assessment. Alextfish's pro-Militia's Pride post in Bennie's forum read like a précis of the article I had planned for this week, so either we have the same Johnny instincts, we plugged identical phrases into Gatherer, or both. Like I always say, great minds search the same card databases.
That's me again! 
If you're like me, you'll find that many of your best ideas come to you while you're slacking off at work.
Ah, Kithkin Greatheart. If you have struck first, it is by standing on the shoulder of a road that a Giant is walking on.
Normally, including such cheap beaters in a deck with high-cost creatures like Giants would be less than ideal. Not these days, thanks to the modern-day Mistform Ultimii. Woodland Changeling, Avian Changeling, and Mirror Entity? They might be Giants.
Do Kithkin Mercenaries Sell Themselves Short?
Today, in a very special episode of a series I'm calling Behind the Mechanic, we're going to examine the Clash. This keyword-action supergroup rose like a phoenix from the ashes of the unexpectedly flammable bands War and Scry.
There are those who think that clash is too random. They've done studies on clash, you know. Apparently, 20% of the time, it works every time. Some of you might say that that doesn't make sense, or, worse, is completely inaccurate. I won't argue with you. How could I? For starters, I pulled that statistic right out of my Shimmering Grotto.
On top of that, even if the number was accurate, it would only apply to "naked" clashes, those clashes that follow the usual script: I'll show you mine, you show me yours, and if mine's bigger, you take a Lightning Bolt to the head or whatever.
But if you're gonna go to all the trouble of clashing with your opponent (you know, doing all that number-crunching), you might as well win the darn things for the love of Pete. That's what I always say, although I usually say it in much stronger, Pete-free language. Let's see what we can come up with.
[Intet, the Dreamer]: ...This way, you can get a "free" card whenever you attack. You might say she's a flyer full of discounts.
When it comes to clashing, the only thing that does it more than my wardrobe is an Elf deck.
Of all the tribes in Lorwyn, it makes sense that the snooty, know-it-all Elves would be the most clash-ist. Besides the alluring Nath's Elite and basilisk-esque Gilt-Leaf Ambush, there's Fistful of Force and Woodland Guidance as potential non-Elf clashers. Sure, the Goblins have access to Adder-Staff Boggart and Dripping Dead—er, I mean, Bog Hoodlums—as well as Lash Out and Weed Strangle as in-colour utility spells. And, yes, Treefolk have noogie-master Oaken Brawler and Sentry Oak and some nice in-colour clash-enhancers. Okay, so apparently Elves have no special relationship with clash and I'm just fixing the facts in order to build another Elf deck. If you're feeling litigious, you know what to do.
Your opponents are going to be blocking the Elite whether they like it or not, so why don't we make them like it as little as possible? What can you use to make this kind of creature especially Nath-ty?
How about something like Venom, Gaze of the Gorgon, or the latest in a short line of unpleasant green tricks, Lace with Moonglove. What's a Moonglove? Is it what a Moonraker wears while he's Moongardening? I don't know, but it seems plausible. All I know is that it sounds like one of MaGo's trademarked doomsday devices, and its effect on your opponent's creatures is just as devastating.
Rebels Without an Intervening "If" Clause
Among the first Lorwyn cards revealed on this site, these plucky and highly coordinated little fighters—er, I mean, these powerful beings—can hop from one plane of the multiverse to the next, either at will or willy-nilly, depending. If it struck their respective fancies, they could have breakfast in Ulgrotha, lunch in Mirrodin, and dinner in Kamigawa—I hear the Shell of the Last Kappa is delicious. They could spend their winters enjoying the sun, sand, and sacred mesas of southern Dominaria; their summers luxuriating in the ridiculously overcosted resorts of Mercadia; and their yearly two weeks of vacation in, I don't know, the streets of Ravnica. Basically, they can choose their own Extended. It's a pretty sweet gig if you can get it.
You can add and remove loyalty counters by activating one of the planeswalker's abilities. Using an ability with a plus-sign next to it lets you add a loyalty counter (go figure), while using an ability with a minus-sign makes you subtract a loyalty counter. Abilities with a forward slash require long division, but we won't be going into that today (or, probably, ever).
Until Time Spiral's temporal craziness changed everything, there had not been a new Merfolk card since Apocalypse (except, of course, for Mistform Ultimus). What's the deal with that? For that matter, what's the deal with airline food? While I'm at it, what's the deal with Deal or No Deal? Basically, there are a lot of deals that I'm questioning right now.
Luckily for the Johnny, these corally fixated, reef-dwelling, bikini-topped sea-dudes provide us with a ton of deckbuilding opportunities. Let's trawl through my inbox for ideas. If we catch some shrimp in the process, I've got the garlic sauce.
Utopia Vow turns your Merfolk into a Utopia Tree, so just tap the creature to add one blue to your mana pool, enjoy the fruits of your triggering, and then use the blue mana to untap the creature. Flip after ten minutes. Er, lather, rinse, repeat.
Ancient magicians are no doubt screaming out for Fallen Empires's Vodalian War Machine, which was recently made available online through Masters Edition. It's like a circus that can attack and pump itself with the help of Merfolk. You don't need to explain to me why Vodalia is a fallen empire.
I've waited for this day for many years. Finally, we have Wizard tokens! Sure, you could make them yourself with Volrath's Laboratory, Riptide Laboratory, Soul Foundry, or some Artificially Evolved token-maker. Ignoring for a moment my attempts to start a Wizard Conspiracy with Endrek Sahr, Master Breeder, this method of producing Wizards has always seemed like a lot of work to me, and I'm unfathomably lazy. You would need Captain Nemo to plumb the depths of my laziness.
What I ended up with is a pretty straightforward Merfolk beatdown deck with some added explosiveness.
Cod's Wallop
Nameless Inversion, which my friends and I have been calling "Innocent Virgin" because we talk funny in Canada, is a Merfolk.
Shapesharer (which I keep reading as Sheepshearer for some reason).
As Devin Low mentioned in his column last Friday, Goblins sure love to die. They're eager to give up their lives for a point of damage or two, or to have their faces vaulted, and, frankly, we're eager to have them do it. Having moved largely into black, modern day Goblins have a penchant for necromancy and won't stay dead for very long.
Purveyor of futuristic cutlery SporkMaster5000 wrote in...
Since the combo he outlined is jam-packed with Goblins, Donald suggested Boggart Shenanigans as the kill card. It acts as a sort of Disciple of the Facevault.
(For the record, I love the name Warren Pilferers, although I can't decide whether it's more befitting of a Goblin, a shady accountant, or an NFL linebacker.)
The Elementals of Style
1. Omit needless Birds.
2. Add Elementals.
It's a pretty straightforward process, really. Once you figure out how to get those pesky Birds out of there, the difficulty lies in choosing the right mix of Elementals. Luckily, I was spared this task by a pair of industrious Elementalists who happen to read this column. The Elemental apple of their Johnny eyes was Ceaseless Searblades, a creature that should probably go into business with Shapesharer selling sea shells by the sea shore.
As you can imagine, I was as happy as a Clambassador when I found out that Lorwyn would be packed with more Elves than the Keebler family reunion.
You start with a card Mark Rosewater previewed a couple weeks ago, Nath of the Gilt-Leaf. You might say that he's a marriage between Durkwood Boars, a one-sided Bottomless Pit, a Hivestone hacked to "Warriors" with Artificial Evolution, and a Riptide Replicator with one counter on it, set to "green" and "Elf," and with the ability to be activated for free whenever your opponent discards a card. You might also say that he does his own thing.
Two Tuesdays ago, he had this to say about Hamletback Goliath:
"The Ferrett's preview card. Holy crap, my brain exploded. With combos!"
Luckily, David survived this impromptu combotomy.
Both the Forcemage and Hampsterdance Goliath
Well, it was tough to decide which of the remaining preview cards I should build around. On the one hand, you've got the über-wacky Gilt-Leaf Palace. On the other, you've got stick-in-the-mud Gaddock Teeg. On still a third hand, you've got an array of Mer-, Tree-, Goblin-, Elf-, and Faeriefolk, as well as Cryptic Command. It's a bigger hand than I was expecting.
To make matters worse, Lorwyn brought with it another master of the red zone, Brigid, Hero of Kinsbaile, who I have taken to calling Brigid, the Really Heavy Ballista for obvious reasons.
I know that a certain segment of the Magic-playing population groans whenever they see Loxodon Warhammer in a deck list. It's a Timmy's dream, and, well, I'm half Timmy. I get it from my mom's side of the family.
Even if you're not a power gamer, doesn't the idea of equipping the 'hammer to Brigid, Hero of Kinsbaile make you smile just a little bit? What if you imagine this great archer with a quiver full of hammers? No? All right.
Soulbright Flamekin is definitely a nifty little tool that can fit into a variety of decks. To use the buzzwords of the day, this card is more modular than linear (if you look at it on that particular continuum), and its hyperbolic rating is like nothing I've ever seen (or ever will see again).
1. It can give a creature trample.
2. It can turn six mana of any colour into eight red mana.
3. It's an Elemental
4. It's a Shaman.
5. I have probably been referring to it with the wrong gendered pronoun this whole time.
Tenth Edition's Bogardan Firefiend recently betrayed its Elemental roots and has some nice synergy with Greater Gargadon. In fact, it makes me wish there was a Bogardan Gargadon, if only to watch people try to pronounce it.
Well, with both Xenic Poltergeist and Karn, Silver Golem able to turn your artifacts into creatures, you can animate your Bombs and send them into the red zone with cries of, "OMG! He's a walking Time Bomb!"
What's a Terravore?
For smashing with.
Unless you're a staunch Cyclops supporter, one of something might be good, but two is better.
G’day, Johnnies and preview-seeking interlopers. It’s Day Three of Week One of Set Sixty-Something Previews. That’s Lorwyn, by the way. I figured it out from the banner.
On Monday, Rei Nakazawa started things off by showing you Gaddock Teeg, the most powerful Tribal Unity hoser ever printed, while Mark Rosewater gave you Timber Protector, a Treefolk “lord” whose flavour text—“Life’s a birch.”—heralds a new golden age of italicized puns. Okay, that’s not its real flavour text, but a guy can dream, can’t he? Then on Tuesday, The Ferrett previewed the least merciful black fatty since Kaervek the Merciless. There’s not a shred of mercy between the two of them.
Not only can it do a million different things, but many of those things are outright ridiculous. While I was brainstorming deck ideas, I lost track of the number of times I said, “Wait... Can you...? Oh, my God.” I don’t know why I was keeping track of this particular statistic in the first place, but trust me when I say that you will probably experience a few of those moments yourselves as you discover some new card to pair with it.
As my editor and personal rules guru Kelly Digges told me, “Basically, Rings of Brighthearth lets you do everything after the colon twice while doing everything before the colon only once.”
Let me tell you, there are some pretty nasty things to the left of the colon, things you don’t want to have to go through twice if you don’t have to. The activated abilities of a permanent are much more likely than a spell to have steep additional costs, whether it’s discarding a card, sacrificing a creature, paying life, revealing cards in your hand, or removing cards from the top of your library. Tap five untapped Donkeys you control. Pay five-seventeenths of your life, rounded sideways.
The Myojin has one of the most powerful activated abilities ever seen on a creature, but once the divinity counter has been used up you’re stuck with a ten-mana Hill Giant. Well, with Rings of Brighthearth and Homarid Spawning Bed, you can turn that 3/3 into twenty 1/1s for five measly mana.
The basic idea here is to use all of black’s trademark land-fetching (Korlash, Heir to Blackblade, Corpse Harvester, and Twisted Abomination, with an assist from Lord of the Undead)
They say that bad news comes in threes. Just ask Goldilocks. So with the recent departures of Taste the Magic's Matt Cavotta and Latest Developments' Aaron Forsythe, you just new that the proverbial third shoe would have to drop. I would like to announce right now that not only does my country boast some unusual proverbs, but I'm also leaving. Yes, it's true. If I don't get out the door right away, I'm going to be late for Evil Dead: The Musical. Don't worry, though. I'll be back in less than a paragraph.
One bad thing about Manabarbs is that while it's great at sealing the deal and preventing miraculous comebacks, it's not particularly good if you've fallen behind in the game and you are trying to get back in it. Unless...
Huh? Oh, yeah, I kinda trailed off there.
As I've explained in incredible detail above, Manabarbs makes paying for your spells painful. Of course, that is only true if you're using mana drawn from lands to do so. If you're playing your spells for free by pitching cards or sacrificing lands, you will be remarkably pain-free. Red is full of such analgesic spells.
If mono-red isn't your cup of tea, or your bag for that matter
Since I want to branch out a bit from the white and red decks, I decided to look elsewhere for inspiration. Luckily, I didn't have to look far. Dang astigmatism.
Welcome to another edition of House of Cards! Before I begin this week's deck-stivities with arguably the worst coinage ever (oops, too late.),
I'd like to spend a little time discussing something near and dear to all of our hearts. No, not our bicuspid valves. I'm talking about baseball.
This usually means I'll steer clear of that card for a little while so things don't get too repetitive. The point is, I've steered clear long enough. It's time to, uh, crash straight through the guard rail of creativity and go plummeting down the cliffs of inspiration.
He took the following deck to a PTQ in Bristol, home of the Chicken of Bristol. It (the deck, not the chicken) uses Demonic Collusion
Awesome stuff! I think all games get better when your opponents have confused looks. Except solitaire. Then it's just embarrassing.
Welcome to Don Slaught Week here at magicthegathering.com!
I'm not sure why I specified magicthegathering.com. I guess you never can tell if some other web site will simultaneously devote a week's worth of content to a long-retired journeyman catcher and I don't want there to be any confusion about what site you're currently browsing. If you weren't sure, it's this one.
