18-97-14-86.crawl.commoncrawl.org | ToothyWiki | MagicTheGathering | RecentChanges | Login Every so often, Mark Gottlieb uses his weekly article to make a deck-building challenge. Wikizens are invited to collaborate in building a deck to meet the [latest challenge]:
Every card in your deck (except for basic land) must be illustrated by the same artist. Since the Invitational will take place on Magic Online, your entire deck must be playable there. That means you can only use cards from Seventh Edition, Eighth Edition, expansions from Invasion through Darksteel, and the three bonus cards (Morphling, Sliver Queen, and Serra Avatar). If a card has been reprinted in different sets with different art, be sure to specify which one you want to use—and double-check that it's Magic Online friendly. For this deck dare, Icy Manipulator is fine for your Mark Zug deck, but not for your Amy Weber or Douglas Shuler deck.
The judges (whoever they are) will decide which submitted decks make it into the auction. They are not making their selections based on power level. Instead, they're looking for the decks that are the most interesting. If you make a deck that is fun to play or has a bizarre combo, it stands just as good a chance (in fact, it stands a better chance) than a killer, near-tourney-level construction. Only one deck will be chosen per artist, and each participant can only submit a single deck, so make your artist choice wisely. The deadline is April 12th. (Note: decks should be submitted [here]).
Provides a few cards to form a green/blue/splash-red beast tribal deck: Canopy Crawler, Contested Cliffs, Hystrodon, Mistform Ultimus, Quicksilver Behemoth, Yavimaya Coast. (More cards for an Elemental tribal deck, but that can't use the Cliffs).
The Aura comboes with the Shepherd and the Sharpshooter: the latter also comboes with Pentavus. Evolution is very situational - I commonly use it for allowing the Lord to pump himself early-game, but ideally late-game it will make Pentavus generate either Zombie or Lord/Merfolk? tokens. The deck is four-colour, and I might want to lower the Island count by two in exchange for an extra Mountain and Swamp, but the Core and Simulacrum generally prevent me being colour-screwed. I have wondered about switching the Might of Oaks for MTG: Echoing Courage, but that's only really effective with Pentavites, and based on the games played so far it's not worthwhile. AC played against this on Sunday and found it great fun (even to play *against*) and quite effective. I think PT or one of us should submit this. PT will submit this unless something better turns up.
This was quite fun for the sheer egg-digging factor, even though I never saw a MTG: Mirari's Wake. But it is basically "stall and kill stuff till you can do a massive MTG: Firecat Blitz". I didn't use the MTG: Raka Sanctuary - MTG: Riptide Crab combo in the end, it's got plenty of creature-kill already. I think the MTG: Meekstones should go in, and just avoid playing it at the same time as two copies of MTG: Mirari's Wake (as that would shut down your Firecats).
Darrel Riche
on the other hand, has a reasonably obvious Elf deck, probably with red for a little burn; but while it might be decent, it looks very unexciting.
PeterTaylor has built a Pete Venters deck based around MTG: Cabal Slaver, a Greg Staples deck and a Ron Spencer counter-burn deck. Hoping to test them and then post the deck lists for general review and tweaking if they appear to work.
Staples deck-list above. The Venters deck didn't really work. The Spencer deck worked well, but was rather boring.
This was surprisingly fun and surprisingly effective. MTG: Evacuation works horrendously nicely with MTG: Nantuko Monastery, and reaching threshold wasn't particularly a problem (the MTG: Cephalid Aristocrat's drawback is an advantage!). The MTG: Lava Blisters should probably come out due to frequent lack of targets in the format. Playing a base-G deck whose stall cards have costs 1RR and 3UU has a certain frisson of risk to it - yet another reason why MTG: Reap and Sow is just good. I may well submit this one, so comments welcome. Do people think I should play MTG: Wind Dancer (early blocker if you get U) or MTG: Lesser Gargadon (big beater with lots of land) in place of some of the other questionable choices?
PeterTaylor agrees that it was an amusing and effective deck. I suspect a lot of the decks in this format will have moderately fragile mana bases, so Reap is scary.
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