I agree that it seems odd to dedicate an entire theme week to a fairly obscure Major League baseball player. I can only assume that we did it because several members of R&D have ties to Pittsburgh, the city where Don Slaught spent much of his career. If this marks the beginning of a trend, I look forward to theme weeks covering other forgotten athletes, such as judo master Amir "The Thinker" Rodin, sharpshooting biathlete Cody S. Sey, and the 1968 Olympic pole-vaulting champion, Abe Trayersofkamigawa. Are these theme weeks on the horizon? Only time will tell. Also, no.
Now the question becomes, "How does one go about building decks based on a baseball player?" Well, it might seem like a stretch, but I'm going to suggest that teams are like tribes. Heck, the Major League team from Cleveland is nicknamed "The Tribe." Extrapolating further, a team like the Toronto Blue Jays could be represented by a Bird theme deck, the Baltimore Orioles by a, uh, Bird deck, and the St. Louis Cardinals could, um, also be represented by Birds. Okay, I hope Don Slaught played for a more diverse group of teams, like the Soldiers, Beasts, and Rebel Clerics. I'm a wee bit sad, because I know going into this little experiment that there's no Major League Baseball team called the Elves. Maybe there should be one, though. At the North Pole.
As I mentioned in the introduction, the man of the hour, Don Slaught, spent much of his career in Pittsburgh playing for the Pirates. That's somewhat unfortunate, because Pirate decks pretty much build themselves. Either they're clones of Mercadian Masques era land destruction decks, or straightforward blue aggro. Rather than tread on well-trodden territory, I built a deck around some creatures whose names only a pirate can say best: Gnarrs!
Later on, it occurred to me that you can pump up all three Gnarrs simply by playing a Cavern Harpy. The only problem would be the mana, but you could solve that by using Aluren. If you want some arbitrarily large Gnarrs (and who wouldn't?), I'd start there.
Don Slaught rounded out his Major League career with brief stints with California Angels, the Chicago White Sox, and the San Diego Padres. In terms of tribal decks, two of those teams can be easily translated. The Padres are Clerics and the Angels are, um, Angels. I'll get to the White Sox in a minute.
[...] Oh, yeah, the White Sox. Check out the feet of Children of Korlis. They look white to me. All I know is I wouldn't want to be the Laundress of Korlis.
Well, that about does it for this week. A man's sixteen-year career summed up in three decks. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I do know that this was a weird theme week. I wonder if it means something. I guess only time will tell. Also, no.
So I'm writing this on my birthday, because, well, I love you Johnnies so much and/or my deadline is tomorrow. I'm 28 now. This seems like a fine age to be, especially since I'm not the lead singer of a groundbreaking rock and roll band. I've been told that reaching this milestone has put me in some good company. For instance, Orson Welles, director of Citizen Kane, also had a birthday when he was 28.
Tenth Edition's Upwelling, a sort of mana-bank which allows you to save your spare mana at an interest rate comparable to an actual bank.
As Mark says, "[The combo] would remove the greatest risk of using Braid of Fire, mana burn, and I've been wracking my brains on how to exploit it—at least, on how to stay alive long enough to exploit it! Any thoughts?"
Why, yes, I do have some thoughts. It's one of the privileges of being a sentient lifeform. While many of these thoughts are irrelevant as well as inappropriate for a family site, others are not. I will discuss these now.
Two columns ago, I arranged marriages for many Tenth Edition creatures. Unbeknownst to me, Puppeteer and Kamahl, Pit Fighter had eloped six years ago and didn't tell anybody, so I looked a bit foolish trying to wed them again. Everyone else still seems happy together, though.
Now, I don't profess to know how Balduvian Warlord actually works. The FAQ for the poor, complicated bastard makes a Stephen King novel look like a James M. Cain. And it doesn't even include the regularly, occasionally, and rarely asked questions like "Can I use this as a beer coaster?" and "Where do you keep the aspirin?" All I know is that under certain circumstances you can use him to make someone block your lovely Knight of Dusk. Sure, it's a long way to go to kill a creature, but it's always more entertaining to jump through hoops. Just ask a circus performer.
Siege-Gang Commander combos with Flowstone Salamander in many of my favourite Magic limericks.
Dark Ritual, Hypnotic Specter, Hymn to Tourach If there is an unholy trio in Magic, this is it. No offense to Linda, Dolly, and Emmylou, but they have nothing whatsoever to do with Magic: The Gathering. These three cards have been wreaking havoc and crushing dreams for over a decade. They're like the New York Yankees, except powered by black magic. Oh, wait... never mind.
Eventually, my patience, like my boxer shorts, wore thin. My lightly-sautéing disgruntlement boiled over into a mixed metaphor of piping-hot frustration.
But, hey, after three years or so, I got over it. I learned to stop worrying and love plagiarizing Stanley Kubrick.
I put the deck together online for about a dollar and I definitely got my money's worth. Er, wait, that makes it sound bad. It was worth every penny? Money well spent? Pick something that doesn't sound sarcastic.
I'm sure I'm not the only spellslinger who gets his curmudge-on because of a friend's unlikely-yet-annoying pet card.
Little did I know, I had opened Pandora's Box. Worse, that box was full of squirrels.
Of course, even the blind non-squirrel player will find a nut, and I eventually evened up my record against the Shrine deck. For purposes of my sanity, I'm gonna say that an approximately 1-30 record makes us even. There is no further need for me to prove that I can beat that deck. I did it once and that should be enough to satisfy all but the pettiest Gregs.
All of this rather expensive tomfoolery was cheapened by the Nightscape Familiars. They just had no sense of decorum.
As much as I love a toolbox, those Merchant Scrolls should probably be something like Sage Owl or, if you prefer, Spire Owl.
I'm also a fan of Wormfang Drake, Flametongue Kavu, and Goretusk Firebeast, so I'm surprised that it took me until this exact moment to realize that their names are put together the same way. The formula would seem to be:
Noun used as a quasi-adjective + part of the mouth + creature type. Here it is in action:
Ironjaw Orcs
Bloodgums Merfolk
Rocktonsil Ogre
Lavauvula Elemental
Wow! They sound like totally (not) real Magic creatures, although, admittedly, that last one is a bit of a mouthful.
Is that love in the air? I hope so. I can't really tell because of these paint fumes. Either way, I'm feeling a little light-headed. As many of you are well aware, it's summer time so Wedding Season is fully underway in my neck of the woods. It coincides with Kitchen Cabinet Painting Season, apparently.
Like Vedalken Mastermind, Stampeding Wildebeests is best friends with creatures like Kavu Climber that do things when they come into play. In fact, they love each other so much that some are questioning why they don't just get married. One of that "some" is me, so I should probably put them in the same decklist, which is a sign of true commitment.
Howdy, folks, and welcome to X Week! As my fellow columnists have no doubt discussed, the letter X has a number of important uses. It's great for describing groups of mutant superheroes, for example. Everyone's heard of the X-Men. The B-Men? Not so much. The letter X also comes in handy when you are short on time and you need to summarize your movie collection. If you need to mark a spot for some reason, you wouldn't consider using any other letter. X also happens to be the Roman numeral for ten. Coincidentally, the Tenth Edition of Magic's Core Set was recently released, so this is the wacky angle I'm going to pursue for my column this week.
That's not all Scout's Warning can do, however. Another cute trick you can pull is to flash out a True Believer in response to a direct-damage spell aimed at your noggin. "Sorry, fella. Me have shroud," you might say.
Might May be Right, but Power is, uh, Dour
Stupid rhyming dictionary.
the reanima-tastic Doomed Necromancer (which some pundits prone to exaggerate are calling "reanima-tacular")
For those of you wondering about the title of today's article and how it applies to building weird decks, I can only try to assure you that it does. If you think I'm just trotting out a Latin phrase from Philosophy 101 in order to make myself sound smarter than I am, well, you are totally wrong. With that kind of logic, you should probably go jump off a cliff with all your friends.
Did I do that right?
Brown Ouphe, which was recently joined by Ravaging Riftwurm on my list of Magic creatures that sound like mosquito-borne intestinal diseases
After a horrible period of tournament Magic history, dubbed "Ouphe Autumn" by, uh, that guy over there, the player base got sick of the ubiquity of Ouphes
I try not to be a mean person, so I will refrain from even attempting a Spell Burst "lock." That's just too cruel. Instead, I'm going to use Clockspinning in conjunction with Reality Strobe and Riftwing Cloudskate to bounce all of my opponent's permanents before making a million Saproling tokens with Sprout Swarm. That seems much fairer.
I used Compulsive Research and Careful Consideration because they both help you find Locket of Yesterdays and put spells in your graveyard. Fill up your graveyard with savings, as I always say.
If Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir is getting you down, you can always swap Search for Tomorrow for Into the North, trade the basic lands for snow-covered basics, and add some copies of Mouth of Ronom. You could also punch a wall.
Like balloons and my '80s-era television from Sears, enchantments are famous for their static abilities.
By now, it's no secret that I like to put pants on my weenies.
The only catch is that you can only put [Daybreak Coronet] on a creature that already has an aura attached to it. That's just asking to be three-for-oned. The inherent riskiness of the card should come as no surprise, since the word "coronet" comes from the French and means "all your eggs in one basket." Can someone fact-check that? Try the Oxford Encyclopedia of Made-up Junk. I'm sure it's in there.
Auratouched Mage can easily undergo a Snake Cult Initiation, but Zur will have to join some other strange club with weird admission guidelines. I hear Wombats have interesting cults as well.
A neat thing about Grave Peril is that it destroys creatures without ever targeting them. This, believe it or not, means that you can use it to kill creatures with protection from black, like the centaurs produced by Hunted Horror. Yes, my centaur friends, you can face a little peril.
I think it's pretty much a rule that you have to hate your boss. This is true no matter no what your job is. Now, imagine that you flogged steam for a living. Once you wrapped your head around the fact that you ended up in such a bizarre career, wouldn't it be hard not to just loathe your boss, some guy sitting in the little metal pod-thingie who was, like, flogging you all the time? It seems to me that a little ill will would be justified in this case.
The Rigger They Are…
Rigger Mortis
for the section and deck in which he breaks Steamflogger Boss. No, really.
'm particularly fond of the excellently-named Imperiosaur. You can just imagine him raising his snout in the air, tut-tutting all those who stoop to using those uncivilized dual lands. How banal! "I say, old boy, these days I kindly request that I be summoned by nothing but John Avon Forests."
And who could forget Starke of Rath, the lovechild of Joven, Chandler, and, uh, Visara the Dreadful? Certainly not the Gatherer card database.
Under normal circumstances, if your Wild Dog or Drooling Ogre hurls a Shuriken at an opposing creature, you won't see it again unless they throw it back at you. Not the case with a Brooding Saurian on the board. I guess the intense brooding creates a magnetic attraction of some kind. That would also explain why I was covered with iron filings throughout high school.
Lovisa Coldeyes, lord and master of all she surveys (provided she surveys berserkers, warriors, and barbarians).
The Butcher, The Baker, and Hell's Caretaker
Like I always say, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and I sound like a rusty mouse over here. It's a robotic mouse, presumably.
Of all the cards in Magic that allow you to really turn the tables on your opponent (with Turn the Tables not being one of them, to no one's surprise)
If, on the other hand, I'm attacking with a Loxodon Warhammer-wielding elf, you can safely bet that Orim's Thunder will clap, probably sarcastically, as I add two more cards to the bin.
It's a Bird! It's a Plane! No, I Was Right the First Time. It's a Bird.
"And in Invasion design, I made that cool bird lord. And then, in development, came the hate. I don't know what the team had against this card (which is odd as I was part of the team) but it was torpedoed like few cards have ever been torpedoed."
Poor Kangee! You really have to be unpopular when you're a measly bird and you're the target of torpedoes. Seems like overkill to me. And he's not even an aquatic bird! That makes it even worse. It's like shooting moon-lasers into the ocean because you don't like shrimp.
What is important is that the deck contains arguably one of the Johnniest cards with kicker ever made: Bog Down.
Hey, I said it was arguable, not that it could be successfully argued.
Just imagine this scenario:
Turn one: Dryad Arbor.
Turn two: Vault of Whispers, Tarmogoyf.
Turn three: Forest, Bog Down with kicker, sacrificing Dryad Arbor and Vault of Whispers.
Now you've got a creature, an artifact, a land, and a sorcery in your graveyard, making your Tarmogoyf a 4/5 beater. Your opponent probably discarded an instant, a copy of Bound in Silence, and, uh, a planeswalker card, making your Tarmogoyf an 8/9. Not bad for turn three.
Every set has some rares that take a while (sometimes forever) to get the respect they deserve. It's my job to help speed up that process. Let's rock and roll, shall we? (Feel free to rhythm and blues or country and western if that's more your style.)
If there's one thing I like to cut, besides class and the mustard, it's a wide swath of destruction.
It has long been the case that cards with a brutal drawback are the domain of Johnny. After all, it is Johnny who likes to work with the raw materials that no one else will touch. These cards are the plutonium of Magic. You need a little ingenuity to harness their power, but if you can do it, the effect will be lethal for your opponent. If not, you will just die from radiation sickness. That analogy apparently had a half-life of one sentence. My apologies.
I wrote about a very spicy little number sent to me by Noel deCordova. His deck featured the storm-enabling Grinning Ignus, the X-spell-enabling Gauntlet of Power, and perhaps a few too many heartburn-enabling jalapeños. Well, it just so happens that two of those three things fit in perfectly with the cards we've already assembled (Sorry, jalapeños!)
Welcome to ELF Week! Today we're going to look at ELF, the Executable and Linking Format (formerly called the Extensible Linking Format), which is apparently a common standard file format for executables, object code, shared libraries, and core dumps.
Whoops. What I meant to say was: Welcome to Elf Week!
Five and half years is a long time. During the time of the Great Elf-Shunning, my entire wardrobe went out of style (and stayed there), my favourite band got together and then broke up, and that carton of milk in my fridge probably expired. I'll leave it to my roommate to test that hypothesis.
The next creature-type to get its own week was Squirrels, which, other than our friend Mistform Ultimus, are entirely green. On the one hand, they definitely get some points for palling around with their elf-master, Deranged Hermit. On the other hand, I had to deduct some cool points for being one of the few so-called magical creatures that currently live in my backyard. I don't have any Leviathans, Elementals, or Kavu in my backyard (that I know of), so those types just have a little more cachet.
50 Ways to Lord of Leaves Your Lover
"Check out this new elf, Riftsweeper."
"Neat."
"Yeah. It's no Mongrel, but it's still a decent bear."
"I thought you said it was an elf?"
"It is, but it's a 2/2 for two."
"A tutu for two? That sounds...uncomfortable."
"It's a Grizzly Bears with an ability."
"Um, don't all grizzly bears have abilities? Like, the ability to spear salmon with their bare claws and the ability to maul unsuspecting hikers in the Appalachians?"
"No, Grizzly Bears are vanilla."
"You mean, like, the flavour?"
"No, the flavour is that it's a magical bear from the land of Dominia."
"Oh."
"It's vanilla because it has no abilities. The Humble Budoka, however, is French vanilla because it has shroud."
"It has shroud? That's not even English. What are you, Tarzan?"
"Shroud is an ability. It means that the monk can't be targeted. You can't ping it, burn it, Boomerang it, provoke it, Swords it, or put fat-pants on it."
"But I can put pants on a grizzly bear because it's vanilla?"
"Now you're getting it!"
"So what's Riftsweeper, then? English-toffee cappuccino?"
"It's a suspend hoser."
"That sounds like something that old people would wear."
"Suspend is the block mechanic."
"A guy named Rusty is my block's mechanic."
"But it doesn't just hose suspend. You can use on anything that's been RFG'd."
"I've gotta admit, I'm RFC'd right now: Really Freakin' Confused."
"Why don't I just show you a deck?"
"Finally!"
Welcome to my humble abode! It's made of cards, as you can see, so the "humble" part kind of goes without saying. Cards are not the most durable building material of all time.
While you can't really build a house with cards, you can certainly build a deck, which is, coincidentally, what I'm going to do now.
Before I do that, however, I'm going to kick things off with arguably the worst play on words of all time. Here goes.
I was somewhat disappointed to learn that Akroma's Memorial didn't end up being part of a cycle. To remedy this unfortunate situation, from now on I'm going to refer to Gruul War Plow as Iwamori's Memorial, Bubble Matrix will be Cho-Manno's Memorial, Ankh of Mishra will be christened Zo-Zu's Memorial, Charcoal Diamond will be known as Riven Turnbull's Memorial, and a blank piece of paper will be Sir Shandlar of Eberyn's Memorial. Could you ask for a better tribute?
Akroma's Memorial has a mana cost that chronic dictionary users might call "exorbitant." Those less familiar with the usefulness of dictionaries might say that it has an "absorbent" mana cost, but I won't (will) hold it against them. No matter what you call it, seven is a lot of mana to pay. For that much mana, I need the card to win me the game roughly 130% of the time all by itself. Akroma's Memorial just can't do that, unless you do something crazy like turn it into a creature with a card like March of the Machines. But who would want to do that?
Uh, I would.
Of course, twenty mana is a lot. It's surprisingly more than seven. If you're going to pay that much you should win 400% of the time. While my Timmy-half generally approves of such unbridled overkill, my Spike-half knows that this plan is just not feasible. Luckily, my Johnny-half came up with a way to cheat all of these expensive artifacts into play, while my Melvin-half complained that I can't be divided into four halves.
Akroma's Memorial gives all of your creatures seven keyword abilities. The next card I'm going to look at gives one of your creatures one of those abilities. The card is Arcanum Wings, and it's notable for being twice as expensive as one of the worst cards with a zebra in the artwork ever made: Flight. Why the price-hike? Is it because of the name-brand label? Who wants to be the lamoid zebra wearing plain old Flight, when all the cool kids are decked out in Arcanum Wings?
It's always nice to get your auras at a discount, and Evan traded his designer Wings for a pair of fungal fat-pants like Verdant Embrace and some, uh, life-saving pants like Fool's Demise (a nice thing to trade for in response to removal).
Howdy, Johnnies. It's Scry Week! I bet you didn't see that coming.
Monkeying with the top and/or bottom of the library has always been profitable for the Johnny, so coming up with deck ideas was the easy part. The difficulty was in devising the article subheadings, which usually combine a random pop-culture reference with an appalling play on words. Since Mark took all the good ones (I was really set on using "Scry, the Beloved Country"), I was left with:
Boys Don't Scry
No Woman, No Scry
Goodbye, Blue Scry
The Boy Who Scryed Wolf
A Scry in the Dark
Don't Scry for Me, Argentina
It's My Way or the Scry-way
Yikes. I had to use the MasterCraft cordless Barrel-Bottom Scraper (that I bought at Canadian Tire) to come up with those. The ones that eventually made the grade aren't much better, so be warned.
You can't write a Scry Week column without mentioning the new Scry King, the latest Scry Captain of the World of Tomorrow, the Scryborg him- or herself: Cryptic Annelid. This guy's sort of like a Foresee with a four-butt that lets you dig six-deep.If that kind of one-shot amazacrazy scryin' doesn't set your heart afire, just imagine turning that one-shot into a two- or three-shot of draw-smoothing, deck-stacking goodness.
It really was not a good deck, since it had something like a single-digit win percentage (I'll let you guess which digit)
Welcome Johnnies, Timmies, Spikes, Melvins, Vorthoses, Reginalds, Archibalds, and/or Jugheads! Phew! That’s a lot of you to keep track of. I’m glad I’m not in marketing.
In my civilian life, I happen to like all fictitious Magic players equally. When I’m wearing my House of Cards hat, however, I’m obliged to like Johnnies more than others. Many apologies to all you slighted Reggies and Archies out there. If you existed, I would feel your pain.
All you have to do (at least if you’re me, though it seems unlikely that you are)
These days, it’s almost too easy to live above your means. You can get just about anything on credit, from food and drinks to furniture to really strange stuff like Magic singles. With the release of Future Sight, you can add Counterspell, Reverse Damage, Dark Banishing, a narrower Eladamri’s Call, and red Durkwood Boars tokens to the list of things you buy now and pay for later. I’m referring, of course, to the Pact cycle (Action Pact, Jam Pact, Pact Lunch, Vacuum Pact, and Pact House)
Ah, Tolaria West! A fine tutor as well as my favourite silent-movie actress.
If you play this deck, don’t make the same mistake I did. Pact of the Titan says you have to put a Giant creature token into play. Forget about dinky little Pro Player cards, dice, or beads. I’ve been using refrigerator boxes. Perhaps I’m being too literal. All I know is that I’m running out of room in my apartment. It’s a good thing I don’t have to pay for these fridges until 2009.
Not content to let everyone else muck about with space-time, reader Alex Churchill flexed some Johnny muscle, time-crafted a deck, and wrote: “Hello! I thought you might like to see this “time counters” deck I’ve created since the prerelease, using some Future Sight cards. It can do some pretty funky things: for example, pay 3U for a Wrath of God every turn, or prevent me from being attacked again for the rest of the game.”
That's me!
The second combo involves Chronomantic Escape and some number of Clockspinnings, Paradox Hazes, Jhoira’s Timebugs, and/or other Chronomantic Escapes. As someone who once tried to “abuse” Moment of Silence in a pre-Isochron Scepter world (with, I believe, Scrivener and Erratic Portal), seeing this combo was like reuniting with an old friend. A cranky old friend who annoys everyone else at the table, but a friend nonetheless.
Sprout Swarm makes green Saproling tokens (thank god they’re not Giant Saprolings)
Ah, Muraganda Petroglyphs! A fine token-pumper, as well as my second-favourite silent-movie actress.
Gravestorm is what you get when you cross storm from Scourge with stuff going to the graveyard from play. I honestly don't know how they came up with the name for this mechanic. Personally, I would've called it grumplicate, but to each his own.
White is famous for its love of law and order. You get a bunch of sentient cats and elephants together, and they just can't stop themselves from drafting up some new laws.
The latest of white's rules-setting creatures, Aven Mindcensor, a card that puts a damper on your opponent's ability to search through libraries. It's like the exact opposite of the Dewey decimal system.
You know who else likes life gain? Ageless Entity. A 44/44 Entity is nothing to sneeze at, but your opponent might want to reach for a hanky when you give it trample with Baru, Fist of Krosa.
Werebear (which I just typed as "Werebeard" for some reason, which would probably still be an awesome creature)
As you probably all know, Future Sight is almost upon us. At the time of this writing (Spring, 1974), the complete spoiler, sortable or not, is not yet available. Since I can't see into the future, I figured I'd do the next best thing and consult those who (probably) can. I'm talking about giant floating eyeballs. Incognito, oxymoronic planeswalkers. Watchers. You know, creatures and players with extraordinary vision.
Hailing from Orms-by-Gore, a sort of Stratford-upon-Avon for the monocular set
A Conspiracy set to Eye will make your Slivers, how do you say, suboptimal. They'll be creatures with the Eye subtype, but they'll still give their abilities to other Slivers. Of course, you won't have any of those any more. You're basically left with a bunch of Grizzly Bears, Gray Ogres, and vanilla 2/2s for four and 3/3s for six, which thankfully aren't common enough to warrant a nickname yet.
Invasion rare Blind Seer. Apparently, this guy is actually Urza in disguise. This should not come as a surprise, since about half the artifacts in Magic history represent Urza's eyewear. Glasses of Urza, Sunglasses of Urza, Urza's Contact Lenses... The list goes on and on. Or stops right there.
In any case, Blind Seer has a sort of sixth-sense when it comes to avoiding the Spreading Plague. You can use ol' Urza to thwart any funny stuff from your opponent, like trying to get away with playing creatures that don't share a colour.
Not very long ago, in a galaxy far, far closer than you might expect, a helpful mage by the name of Redland Jack sent me an interesting decklist.
Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker and the Betrayers of Kamigawa ninjas teamed up with the Rishadan pirates to form what is arguably the greatest ninja-pirate deck ever featured in my column.
Territorial Dispute, one of the most busted cards ever printed if you only read the first half of the card
We get to see the interaction of lots of mechanics from the history of the game in the same block.
Picture it: Convoke and Buyback. Madness and Cycling. Buyback and Storm. Third Strike and Phases with Others (Note: Not actual mechanics).
Like a half-man, half-dog, my preview is its own best friend.
I could be wrong, but I think the most likely place to which one would descend (while gibbering) would be the fiery depths of heck. H-E-Double-hockey-sticks. They have plenty of fire there, tons of Madness, and I hear the guy who's in charge wields an axe made of frickin' lightning (or at least he or she should). Gibbering Descent enables the Madness of both Fiery Temper and Violent Eruption, and is in turned enabled by Lightning Axe, Kindle the Carnage, Rix Maadi, Dungeon Palace, and the Great Dame of Flame herself, Jaya Ballard, Task Mage. All of these cards accelerate you to Hellbent, which is a nice place to be if you're a Magus of the Scroll or an anthropomorphized Demonfire.
Razormane Masticore has an almost uncanny symbiosis with Gibbering Descent. It has a pretty steep upkeep cost, but that cost is discarding a card which conveniently provides you with a Madness outlet for Gibbering Descent. By the time you have no more cards in hand and therefore can no longer pay that cost, you will be skipping your upkeep anyway! It's like the opposite of a Catch-22. Or something.
For those of you who just want to see the neat new card (and I promise it is all three of those things)
Now, in the speculative future of Future Sight, each colour's timeshifted cards don't just show off some piece of the pie that they used to have, or simply trade pieces of pie with another colour. This is more like some fancy, new and improved pie, made with a dash of necroleum and a pinch of cryo. It's a freaky post-apocalyptic mutant pie.
How would you like to halve your opponent's life total whenever you played, say, a Sleight of Hand?
Is this your card? 10 to the dome.
Is this your card? 10 to the dome.
Danish deck designer Christian M. sent me a deck that finally provided an answer to the eternal question: "What do you get when you cross Wild Pair with Elf-Ball?" I always thought the answer was "lowbrow humour," but apparently I was wrong.
Not every card can be as damnable as Damnation or as groundbreaking as Groundbreaker or as silly-sounding as Shivan Wumpus
I wonder what would happen if we combined a win-more card like Roiling Horror with a bunch of win-less cards? Surely, they would have to balance each other out and leave me with a win-some deck.
For the past couple of days, we've been celebrating the pleasantly plump, the Rubenesque, the euphemistically-endowed – what we in the Magic world rather uncharitably call "fatties."
I like high-toughness creatures and I cannot lie. And not just green fatties, either. I don't care if you're red, black, purple, or green. Well, if you're purple, I don't think I could fit you into a Magic deck. At least not yet.
The focus of the format is fun. If that's not enough f's for you, then I ought to tell you that a large part of the fun comes from flailing at each other with freakin' fatties.
For a more in-depth look at the format – including discussion of its rules, variants, strategies, and banned list – feel free to visit the home of EDH on the web, which is conveniently linked to one of the words in this sentence.
Who Drinks the Blood of the Blood-Drinkers?
1 Novijen Sages
This was Sheldon's suggestion and I think it's brilliant. The card isn't bad on its own, but once your vampires (especially Szadek) start accumulating counters, the Sages become quite amusing. Your vampires drain the life-force of your enemies, while the mutant advisors do their thing and drain the life-force of your vampires.
I trust everyone had a lovely weekend celebrating St. Patrick's Day. Being 1/512th Irish, it's perhaps my favourite March non-holiday. When else can you wear an emerald-sequined top hat and imbibe frosty beverages containing a near-lethal dose of green dye? I mean, without looking like you just bombed an audition for your community theatre's production of Alice in Wonderland?
Rumour has it that St. Patrick's main claim to fame is that he banished all the snakes from Ireland. How, you ask? Well, if The Simpsons has taught us anything, it's that the way to deal with an out-of-control snake population is to let loose a pack of gorillas with a predilection for snake meat.
"Now," I hear you asking, "where am I supposed to get all these asp-munching apes, Mr. Millar? They don't grow on trees, you know."
Er, actually, they do.
But, hey, whatever floats your boat. I'm no connoisseur of boat-floating, but I know what I like. And that's making a ton of monkey tokens all in one shot.
Unfortunately, Brand isn't available on MTGO – where all the best screen shots are found – so I figured I'd try the next best thing (which is actually nowhere near as good): Peer Pressure. I wouldn't have thought that Apes were vulnerable to peer pressure, but I guess that explains how all those poor chimps end up smoking cigarettes. Or not.
The lesson: Don't be greedy! Make Apes now, so you don't die to a bunch of dragons later. I believe that was Confucius.
Hey, if you're gonna lose, you might as well lose to monkeys. That's what I always say.
Stop me if you've heard this one: Welcome to Echo Week! To be honest, I was a little unsure about what I was going to do for the theme this week. My first instinct was to just rerun my article from last week – har har – but apparently that wouldn't have resulted in a similar echoing in my bank account. My second instinct was to yodel my article from the Swiss Alps, but apparently I don't live anywhere near the Swiss Alps and I don't know how to yodel. Once I work out these kinks, expect a belated Echo Week podcast from me. Until then, I'll have to come up with something else.
What I'm trying to say is that I like me a Man-o'-War. Have I mentioned that anywhere before? Besides every third article?
Given my (unrequited) love for the betentacled bouncer
Now, of all the silly weapons employed by goblins throughout the years – like rocks, kites, flamesticks, and something called a charbelcher – fighting off your enemies with a marine invertebrate nailed to a twig has got to be the most absurd. On second thought, maybe it's not such an incongruous pairing, since goblins and jellyfish do have one thing in common: They both lack a brain.
Kaervek has never been a very friendly fellow. He has a tendency to spite, purge, and/or torch things without a modicum of compassion, an iota of kindness, or a shred of clemency.
Fortunately, he and Stingscourger have really hit it off. Maybe it's their mutual love of jellyfish-based melee weapons
What's more natural than a team-up between a lava-spewing tentacle with tentacles and an indestructible puppet? Nothing I can think of.
Luckily, Volcano Hellion still has a few tricks up its sleeve. Or at least it would, if it could find some suitable shirts at Dominaria's Big and Tentacled Clothing Store.
"Playing Volcano Hellion knowing you have an Angel's Grace ready to go allows you to be stylish. Say... Impersonate Dr. Evil with a pinkie raised to the corner of your mouth and say 'I choose one ... meeellion ... damage! Mwahahahaha!'"
During my long sojourn, hunting for (and Gatherer-ing) Volcano Hellion combos, I stumbled upon a couple of six-legged freaks that seem like they wouldn't mind having liquid-hot magma spat upon them. I'm talking, of course, about Broodhatch Nantuko and Bennie Smith's beloved Saber Ants.
In the absence of either of your little flea-factories, you can suit up one of your other insects with Druid's Call and have your Hellion magically turn lava into squirrels, which is truly a neat trick.
Acridian is an insect with echo, so including it was like a goblin and a jellyfish: a complete no-brainer.
Living with a houseful of gamers is the first step towards a full-blown game addiction. I won't say that it had a, uh, deleterious effect on my education (after all, I can apparently use the word "deleterious" without embarrassment)
The great thing about this format is that if you enter once, you can basically "go infinite" by resubmitting the 45 cards you drafted last time. Reduce, reuse, Null Profusion, as I like to say. (I'm allowed to recycle Null Profusion jokes.)
Caribou Range + Hour of Reckoning: This isn't really a "combo." It's more of a "nice interaction." You can stall the ground with your caribou tokens, forcing your opponent to commit creatures to the board in order to bust through your antlered army. Then use your white caribou tokens to convoke out Selesnya's Wrath of God. Okay, that's not even close to a combo. I included it here mostly because it makes me chuckle to think that caribou would be spared in the hour of reckoning. (We didn't put one on the Canadian quarter for nothing.)
Just add some creatures with protection from red (like Subterranean Spirit), or some task mages (like Jaya Ballard), and go to town. While you're there, can you pick me up some eggs and milk?
Storm Herd + Flame Fusillade: If you looked in the dictionary under "overkill," you might find this pair of cards.
If your opponent isn't playing black, the Blightcutter is just a green Gray Ogre, blockable and, uh, normous. However, with Blind Seer using his other four (super-heightened) senses to redecorate the world, your opponent will always be playing black.
I got an early Humility and dominated the board with Evolution Vat and Caribou Range. Apparently, when you humble a caribou, you just make it stronger, more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Quite conveniently, both Will and I were undefeated at this point. Our match would be for all the marbles, which in this case was zero marbles. We used to play for marbles, but then someone ate them. Hippos, I believe.
With Life and Limb in play, Mistform Ultimus will be a legendary 1/1 green land creature that has land type Forest and has all creature types.
The important thing to note is that your forests will have summoning sickness, so you won't be able to tap them for mana the turn they come into play. It's also nice to see Mistform Ultimus get its comeuppance. A Mutant Ninja Forest is not very cool.
The first Supply gives you X tokens, the second one gives you (at least) 2X tokens, since you can tap the first batch of Saprolings for mana, the third one gives you 3X tokens, and so on. You really get to put the algae back into algebra.
Pairing Life and Limb with Earth Surge was also suggested to me by Nafthali Weiss, and it's definitely a marriage made in leaven.
You just make zillions of tokens, pump them with some combination of Thelonite Hermit, Verdeloth the Ancient, Nemata, Grove Guardian, and Tolsimir Wolfblood, and overload your opponent's defenses with your army of animated athlete's foot.
Until next time, have fun with fungus, but spore me the details.
Greetings, all. We've hit the middle of Bluff Week - or have we?
Er, we have. That's pretty tough to deny. There's no hiding the fact that it's Wednesday, unless you live in a part of the world where it isn't actually Wednesday right now. If that's the case, then I say, "Gotcha!"
To better understand this thing we call "the bluff," I did what any creditable researcher would do and I Googled the hell out of it. I gave the word an unmerciful Googling, the kind of Googling you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy.
You see, a bluff is also a noun that means "a steep cliff." It's the cousin of the crag, the brother of the brow, the, uh, estranged uncle of the escarpment.
the unlikely duo of Trial // Error and Valor Made Real: Two mediocre tricks that trick mediocre-ly together!
Most famously, a game of chicken involves two drivers heading towards the same point from opposite directions. If one driver swerves, he is considered a chicken. If neither driver swerves, they are both toast. Either way, someone ends up being part of a club sandwich.
Chicken à la King, the chicken lord, is a great card to build around, especially in this day and age. It is also, to my knowledge, the only Magic card named after a recipe. (If someone's grandmother makes a mean Mistform Ultimus, I'll be very upset.)
To round things out, I added an Evolution Vat (or bucket of chicken), a Riptide Laboratory (coincidentally, where KFC is made), and a Doom Cannon (because nothing strikes fear into the hearts of your enemies quite like clucking ammunition).
Welcome to a very special episode of House of Cards. As you might've guessed from the title of today's column, I'm going to talk quite extensively about Canadian politics.
To aid in my discussion, I'm going to rely heavily on Wikipedia. In case you're new to the internet, Wikipedia (a portmanteau, combining the words wiki and pedia)
...is like an online version of the Funk and Wagnall's Encyclopedia you haven't looked through in the past twenty years. The only difference is that Wikipedia gathers much less dust, which is great if you have allergies. It is a widely considered to be a trusted authority on all matters of great importance, like the population numbers of African elephants, the structure of governments, and the name of the voice-actor who played Teela in the animated version of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe from 1983.
(How a jellyfish can stuff a dragon back into the aether from whence it came is a question best left to philosophers and theologians.)
With a Lion in the graveyard (put there, perhaps, by an Icatian Crier), and a Locket in play, you can play a second Lion for W and have it bounce itself. Admittedly, this will get you nowhere fast (although bouncing is fun, just ask my personal cheques).
More cards equals more options and greater deck consistency. More options and greater consistency equals more fun. More fun equals 15.
White has long had a relationship with enchantments (though they claim to be “just friends”).
That’s because of semi-obscure rule 216.1 (not to be confused with very-obscure rule 612.1). From the comprehensive rules:
216. Tokens
216.1. Some effects put a token creature into play. He who supplied it, denied it. More importantly, he who supplied it is technically the owner.
Please forgive any inaccuracies; I’m quoting from memory.
Pyrohemia. Translated literally, it means “a burning sensation in the hemia.” It’s also the title of a totally killer album by Def Leppard, if that’s not a contradiction in terms and/or completely made up.
Protection from red is generally more significant than protection from black, since red usually needs to deal damage in order to kill creatures, whereas black can get around protection with forced sacrifice (Cruel Edict), -X/-X effects (Hideous Laughter), and, now, Damnation. In general, being flame-retardant is a much better quality than being bog-water-repellent (Someone should tell that to the makers of my khakis).
Keldon Necropolis and Kher Keep: Is there a more mana-intensive “combo” between two rare lands beginning with the letter “K”? I’d say it gives you a way to machine-gun your opponent’s creatures, but that might be overstating it slightly. You’d be lucky to musket them.
You'll want to imprint both Wurmcalling and Rude Awakening on to your Spellweaver Helix. Once you do that, every time you play Rude Awakening, you will get a free 0/0 Wurm! "Blammo!" as the kids say.
You can tweak this deck any number of ways, like five ways or nine ways.
He wrote: "I've been fine-tuning a few decks (which, admittedly, is kind of like fine-tuning my 1995 Ford Taurus), and I figured I would kick them out the door before Planar Chaos comes out and makes them obsolete."
Boy, I never thought I'd hear the words "1995 Ford Taurus" and "obsolete" in the same sentence. A 1991 Ford Tempo I'd understand. Those things were like Flintstone cars after about five days. Another surprising juxtaposition of words could be found in a subsequent sentence, which included both "Brass Gnat" and "holding down the fort." In case you were wondering how (or, more likely, why) you'd go about defending yourself with a creature so wimpy, the answer is Swarmyard.
Apology 2: In that same article, I referred to the impatient, preview-hungry readers of this column as “jackals.” This was way out of line. My deepest apologies go out to any actual jackals reading my articles.
Six mana is a lot, let's face it. As I've said many times before, when I pay mana for something, it'd better win me the game. When I pay six, I expect to win the game six times as much.
If you're like me, when you were a kid and you wanted something expensive, you played the lottery. This was poorly thought out on my part, not to mention illegal.
As in most social situations, when playing a game of Magic, you don't want to get caught with your pants down. Unless, of course, you're squaring off against a Hurloon Wrangler or, for all I know, Mistform Ultimus (just keeping my bases covered with that one).
Well, playing with Null Profusion is like fetching your morning paper in your underwear. If you're not careful, your front door might swing shut behind you as you bend down to pick up your copy of the Wirewood Herald. In short, it can backfire, leaving you vulnerable and ashamed.
An untimely Mindstab or Haunting Hymn will stop your deck dead in its small, rectangular tracks.
Since Null Profusion triggers whenever you play a card, any card, it's like a Horn of Greed, a Verduran Enchantress, a Vedalken Archmage, a Primordial Sage, and two cards that haven't been printed yet, all rolled into one! It covers all the basic “food groups,” like a sort of burrito of Magic. Some might go so far as to call it one gigantic cornucopia of awesomeness.
I had a wonderful time with family and friends the past couple weeks. My only disappointment came from the fact that this year I found a lump of coal in my Christmas stocking. I'm not sure what Santa Claus was thinking. Doesn't he know that fossil fuels are passé? Maybe news travels slowly to the North Pole – those elves should workshop up a better internet connection. At least it was better than the drum of oil I got two years ago. While I'm currently using that lump of coal to power a very small locomotive, I really hope that he gives me a solar panel or a windmill next year.
Well, just as I was putting the finishing touches on that article – dotting the y's and crossing the b's, just so Kelly had to put them on the i's and t's where they belonged –
If you've ever wanted to see the deckbuilding process laid bare, Jay does it with aplomb. (That came out sounding much weirder than I thought it would.)
Magic is fun no matter how you divvy up the cards, with Fact or Fiction being the only possible exception.
the hilarious and fun Counterbalance. From the name alone, you know you're in for a treat. Counter. Balance. The only card that comes close to it is the much-maligned Discardpillage, which is not actually a real card (though I bet it would be annoying).
Always keep in mind, though, that it's the journey and not the destination that's important. As long as the journey is incredibly frustrating for your opponent, that is.
Another way to keep Planar Chaos around is by skipping your upkeep step entirely with the aid of Eon Hub – the Fifth Dawn rare, not the prog-rock band.
Welcome to Easter Egg Week! It's the only week imaginable that could kick things off with a feature article talking about severed baby-heads and surfing. Sigh. There goes all of my material.
Completely stumped, I finally decided to consult my Muse. Most Muses are pretty girls who get your creative juices flowing, and mine is no different. What sets my Muse apart, however, is that she's green, costs five mana, and is Seedborn.
Ah, Seedborn Muse. Is there anything you can't untap? A combination of two of my favourite cards (Awakening and, uh, Foot Soldiers)
As I hope I proved with my preview of Paradox Haze, having extra “phases” is always a good thing. I'm still waiting for the card that gives you twice as many declare blockers steps.
Quilled Sliver is the Sliver-fied version of Crossbow Infantry. Instead of shooting arrows from a crossbow, this little guy flings quills from its spine, which makes sense if you've ever tried to pull a crossbow trigger with a one-fingered claw. Awkward.
Meanwhile, Telekinetic Sliver is as fun as Opposition but half as consistent. That sounds like a recipe for … something that I probably wouldn't want to eat.
That was weird. I don't know where I was last week. Someone suggested that I must've had a terrible bump on the head and that I wasn't really gone. But I did leave you, Johnnies - that's just the trouble. And I tried to get back for days and days. It wasn't a dream - it was a place. And JMS - and Adrian - and Randy - and BDM – and, uh, BDM were there.
Thank goodness I'm home! And this is my column - and you're all here! And I'm not going to leave here ever, ever again, because I love you all! And - Oh, Beedie Em - there's no place like House of Cards.
[I quote this principally for the groanworthy "Oh, Beedie Em"]
My deckbuilding process is pretty organic. No pesticides for me. In order to “grow” the next couple decks, I had to procure some “magic beans”. At least, that's what the unsolicited email in my spam folder said they were for.
Yes, that's a Hill Giant. Four of ‘em. Normally, I wouldn't use a vanilla animal unless I was baking a cake that for some reason wanted animals in it.
Ninth Edition's Marble Titan. Don't get me wrong. I like ol' Marbles. He rules the schoolyard.
With all these new tools, can Giants be a contender? Robby Bullis, aka Redland Jack, certainly thought so. Since Chronosavant complements a reanimation strategy (you'll want to be dumping creatures into your graveyard anyway) and Resurrection enables such a strategy, Robby was all over it like someone who loves Smarties would be all over a Smartie.
Giants are quite intimidating. They're big and mean and destructive. One of them has a hammer for a fist, for crying out loud! Another one has blood … that's on fire! There's probably a Giant out there with a socket-wrench for a leg. Made of magma. You can't make this stuff up.
I tried to reassure dedicated Green mages that there would be plenty of “tricksy” cards in the set for them. One of the cards that I had in mind when I wrote that was the Master to Spectral Force's Blaster, Scryb Ranger. It's a Scryb Sprite! It's a Quirion Ranger! Buy now and get Protection from Blue and Flash and, like, a tote bag while supplies last! (Offer void everywhere.)
Way back in January, when I started writing this column, I expressed a severe dislike for winter. It's one of my least favourite seasons. Bottom four, anyway.
Norin the Wary: Nicknamed “Nervous Nelly” in playtesting (at least, in my playtesting)...
Fans of Standard Tribal Wars take heed. You know what, keep the heed and take notice.
Ixidron: Nicknamed “Backslide Joe” during development (or at least it should have been)...
As a result of this sudden surge in face-down creatures, Ixidron's power and toughness will shoot through the roof (For this reason, I recommend playing this deck outdoors).
Welcome to Legendary Creatures of Time Spiral Week! As Brady Dommermuth explained on Monday, the Legends of Time Spiral (hereafter known as L.O.T.S.) are all very famous personalities from Magic's past. Some of them are brave and heroic, some of them are amusing cowards. One thing they all have in common is their commitment to charity. Before he was raising the dead as a necromancer, Lim-Dul was raising funds for various causes. His latest project, the 2007 Legends of Time Spiral Calendar, just came out. I got my copy in the mail the other day. It's extremely cool, even if it means I have to stare at Saffi Eriksdotter for the entire month of December. What a bummer.
Indeed. Matopi's got style points coming out the wazoo (or is it the yin-yang?)! Either way, style points carry some serious weight here at House of Cards, so Matopi wins a prize. I decree it! Or something.
I'm a big fan of Overrun (and, by extension, overkill)
The Thallids can pump out tokens, they can help you win the New Jersey State Championship, but one thing they can't do is trample. I'm going to fix that. Since Stonebrow seems pretty Gruul to me, I'm going to combine him with their signature artifact, the Gruul War Plow, to give all of my little Saprolings trample. As Defiant Elf amply proved, everyone loves 1/1's with trample. There's no flavour disconnect at all.
Wow! I write for a company named Wizards of the Coast, about a game called Magic, my favourite Fred Savage movie is The Wizard, and my randomly-derived nickname actually means wizard in some language I just made up! Names sure are full of improbable coincidences.
Now, you might be saying – “Boring! I've seen that combo a million times!” Well, my heckling friend, I've seen it infinity-plus-one times, but it's going into the deck nonetheless. But don't worry, ennui-nistas.
Due to the unorthodox location of Mangara's colon (wedged between the tap symbol and the text instructing you to remove Mangara of Corondor from the game)
The blue Magus didn't really excite me at first. I couldn't think of any exciting uses for it, any particularly spicy combos. Then it hit me like a ton of zombified bricks: Dawn of the Dead! I immediately put in my DVD copy of the George Romero classic. And then it hit me: Dawn of the Dead is also a Magic card, and it works wonderfully with Magus of the Jar! Thanks, Football Zombie!
The sheep-maker has one of the nastiest drawbacks ever conceived. When it comes into play, you have to return three (!) basic (!!) lands (!!!) to your hand, or sacrifice it. That's the price blue has to pay if it wants to destroy creatures. Sorry I killed your Angel. Here's some Sheep.
I was delighted that so many of you chose to participate. Heck, I was more than delighted. I was one step up from that – I was ce-lighted. Yeah, that's right. I said it. (I wasn't quite be-lighted, though. That would be absurd.)
Bond, Contaminated Bond
Most people look at a new set and get excited about the cards like Simic Sky Swallower, Adarkar Valkyrie, and Dark Confidant. Other people, the oddballs, the excessively optimistic, the Johnnies, see the new set and decide that now is the time to build a deck around Contaminated Bond.
There's nothing I like more than having someone change my opinion about a card. I like having my eyes opened, my mind expanded, my creative juices, uh, shaken, stirred, and garnished with a little pink umbrella of unexpected enlightenment.
Wall of Roots shrinks with the addition of -0/-1 counters, but you can reverse the shrinkage with some, er, Blinkage.
Greetings, Johnnies and Johnnies-in-waiting! It's Suspend Week here at magicthegathering.com, and I have to say, you're in for a treat. To better serve your thematic needs, I decided that this week I would embody the theme. Instead of doing what I usually do when I write this column (doing all the work at once, right around the time it needs to be done), I figured I would try a different, more thematic and poorly-thought-out tactic. This time, I did much less work, and I did it several weeks ago. If I wait long enough, I think I can achieve the same results.
I just hope you guys don't have a Remand!
What did Noel do? He took the opportunity to send me several suspend-based combos that were quite spiffy (and I wouldn't use such strong language if I didn't mean it). It was like coming home and finding out that your house had been cleaned, your homework completed, and your dinner prepared (in my case, boiled and salted). It was a very pleasant surprise.
When Curse of the Cabal resolves, it's going to take half of your opponent's permanents with it to the graveyard. Now, I'm certainly no numberologist, but I'm pretty sure that half of a large number is greater than half of a smaller number.
Sure, it's fun to manage your various Magical resources. We all know that. However, there are times when you'd just rather win in one turn and skip all the bean-counting. What if, for example, you started the game with a twenty-power haste creature in play on your side? That might simplify things and save you some number-crunching.
Phthisis is a very cool card, and you don't even have to be Daffy Duck to pronounce it, either. According to the Internet, Phthisis is an “over-consonanted Greek word meaning ‘a dwindling or wasting away,'” and it's pronounced TIE-sis (rhymes with crisis). Over-consonanted? Really? In my opinion, a word can never have too many consonants. That's why I've recently changed my name to Phchris. The “Ph” and the second “h” are silent but completely necessary.
That guy will allow you to give your opponent a 3/3 creature, in the form of an animated land. The only way to make it a 10/10 is to give it +7/+7. Hmm. How could we do that? I have an idea. You might Might of Oaks their tilled land! Or should I say, you may Might of Oaks it. You might not May of Oaks it, however.
Since my Johnny-o-meter is on the fritz (and you don't even want to know what happened to my Fritz-o-meter)
Many anonymous readers wrote in to ask me if I knew how to read, which seemed like an odd question to deliver in text form.
This week I’d like to look at Zur the Enchanter, not to be confused with the indefinite Zur an Enchanter, who is just one Enchanter among many.
I like to have Armageddon in my toolboxes. Right next to the needle-nose pliers.
It always pleases me greatly when a reader shares his or her kooky and brilliant deck ideas with me. It turns out that ideas are contagious, so allow me to cough a couple into your handkerchief.
Pros: He can't be killed by conventional removal spells. He can only be killed by permanents like Tim, or Murderous Betrayal, or Rod of Ruin. He's certainly no match for Imagecrafter and Dwarven Demolition Team, I don't care how wary he is.
Cons: He doesn't actually do anything.
He has many aliases, such as Zuran Spellcaster and Gill McHalibut, the Pinging Fishperson. And, of course, there are some who call him ... Tim.
Mr. Dagsson can force a player to sacrifice an Artifact Creature. After all, the Coldsnap Legend is the Master of Sleighs, Whistles, and Weathervanes. With an arsenal like that, you just know there's going to be a bloodbath.
It's always nice to see Magical creatures working together. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, and maybe afterwards we can kill a guy. That's freakin' teamwork!
With, say, twenty turns in a row, a single Tim would be like a twenty-point Fireball. The only snag is that it's unlikely that you'll be able to take twenty straight turns. You'd be lucky if you took two straight turns. Some might even say that "one straight turn" is a contradiction in terms.
Until last time, have fun with Darien, King of Kjeldor!
Traveling through time is all the rage these days. It used to be that only skateboarding teenagers, naked robots out for blood, and English guys in phone booths made the journey up and down the space-time continuum, falling in love with their own mothers, trying to kill some other guy's mother, or doing battle with rolling garbage cans that have a showerhead for a nose (Sorry, Daleks!). Now, apparently, even little pieces of cardboard are doing it. Special pieces of cardboard depicting bizarre creatures like the Cockatrice, Ostrica Gigante, and Dandân, an ancient fish that, over time, evolved a high power-to-cost ratio and a very rare accent circonflexe. Despite their utter lack of hoverboards, you can tell that these critters have made a trek through the timestream by their special markings.
Maybe it's time to Break Glass In Case of Emergency. You see, I keep a list of interesting topics in a glass case, beside the fire extinguisher. That way, if my article catches fire, everything I need is one place.
It was a pretty straightforward Counter-Burn deck, full of counterspells and direct damage spells. The only slightly odd thing about it was that it was mono-Green! I guess that's a really odd thing.
re Unyaro Bee Sting: With, say, Volcanic Hammer, you get three damage for two measly mana! It's much more efficient, and besides, it's a hammer made of liquid-hot magma! I don't know about you, but if someone told me that I had a choice between getting whacked with a Magma Mallet or getting stung by a bee (even if it's a bee from a foreign land), I'd take the bee sting every time. I'd recommend that you do the same (unless you're allergic to bee stings, in which case, wear something in a nice cotton/asbestos blend).
I'm going to take Travis's mono-Green burn “concept” and run with it. Don't worry, I won't get far (I'm so out of shape).
I don't like to rely on my opponent for anything, so I think I'll be doing the damage to myself. A little self-flagellation never hurt anybody. Er …
You see, there's another series of cards from [Coldsnap] that needs a little love. They're big and have a shaggy mop up top and they work very well as a team. No, not the Beatles. I'm talking about the Aurochs.
Mistform Wakecaster has the unfortunate tendency to turn all of your creatures (Elves, Snakes, Saprolings, and Illusions alike) into stampeding snow-cows.
Trust me, Green Mages, when I say that Time Spiral is full of awesome Green cards, many of which are quite tricksy. Clever Green cards? They really must be messing with the colour pie.
This gives you (and your opponent) a few turns to fill your hand up with Green Meanies, Blue Meanies, or even Green and Blue Meanies like Simic Sky Swallower (Meanies of other colours are also acceptable).
First of all, you can assemble the four Fifth Dawn stations (Blasting, Grinding, Salvaging, and Summoning Station). Throw in a Chromatic Sphere and that's an instant win. I'm not sure exactly how, but I think you tap and untap things until your opponent concedes.
Originally, I wasn't supposed to be previewing a card this week. Luckily for me, there was a bit of a rift in the space-time continuum last week, and it turns out that I'll be previewing one after all.
Upkeeping with the Joneses
I know what you're thinking. Don't worry, though, I won't tell anyone about that. The other thing you're probably thinking is this: “Chris, I already have a perfectly good Upkeep Phase, why would I possibly want another one?”
On the other side of the coin (don't worry, it's a very large coin), we have some cards that don't function quite so well under a Paradox Haze.
What's Black and White and triggers during your upkeep?
Finally, who could forget multiplayer favourite, Subversion? Not an elephant, that's for sure.
Perhaps the most interesting White card to pair with Paradox Haze is Dimensional Breach. Why not disrupt both space and time?
Just in case you've been living under a rock for the last couple weeks, I'm here to tell you that that must have been very uncomfortable.
Also, Time Spiral has a bit of a nostalgia theme. Ah, nostalgia! I remember the days when nostalgia actually meant something.
To be perfectly honest, I didn't like Thallids very much at first. So, you're saying that they're Fungi? Oh no! Hide the cheese! How intimidating can a Fungus be? Seriously, I scraped some off a loaf of bread this morning without a second thought and not much of a struggle.
Then something strange happened: they kinda started to grow on me.
...you'd have a pretty sweet reanimation engine going. As my French Impressionist friends might say, this would be “der gas.” But I wanted something gassier.
Phew! It took me a while to count them all, but there are literally millions of other things you can do with this card.
Until next time, until next time, have fun during your upkeep!
Those of you looking to see a Time Spiral preview are in luck. This week, I get to preview Yoda. Well, it's not actually Yoda, but there are some similarities. The Empire Strikes Back introduced us to the Jedi Muppet, but it took another twenty years before we got to see him in action, battling the ridiculously titled Count Dooku in a style that was a cross between Bruce Lee and Sonic the Hedgehog. Before that, we could only imagine what Yoda was like in his prime, but we all knew that it had to be cool.
The Brothers' War. If I remember correctly, the tale goes that the brothers, unknown to their divorced parents, meet at a summer camp. Products of single parent households, they switch places (surprise!) so as to meet the parent they never knew, and then contrive to reunite them. I might have that story confused with something else.
While Urza, his millionaire-playboy brother, was dabbling in real estate, developing fashionable eye-wear, and chilling in a hot tub, Mishra was hard at work maintaining the family business. The younger, blonder Urza, full of rage and guilt, and jealous of all the attention given to Mishra, could often be seen exclaiming exasperatedly, “Mishra, Mishra, Mishra!” It's been a long time, but today we finally get to see the man in the flesh. Which one of the brothers am I going to preview? More importantly, which one will win the affections of Sabrina? The answer is but one click away.
Pre-Coldsnap, if you wanted to play with Cats, you'd need several balls of yarn and mana of at least three colours.
The Nishoba joins the jobless (Savannah Lions and King Cheetah) and the gainfully employed (Leonin Skyhunter and Skyhunter Prowler), to form a sort of giant robot made of cats. I'm not sure what you'd call the robot, but it's such a great idea, I'm surprised nobody's thought of it yet.
When they're not taking over Earth in a post-apocalyptic future or throwing barrels at a poor Italian guy, Apes can be found patrolling the treetops in John Avon's 9th Edition Forests.
I believe it was Sartre who said, “Four Apes don't make a tribe,”
Jotun Owl Keeper. As a 3/3 for three, it's not a bad creature on his own, and when he hits the bin, he releases all of his pent-up frustration in the form of 1/1 Birds. That's his death wail, his ‘owl of anguish, as it were.
Greetings, Earthlings and/or beef and/or mutton! Summer is almost over in my neck of the woods. We're into the infamous “Dog Days of August,” which is fine place to be if you're a dog, I suspect, but it's not so great for human beings. Just below my neck of the woods, somewhere around, say, the collarbone, a cold front has moved in. Some might even call this “front” a “snap,” which is convenient, because Coldsnap (the set, not the snap) is finally available on Magic Online, and not a moment too soon.
Haakon, Haakoff
A bit of an iconoclast, Haakon blatantly refuses to be played from your hand, and instead insists that he be played only from the graveyard. Once he's there, though, he can perform all kinds of nifty tricks, like balance a beach-ball on his nose and give a helping hand to some of his dead friends.
If Elton John can be knight, why can't an Ornithopter?
Since you can play Ornithopter for zero-mana from your graveyard, you can play it, sacrifice it to Nantuko Husk, and replay it, as many times as you like. This will make your Husk arbitrarily large, as big as, say, the CN Tower. If you don't like Nantuko Husk, you could make some other creature arbitrarily large. Fallen Angel or Carrion Feeder, for instance. You could make them as big as Yankee Stadium or the Pacific Ocean. While we're doing things arbitrarily, we might as well make a preposterous amount of mana (say, six bushels of it) by sacrificing the poor Thopter on a Phyrexian Altar.
Each time I reanimate Haakon, or one of his freshly be-knighted minions, I like to say, “Wise fwom your gwaves!” as a tribute to the Sega Genesis> “Classic,” Altered Beast. This is an incredibly fun thing to do, although your opponent might find it a touch annoying when you say it thirty-five times in the middle of your “infinite” loop.
What do you get when you cross a tree with a mutant wizard?
Time to get a new watch.
Hmm. I don't think I did that right.
Plaxcaster Frogling does what any good frog should do, and protects your counter-laden creatures from opposing spot removal.
Of all the ethos' they don't have, the one furthest from Rakdos minds is “Safety First.” Rix Maadi, the underground “palace” that the cultists call home, makes the Temple of Doom look like the Four Seasons. “To your right, you'll find the world-famous Wall of Skulls. To your left is a fountain spouting liquid-hot magma. Check-out is at noon, unless we decide to murder you in your sleep for fun.”
When they're not playing board games like Scrabble (to Safety) and Sorry! (I Killed Your Family), the Rakdos cultists keep themselves busy with “unspeakable tortures” using such diabolical devices as the Wheel of Misfortune, the Quiet Riot, and, of course, the agonizing Bed of Puns. (“Hey, Jim, you're lookin' sharp today!”) At their annual festival, the Wrecking Ball, the boy goblins and the girl goblins stand at opposite ends the dungeon, too nervous to ask someone to torture.
If the Rakdos like anything besides pain, it's tapping. Turning sideways is one of the particular kinks of the Rakdos Cult. They can be straight-up nasty, but when they're sideways they're even nastier.
A deck called Right Stone, Right Knife which contains Magewright's Stone and Rakdos Riteknife...
The Poppet and the Pit Dragon (coincidentally, the title of one of Ravnica's goriest fairy tales) are big fans of Blazing Shoal
One thing you may not know about me is that I like Magic cards and, on occasion, I like to build Magic decks with Magic cards.
Suddenly, I had Netherborn Phalanx decks coming out of my ears. I ended up building some cool decks, although my cochlea is still a little sore.
Sanguine is a word that means “cheerfully optimistic” or even “Pollyannaish,” but it can also mean “bloody.” I guess the moral of the story is, “When life gives you lemons, murder them.”
I was very excited to learn that magicthegathering.com Editor and Magical Academic Ted Knutson had decided that this week would be Catnip Week. My imaginary pet tabby, Cringer II, was even more thrilled. What catnip had to do with slinging cardboard spells was unclear, but I had enough faith in Ted that I let it pass without comment. It wasn't until my first draft was rejected on the grounds that it was written in hairballs and had nothing to do with Magic that I realized something was up. Apparently, the hallucinogenic ramblings of a fictitious feline are not suitable content for this website. Who knew? Eventually, we figured out the whole Catnip / Cantrip thing. It was all just a big misunderstanding.
With that said, welcome to Cantrip Week! For those who don't know, “cantrip” is Magic slang for “bathroom break.” It's also slang for those minor spells that feature the most excellent text, “Draw a card.” For our purposes today, I'll be using the second definition.
In case you were unaware, one of the formats for this year's Magic Invitational was called the Auction of the Geniuses. Each “Genius” had to build a Vanguard deck using the Online Classic card pool. By sheer dumb luck, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michael Bay were all dead or otherwise unavailable, so one of the Genius slots was passed down to me.
The Ravnica cantrip that gets me the most jazzed is Shadow of Doubt. Half Stifle and half Counterspell, Shadow of Doubt can effectively counter Sakura-Tribe Elder activations, fetchlands, tutors of all kinds, and cards like Cranial Extraction.
It seems like a purely reactive card, but after doing some Gatherer searches, I found that you can also use it proactively. It's a totally new paradigm!
Since the deck has so much card-drawing and deck-thinning (my card sleeves have vertical stripes)
Welcome to House of Cards! Before I get going, as the title suggests I have a monkey to get off my chest. I'm not sure how it got there, and I'm even less sure how I'm going remove it. These burdensome little simians are usually on my back. Maybe it's because I've been eating an inordinate amount of bananas lately, or perhaps it's because of my newly embarreled chest and my aversion to razor blades. It might even be because of a longstanding feud I have with a local plumber and his mustachioed brother.
In any case, this monkey is making it very difficult for me to write this article. Some guys have all the luck. For the time being, I have all the (monkey-induced) pain. The only cure, so I'm told, is more deckbuilding. So here we go!
In the olden days, when I was a lad, if you needed to have some souls gorged, you called the Orggs. Ever since Judgment was released, Ma and Pa Orgg have had a bit of a monopoly on soulgorging. After a long and drawn out lawsuit - Phyrexia v. Garth W. Orgg - a new and exciting, state-of-the-art soulgorging product has just hit the market: Phyrexian Soulgorger!
If for some reason you have access to a time machine, then go ahead and turn on your Tardis, fire up your flux-capacitor, and start enjoying Coldsnap Standard post-haste. A word of warning, though: if movies from the ‘80s are correct, the world of August, 2006 is a dangerous, post-apocalyptic wasteland where resources are scarce and warring factions fight over what little remains. I'd pack a lunch.
There are many other options for rhyming decks, and if anyone else has ever tried this, I'd like to hear about it.... Just don't try building a deck around Balthor, the Orange. There's no such card.
Luckily, Coldsnap is shaping up to be an old-fashioned Johnny-fest, so I can't wait until I can start playing with the cards online. Literally, I can't wait. I'm going into hibernation, just like a bear. When I wake up, I'm going to be very hungry and playing with Zur the Enchanter. Just like a bear.
For anyone curious about how well Coldsnap interacts with the other cards in Standard, look no further than Juniper Order Ranger. This Human Knight is not only very protective of his juniper bushes and their surprisingly edible berries, but he also hosts a mean party. Whenever a new guest arrives, he gives them a balloon, a fancy-looking pencil, and a +1/+1 counter. Giving is its own reward, so he gets a +1/+1 counter as well. “One for you, one for me,” he might say, in the Juniper Order's signature sing-song.
Me Tarzan, Yukora
I know Yukora doesn't suck, either like a vacuum or in a vacuum.
I was understandably nervous when Frank Pulmanns, otherwise known as Bran_Dawri, sent me an email on behalf of the Yukora Promotional League. (Warning: Don't get caught impersonating a Y.P.L. officer. That's what got the Demon into hot water in the first place! His self-promotion was criminally shameless. To avoid getting caught, just don't go to places where there are 99 monks, like monasteries and Beastie Boys concerts.)
I figured that I'd take the time this week to explore one of the wackiest tribes ever conceived: Soldiers! Talk about craziness! Other than a rigid hierarchical order and a strict obedience to senior members, I just don't see how these guys can work together.
Despite that, I'd been tinkering with a pre-Coldsnap Soldier deck. It was basically a Boros deck, with a suite of sweet weenies backed up by a barrage of burn. It was all very alliterative and very straightforward. Attack, attack, attack, burn, burn, burn.
Thundersong Trumpeter and Agrus Kos, Wojek Veteran love to strike first and, subsequently, ask questions (they're very inquisitive).
I originally had some Sunhome Enforcers in the deck, because they work well with Agrus Kos, Field Marshal, and Sunforger (more life-gain!). Unfortunately, I had to leave them on the sidelines, because it turns out that the Spirit Link-ed Giant would rather be playing the piano than marching with his fellow Soldiers. Apparently, they have very large pianos in Ravnica. Did you know that, in development, Sunhome Enforcer was called Sunhome Ivory-Tickler? True (false) story.
Sadly, since Alexi's Parrot was deemed “unsafe at any speed” by the development team (I'd tell you what it did, but I'd be making it up), there is a noticeable lack of Pirate-y accoutrements in the set, your peg-legs, eye-patches, and said avian companions. If Ramos had his own card, I suspect he would have an eye-patch, since his eyeball is currently being used for mana production. No word on what happened to the Leg of Ramos.
One of the major sub-themes of Masques Block is “accounting.” Credit Voucher, Liability, and Monkey Cage all hint at the central conflict of the Mercadian Masques story-line, the battle between Cho-Manno's righteous ledger-keepers and Volrath's band of sinister book-cookers. What a tale of adventure and intrigue! I don't want to spoil the ending, but I will say that there is a twist-debiting that you will never see coming.
Of these cards, the one that gets me the most excited is Liability. Maybe it's because I'm such a fan of debt, or losing life, but I've gotta say, “Owing money is a real hoot!”
Whew, is it still Summer? My armpits tell me it is, but I thought I'd get a second opinion. I hope everyone had a good weekend. I know I did. When I wasn't talking to my armpits, I was celebrating Canada's birthday.
If anything is going to get you, it's Karma + Instant (Nightcreep).
As long as the deck ideas are a-flowin', I'm as happy as a pig in whatever it is that pigs are happy in. Probably Homelands boosters.
More importantly, the idea of putting a Cloak on Cephalid Constable gets me excited in exactly the way you'd think a vine-covered chief-of-the-Squid-police would get a person excited.
Since every Skeleton ever printed has Regeneration (Ha! I caught you trying to sneak in there, Mistform Ultimus! And Carrionette. And Skeletal Snake and Crocodile.) … since almost every Skeleton ever printed has Regeneration, they really don't mind if you sweep the board. That's no skin off their backs.
The fightin' Assassins! There are only five of them in Standard, four Humans (Unliving Psychopath). I'm not sure how the Psychopath became a Zombie, but according to the rumours, he accidentally assassinated himself during an Assassin's Guild hazing ritual gone awry. I'll have to check the latest Darwin Awards to be sure, though.
Unfortunately for the Akroma devotees in the audience, all of my notes have been destroyed. By the look of it, they were sliced to pieces by some kind of ninja-style weapon, glued back together, then turned to stone, then chopped up a second time. I'm not sure how that happened.
Lower on the list of great Swallower followers (much, much lower) is the card that Andrew Lee and AJ Richardson decided to use. It's a card that even I wouldn't touch. Not with a ten-foot pole, or an eleven-foot pole, or even two ten-foot-poles lined up end-to-end.
If you want to experience the straight-up weirdness of casting a Diabolic Tutor for Ragged frickin' Veins, then I strongly recommend trying out this deck.
Welcome to Akroma week! I had big plans for this week. This was supposed to be my first all-talkin', all-singin', all-dancin' column - a live webcast from my living room in the style of the Hollywood musical. Called “Angellzapoppin'”, it would've featured me swing-dancing with a life-size inflatable Akroma doll (not yet on the market). Unfortunately, I ran into a few snags. On the day the performance was to take place, my piano man called in sick, the costumers could only find nine-gallon hats, and, as it turned out, I was completely making the whole thing up.
Some would also say that she's a bag of chips, but that seems a bit farfetched to me. When Akroma's not slicing and dicing, she's making very thin French fries for some reason. I guess she likes potatoes.
Flavour aficionados get on the horn and alert your local congressperson that we need a “Q” Legend, stat! In the meantime, here are my suggestions:
Quigley, Who is Down Under
Quizzledorf, Devourer of Souls.
Quartenov, the Milk Bottler.
Queen Winnifred, Master of Ponies.
Portal Three Kingdoms has a couple of “X” Legends, but I chose Xiahou Dun, the One-Eyed because this deck needs more Horsemanship and less eyeballs.
To borrow a phrase, I'm the third best player in my playgroup. The results don't lie. Well, sometimes they do - like the time my results told my (ex-)girlfriend how she looked in those jeans. But most of the time they're honest.
According to the flavour text, “it took ninety-nine monks to weave the spell that trapped Yukora.” I guess they don't have Caribou in Kamigawa, because apparently a Range of them does the trick just as well. Other habitats of non-threatening or herbivorous Northern Ontario woodland critters that are hostile to arch-Demon Yukora include:
Squirrel Nest
Bearscape
Snake Pit
Elk's Lodge.
I'm pretty sure that any job sounds better if you tack “mancer” on to the end of it. For a while, I was what is commonly called a “gas jockey,” but from now on my resume will say that I was a “petro-mancer.” My plans to work my way up to CEO of Shell Corp. fell through, so instead I “grew up” to become a logo-mancer. A word magician. Watch me make good grammar disappear!
Instead of actually writing an article from scratch, I decided that this week I would pay homage to the Simic and “graft” together a bunch of different words I selected at random from the dictionary. I hope it turns out well!
Beasts and Snakes and Overdone Phrases … Oh My!
Sure it's “win more.” But that's better than winning less, in my opinion.
Root Greevil (who, apparently, is responsible for much of the world's greevil problem).
Vats and evolution go together like macaroni and cheese. If want a heightened mental and physical abilities, a bucket of fluorescent goo is the only way to go. Just think: How did petty criminal Jack Napier become the super-criminal known as The Joker? He fell into a vat. I wouldn't be surprised if a vat was responsible for the Wuzzles, or the mutant hybrid known as “Brangelina.” Charles Darwin came up with his theories of evolution while sitting in a vat. (I might have my facts wrong there.)
Steward of the Ravnican wilderness, Momir is like Yogi Bear's arch-nemesis, Ranger Smith, except creepier and more chimp-like.
Until next time, claptrap squash blindfold homogenize symbiosis!
Before I get going, I'd like to say that I'm a Canadian. It may not be obvious to those of you outside of my increasingly exclusive inner-circle, but I am. Ted knows, because my articles are etched into fresh sheets of birch veneer and bound in hockey-tape. I'm sure they're hell to edit, but it's the way I've been taught to write, so tough-noogies.
I said something like, “You won't win too many games with just Card X + Card Y, not even in Canada.” That's not a dis, that's a fact. If you don't believe me, try registering that at your next tournament. I know we're pretty laid-back about “the rules” up here, but that's completely unacceptable.
What I don't get is why a Hydra with Hellion-heads spawns little green fungus creatures. Call Maury, I want a paternity test!
Ulasht, the Hate Seed is the poster boy for cards that “do nothing on their own.” I found this out the hard way when I played Ulasht on an empty board only to watch him make a bee-line for the graveyard crying, “Nobody understands me!” As it turns out, he counts other Red and Green creatures as he comes into play. With no friends around, I suspect it was the loneliness that killed him, state-based effects be damned.
There's a reason he's not called Ulasht, the Nice-to-Other-People Seed. It wouldn't fit on the card!
It's a hot potato with a one-way ticket, except it causes life-loss and not potato-shaped burn scars.
Sometimes, All Suns' Dawn will effectively read, “Put your graveyard into your hand.” That's the kind of sentence non-Magic players love.
Gruul War Plow, meanwhile, is an artifact that moonlights as a creature. While Savage Twister is busy sweeping the board, the War Plow is parked on the sidelines, chilling out, relaxing with the other plows. After the board is clear, Gruul War Plow gets off its lazy butt and says, “What did I miss?” before attacking for four.
When building decks, don't hesitate to blatantly steal take inspiration from any source. I got the idea for the next deck from a Saturday School question.
I Dream of Djinni (followed by a picture of Djinn Illuminatus)
What if you took the token-to-fatty part from the U/W deck and combined it with the U/R Splice engine from the second deck? From what I've heard, you end up with peanut-butter and chocolate all over the place. Or in cup form, I'm not sure. Either way, you end up with something cool.
Grand Arbiter Augustin IV (hereafter known as Arby) is the love-child of Pearl Medallion and Sapphire Medallion. And Sphere of Resistance. And Hurloon Minotaur. That's a lot of mommies and daddies. The tale of how he went from being the only son of three inanimate objects and an out-of-print bull-person to being the Grand Arbiter of all of Ravnica is an inspiring one. I'm sure that Matt Cavotta is giving you all the details over at Taste the Magic.
A reader by the name of Mark Matics sent me his latest pet combo: a hamster-ball and a Chihuahua. I'm not exactly sure what the combo does, but from what I can tell, you end up with a clear plastic ball that rolls around the floor, yapping incessantly.
It wasn't until he mentioned the possibility of splashing Leap of Flame and Tibor and Lumia, that a light went on. Then my eyes turned to dollar signs, a little storm cloud appeared overhead, and a series of punctuation marks shot out of my mouth. Clearly, I'd had an idea that would simultaneously make me very sad and obscenely @#$%&^* rich. It was a very strange moment, but at least I was inspired to build a deck.
Tibor and Lumia are a tumid, baronial duo with two very synergistic abilities, not including their delightful anagram possibilities. You might think I'm crazy for liking this aspect of the card, but I'm rational, bud.
If your opponent won't cooperate and play some ground-based creatures, you can give him some with Hunted Dragon and Hunted Phantasm. All those donated Goblins? As a man much wiser than I once said, “They make funny little popping sounds when they die.” Just like corn. I'm not sure what sound Hunted Dragon's knighted enemies make when they die, but Mark says they sound a little bit like a Chihuahua in a hamster-ball. (Note: No animals were harmed in the making of this joke.)
At this point, you can use that infinite (or arbitrarily large, if you want to get Judge-y) mana to untap Kiki-Jiki as many times as you please, copying the Golem each time. That's a lot of Golems, and it means ol' Kiki is going to have bad luck for the next infinity-times-seven years. Don't play the lottery, Kiki-Jiki!
As a four-mana Equipment, Sword of the Paruns is (obviously) best when you can get it into play for a 100% discount, directly from your library. How many libraries have swords you can take out of them? This one does.
Of all the Guildpact Rares, Hatching Plans is the one with the largest gap between how good it could be and how bad it probably is. Between those two points there's an ever-widening gulf. A veritable canyon. A vast expanse with enough space for two little gulfs, a crevasse, and half a chasm. The main point of interest are those three little words: Is. Put. Into. Er … I mean: Draw. Three. Cards.
With Drinker of Sorrow and Greater Harvester already slated for inclusion, I figured I might as well go all the way and make it a Horror Tribal deck. Those crazy Horrors, always working together towards a common goal.
Sometimes new cards fit it into old concepts so snugly, so effortlessly, you'd think they were meant to be there all along. I'm not sure if it's like putting old wine into new bottles, or new wine into old bottles, but I'm pretty sure bottles are involved somehow.
The bottles of destiny.
When is a Forest not a Forest?
When it is a tacking.
On the other hand, there are cards that don't want +1/+1 counters. If you had the guts to play Myr Prototype, you might have noticed that after a while, it becomes difficult to attack with it. Simic Guildmage is there to alleviate the burden of all those beads. Similarly, the Guildmage will allow you to better control the Golgari's Necroplasm, allowing it to take out its gelatinous fury on Saproling tokens, Snake tokens, and subway tokens … every freakin' turn! Fungusfolk, pack your bags, you're going on the Ooze Cruise.
Before you can love another, you must first love your elf
Before I get to the last deck, I have a small confession to make: I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die. Ha, I'm just kidding! That's a big confession. The small confession is that I have an unnatural predilection for Elf Tribal decks, an abnormal penchant for the other little Green men, a strange proclivity for the pointy-eared mana-makers, not to mention a freakish propensity for using Microsoft Word's thesaurus tool.
Until next time, have fun attaching target Aura enchanting a permanent to another permanent with the same controller and/or moving a +1/+1 counter from target creature onto another target creature with the same controller!
All that said, this week I decided to take a break from building super-ultra-powerful tournament-winning decks. For this week, at least, the development of my metagame-warping monstrosities will be put on hiatus. There won't be any finely-honed killing machines. No brutally efficient killing machines, either. Basically, there won't be any killing machines of any kind this week. (I'm saving those for Killing Machine Week.)
Tribal Wars. Luckily, despite being a so-called “casual” format, games of Tribal Wars still have winners and losers. More accurately, these games still have people like me and losers. So it's a format I can really sink my teeth into. Chomp. See? Tribal Wars is delicious.
Minamo Scrollkeeper is a fine man, providing early defense and making sure people pay the fines on their overdue scrolls. I'm looking at you Kird Ape.
After that, Imps spent a long time stinking. I mean, the cards weren't great, but that's not what I mean. Their whole deal was smelling bad. That was their thing, their M.O., their raison d'etre. (See Foul Imp and Putrid Imp.)
Sorry, folks. The deck is Standard legal, so no Chimney Imp. Besides, good Spikes like me don't play cards like Chimney Imp. The card is no good! Just look at the power to cost ratio! One power for five mana? It's no Infectious Host, that's for sure. If I'm paying five-mana for a spell, it had better win me the game. So you can forget about it. Don't even think about asking again, because I won't budge and I won't buckle. I'm completely unbuckle-able.
...
Okay, fine!
I'll play a Chimney Imp. But justone.
Another Guildpact card that caught my attention was Feral Animist. After releasing Feral Thallid, Feral Deceiver, Feral Shadow, Feral Throwback, Feral Lightning, I figured the least they could do was to make a Feral Animist. The most spiritual of all the goblins, the Animist believes that ordinary objects, as well as animate beings, have a soul. Everything is conscious to the animist, from rocks and trees, to oversized novelty wolf hands. This fellow is not to be confused with the Feral Animalist, who believes that humans are merely animals with no spiritual nature and who is indifferent to all but the physical appetites, like eating, drinking, and playing Magic Online. Also do not confuse the Animist with the Feral Anime-ist, who rabidly collects Duel Masters cards and foams at the mouth while watching Sailor Moon cartoons. They're totally different things.
With all the one-toughness creatures, the deck would just roll over, fetch a stick, shake a paw, and die to cards like Electrolyze. Or Darkblast. Or Night of Souls' Betrayal. Or Tibor (What a jerk! Lumia was cool, though). Or Gelectrode. Or Plagued Rusalka. You get the picture. It wasn't pretty. It was the opposite of that. It was un-pretty.
That's when I realized that Revenant Patriarch is a Spirit. Hmm. If only there was some way to take advantage of that. That's when I realized that I left the oven on! I immediately rushed home to turn it off.
...there exists a useful taxonomy (it's like astronomy, but with taxes) of Magic player types
...the other half of my psychographic (it's like a normal graphic, but crazier) profile
There's a problem plaguing poor Timmy. No, Lassie, it's not that he's trapped in a well down by the Old Mill. It's not plagues, either. It's his Leviathans. He's still waiting to summon them, and it's been years since Unglued. To make matters worse, the Leviathan has become a sort of double agent, providing massive exploitable drawbacks for Johnny while still being the sizable monsters Timmy has come to expect.
When not selling him out to the Johnny-side Lando Calrissian-style, his Leviathans are deficient in other ways. For one, they are featured in terrible Peter Weller movies (although, come to think of it, Robocop 2 might have benefited from some Leviathans). Beyond that, they are bad role models, plain and simple. Just look at their diets! Eater of Days? Sky Swallower? These guys have possibly the most absurd abstract-concept-based diet since Thought Devourer. Or Atkins. Now, you might think that eating days isn't so bad, and swallowing some sky is okay (as long as you chew it first). But where does it lead? First little Timmy's eating a few days here and there with his friends on weekends, and the next thing you know he's lying face down in a ditch after a two-week calendar-binge, fingernails yellowed from too much Tuesday and little bits of Wednesday stuck in his beard. Does anybody want that for poor Timmy? I didn't think so. Man cannot live on Sky alone. You also need some protein.
Since that is indisputably true based on the mountain of evidence I have just marshaled (yes, you can marshal a mountain)
As I was busily testing a not-very-successful Sky Swallower deck online, a player by the name of Dark Lord of the Slith challenged me to a duel. It was pistols at 3,426 paces, which seemed way too far to me, so we played Magic instead.
followed by me losing twenty life because of the Delusions' leaves-play “ability,” followed by so many tears. (I happened to be chopping onions at the time. Always multi-tasking.)
Delusions of Mediocrity and Night's Whisper combine to provide a little of that long lost “Necro-Donate” flavour. That just so happens to be my second favourite flavour, after cinnamon.
Play Myojin of Life's Web, followed by Weird Harvest. Remove the Divinity counter from the Myojin to plop Sky Swallower, Hokori, Dust Drinker, and four Forces of Nature into play. Your opponent gets everything but Big Gulps, and at the beginning of his or her upkeep will have to deal with four very cantankerous Forces of Nature who will be demanding a payment of sixteen Green mana (with no installment plan). Unfortunately for your opponent, Hokori puts a damper on that plan. Two dampers if you're lucky. With only one untappable land, coming up with sixteen mana might be a tad tricky. And by “a tad” I mean “extremely,” and by “tricky” I mean “tricky.” If he or she can't pay the mana, those cranky old Forces are going to revolt and deal somewhere in the neighbourhood of thirty-two-damage. That's the neighbourhood I want to live in.
every Leviathan ever printed is included, except the Segovian Leviathan who isn't actually a Leviathan. I think the story goes that he was abandoned by his birth parents (two upper-class Leviathans from Manhattan) and raised by a working-class family of Serpents in Brooklyn. Hence the creature-type. I could be mistaken, or making that up.
The deck is rougher than sandpaper wrestling, and its mana-curve balloons in the middle like, uh, I do. After a balloon-eating contest.
Grab their respective Reins and fling a Timmy-load of damage straight at your opponent's head. (Note: a “Timmy-load” is eight to ten. For example, you would say that a baseball team has a Timmy-load of players. At least, I would.)
Enjoy those lands I just gave you! They have acid in them. Oh, those Red mages and their practical jokes.
The whole first four paragraphs of the letter from Kharlamov is entirely quotable and worth re-reading and re-giggling at. Also:
Rain of Tears, Stone Rain … the world of Magic: The Gathering sure has some strange precipitation. Can you imagine what it must be like for a Magic-land meteorologist? “Today's forecast is partly cloudy, with a 30% chance of daggers. Don't leave the house without your titanium umbrella.” I mean, Rain of Blades, Hail of Arrows, Sleet of Spears? I hope the postmen in the Magic universe have a different motto. Or wear helmets.
Stone Rain castle: It burned down, fell over, sunk into the swamp, and then was showered with fiery chunks of granite.
I hope that gives you an idea of what goes on in our completely made up organization. Interestingly, my opinions line up perfectly with your own. Chalk it up to a coincidence, I guess.
Sincerely,
Kharlamov
P.S. Two weeks ago, you forgot about Mistform Ultimus.
The other mistake I made was to suggest, in a very oblique way, that Uyo, Silent Prophet was a man. This is clearly not true. Only fans of ‘70's Glam Rock could make that mistake. I didn't realize that the gender of imaginary Moonpeople was such an overriding concern for people, and for that, I am sorry.
As you can probably tell, I love “bad” cards. Basically, if the card stinks, I'm smellin' it, if you know what I mean. (If you don't know what I mean, consider yourself lucky.)
Since these effects return the land to its owner's hand, Miguel gets his land back while his opponent probably goes home and bawls his eyes out. Literally! Or figuratively, I guess.
In Ravnica, The Izzet run the Water Works, the Electric Company, and all four railroads.
It doesn't come up often, but if you want to respond to your own spells, you will have to keep priority. To do this, hold down the Ctrl key as you play your spell. This will give you an opportunity to use Uyo's ability to copy the spell while it's on the stack.
I learned this the hard way.
(Note: This only works if you're playing on Magic Online. Around the kitchen table, holding down the Ctrl key will do nothing but elicit strange looks from your opponents.)
(As a side note: With their outrageously flamboyant fashions, and their Stitches in Time, I think the water-systems managers among the Izzet are spending a little too much time around the (don't hurt me) ''sew''ers.)
If a Stitch in Time saves nine, just think of all the stitches you'll save when it's “imprinted” on Eye of the Storm! Dragons are known hoarders, so it wouldn't surprise me if there was a room in Nivix full of all these saved stitches.
If hard work is the song, I am a verse. Yes, I am a verse to hard work. (If you think that pun was forced, just wait 'til next week.)
“How short can I go?” you ask. I plan to build some decks with cards whose names have only one syllable. That's right: one. If I get to two, you'll know that I've gone too far. Five would, of course, be right out.
Okk and Orgg love to Brawl, but they like to be flung with Fling just as much. That's four - or six - straight to the dome! "Ow, my dome!" the domed guy might say.
Black decks are not my cup of tea. For one thing, it's hard to drink out of a cup made of cards. In fact, I'm not sure how a Black deck and my cup of tea got mixed up in the first place. A Black deck has skulls, blood, and dead things in it, while my cup of tea has, you guessed it, tea in it. At least, that's what I hope is in it. Do you see what I mean, though? They're not the same at all. I just thought I'd clear that up.
Welcome Johns, Jonathans, Joes, Jacks, and Johnnies! In case you missed the bloodsoaked memo, it's Vampire Week! The one week of the year you can sleep in your coffin without everybody getting weird on you. And what better week to schedule the celebration of Magic's soulless bloodsucking night-stalkers than the same week as Valentine's Day? Er … Is there something you're not telling us, editors?
It'll be tricky, but I guess I can build some Vampire, flower, and chocolate combo decks.
I'm just glad it's not Groundhog Day. I don't know what kind of decks I would have to build then.
When it comes to combos, Vampires really bite. You might even say they suck.
Could the deck be updated for Standard? The answer is a resounding, “Kinda.”
As I mentioned above, the Magical Color Pie has been reshuffled a bit since the days of Revised. Now, I'm not sure how one goes about shuffling a pie, exactly, but the boys in R&D managed to find a way to do it. Kudos, gents! Everyone loves the Color Pie, or as I like to call it, the “Colour Pie.” How could you not? I mean, who doesn't like Pie? And who doesn't like Colour? Someone who grew up in a family of clowns?
Touché.
One such card is a Blue card-drawer from Betrayers of Kamigawa. What is it called again? Obey the Spray? Mind the Spume? Do What the Fog Says? Follow that Cloud's Instructions? Heed the Mists? There, that's it!
Enter Flight of Fancy, Masumaro's best friend. Seriously, I think Flight of Fancy was the Best Man at Masumaro's wedding. That might be completely made up.
You must be getting sick of me by now, with my unnatural affection for really bad cards. If you aren't, then you might be after this article is done. That's what we in the business call “foreshadowing.” That's the business that we in the business call “Dictionary Sales.”
One, I am extraordinarily lazy. To illustrate, as I write this article, I'm eating a comically large submarine sandwich while lying on a hammock.
Zephyr Spirit has what we in the business call a “drawback.” Yep, still the same business. (Sorry, I'll come up with a new gag in the next section.) Actually, Zephyr Spirit has a number of drawbacks: it costs six mana, whenever it blocks a creature it's returned to your hand, and it puts a little bit of arsenic in your coffee each day so you won't suspect you're being poisoned.
Yeah, that last one was a surprise to me too.
Like I always say, when life gives you lemons, make a lemon combo deck.
Countering a Keiga, the Tide Star by pitching Zephyr Spirit to Disrupting Shoal. The look on the face of the opponent that I couldn't see was priceless. I pretended that he was very embarrassed.
For those unfamiliar with the term, a “Wall” is a continuous upright structure forming one side of a building or room. It is also a more-or-less defunct type of creature, defined by its inability to attack. This doesn't leave much for the Wall to do, so it ends up spending most of its time blocking and knitting afghan blankets for relatives.
Further keeping with the Gruul theme, I printed up the decklist, burned it, smashed it with a hammer, ate some of it, then adapted the deck for Standard.
On the other hand, if you play with fire under the supervision of a Druid, you're liable to burn someone else. When I originally scanned the Ravnica spoiler, Stone-Seeder Hierophant was a card that screamed “combo”. Unfortunately, I was in the local public library at the time and was promptly asked to leave. The card should've whispered “combo” in that situation. Before my unceremonious expulsion, however, I jotted down a few words: eggs, bread, milk, Stone-Seeder Hierophant + New Frontiers.
I lived in Northern Ontario for years, but I went to school in Ottawa. That's where I wrote my MA thesis, Barthes, Bakhtin, Baudrillard, and Spaceballs: Towards a Theory of Parody. To my eternal delight, my graduating class voted it Thesis Most Likely to be Completely Made Up.
I've been obsessed with booby traps ever since I watched Disney's Swiss Family Robinson. While the Magic Booby Trap looks more like the thermal detonator from Return of the Jedi than a hole in the ground with a tiger hiding inside it, or a coconut filled with gun powder, it's just as exciting!
As I said, you're going to need to make your opponent draw a card during your turn, so, to that end, I've included four Lore Brokers, three Compulsive Researches, two Mikokoros, and a Partridge in a Pear Tree. (Note: Partridge not included.)
There are other cards, however, that you just can't help pitying. They're the cards that promptly get cut from your sealed decks, your pre-constructed deck experiments, and your high-school basketball teams. They are the dog that nobody loves. You know, like Lassie. These cards look up at you with their big, sad, puppy-dog eyes, belch clouds of cotton-candy-coloured mystery-goo, and scare children with rhyming couplets about their cankerous sores. You know, just like Lassie.
This always-say-die flesh-eater puts the “supper” in “suppurating pustules.” The more he dies, the happier he gets. He is not in the least bit scared to be mashed into a pulp. Or, for that matter, to have his eyes gouged out and his elbows broken.
Other Enchantments that I have anthropomorphized and befriended include Oversold Cemetery and Bloodbond March. All those Hosts whose souls have been betrayed? Bring 'em back from the grave with the, uh, Cemetery.
Victory is assured. For whom, I'm not sure. I don't want to say that the combo is fragile, but if you tried to mail it, you'd have to put it in a box marked Fragile.
I don't want to single out Winter, because, really, I hate each season equally. Winter may be too cold, but Summer's too hot. I spend most of Spring recovering from Winter, and spend Fall dreading it. There is one season, however, that I'm grudgingly growing to appreciate.
Doubling Season!
On the Canadian calendar, it falls somewhere between Winter and Spring.
The card isn't bad either.
Throughout Magic's history, there have been cards that double something, whether it's damage (Furnace of Rath), +1/+1 counters (Solarion), my blood pressure (Raging River), or mana (Doubling Cube). Each one of these cards has inspired a plethora of decks in a plethora of formats, not to mention the plethora of “plethoras” in this sentence. That's a lot of plethoras, to be sure. More than most other cards. For example, just look at all those decks out there based around Doubling Cube ...
*crickets*
Okay, there aren't any. Well, at least not a plethora of them. Or even half a plethora. I don't know about you guys, but, personally, I'm waiting for Tripling Cube. Now that'd be a card I could get behind! It'd be 50% cooler than Doubling Cube. I measured.
Unnamed Playtest Partner #1: Do you think we're being too literal, sir? Me: He told us to comb the spoilers, so we're combing them!
Combing the spoilers proved fruitless, so I decided to read them instead. Wow! What a difference that made! One card in particular caught my eye. Luckily, the eye was quickly released so I could look at the rest of the cards.
What could be better than a creature with a really high toughness?
“Playing videogames?”
“Winning the lottery?”
“Having a girlfriend?”
No, you imaginary question-answering people: a creature with a really high power!
Boros Swiftblade is the creature whose power and toughness I was most interested in switching. He hates it when I do that, so I do it just to bug him.
When I took this position, as faithful steward of House of Cards, I felt a great pressure to be wacky. After all, isn't that what this column is all about? Magicthegathering.com content manager Scott Johns went so far as to make me do the interview in a propeller-topped beanie, rainbow suspenders, and a pair of floppy red shoes to see if I fit the role. At least, that's what he said they were for.
Golgari Guildmage is a card I've come to like, even though his abilities are a little pricey. Sometimes, he is just a bear. Other times, he is a complete house! Still other times, he is a house with central air and a two-car garage. Rarely is he a bachelor apartment.
Once again, the first four paragraphs of this, his first ever mtgcom article, are superb and worth re-reading in their entirety. See also:
The deck, as I had actually built it, was approximately a kersquillion times worse. No exaggeration.
Luckily for the Enchant Land enthusiasts among us, Ravnica brought with it the tutoring power of Three Dreams, a card which, in one fell swoop, obsolesced the Arabian Nights card, Two Dreams, as well as Antiquities' That Crazy Dream I Had About the Octopus Riding Four Bicycles At Once.
If you said put 'em directly into play with Call of the Wild, then you're my kind of person. If you didn't say that, you're probably still my kind of person. (I like a lot of different people. Except that guy. I'm not sure what his problem is.)
The rules are like the sewer system: It’s really important to society and keeps everything running smoothly, but as long as it’s doing its job behind the scenes, there’s no reason for you to poke your head in there. (In this analogy, I’m the plumber.)
Time Spiral is a bit different. Besides the new keywords (which are reasonably complex), there are a couple of other things going on. One is the introduction of a pair of new rules. That’s not too strange, but these are rules you might want to check out. The other is the fact that we’re monkeying around with old keywords. (In this analogy, I’m the monkey.) We’re changing how echo works, for Pete’s sake! (In this analogy, I’m Pete.)
It’s hard to explain what changed about the madness rules because no one understood the madness rules in the first place. Well, OK, some did, but those people were rightly deemed dangerous to society and shipped off to Monster Island. But I’m going to give it a shot anyway.
threshold might be getting the most extreme overhaul of any keyword ability (I guess you could call being erased from the rulebook an “overhaul”)