#Advanced Decklist

[beatsandskies]

nuANCED reviews: Rebel’s Call

I’m not really a big fan of this deck. I’ll obviously expand on this statement, and in the process of writing this review I might talk myself into liking it a bit more, but on first impressions… I wasn’t feeling it. And I’m currently well past the point of a first impression, in any case. I’ve looked at the decklist when uploading the Masques booklet insert, when doing the compendium post for the…

[digi-lov]

Advanced Deck Set -DOUBLE TYPHOON- [ST-17]

Releases March 8, 2024

Decklist under cut:

New Cards:

ST17-01 Gummymon x4, ST17-02 Terriermon x2, ST17-03 Lopmon x2, ST17-04 Wendimon x4, ST-05 Gargomon x4, ST17-06 Rapidmon x2, ST17-07 Rapidmon x4, ST17-08 MegaGargomon ACE x2, ST17-09 Cherubimon x4, ST17-10 Li Jianliang x4, ST17-11 Double Typhoon x2, ST17-12 Giant Missle x4

Returning:

EX4-032 Terriermon x4, EX4-033 Terriermon Assistent x4, EX4-057 Antylamon x4, BT8-091 Wallace x2, EX2-061 Li Jianliang x2

[ritunn]

Venture Into the Hidden Realms: Roon of the Hidden Realms Dungeons

Archidekt Decklist | Art by Rafael Sarmento

Welcome to a short deck tech for a tried and true classic, Roon of the Hidden Realm! But like our rhox friend, we're not treading the normal battlefields you typically see with Roon... because we're venturing into the dungeon. A mechanic introduced in primarily blue and white in AFR, venture allows you to enter 3 special dungeon cards for loads of effects. Most decks use Sefris of the Hidden Ways to make use of this mechanic, but we have a different path laid before us. Replacing black for green and switching a reanimator strategy for a blink one. So, without further ado, let's go over our commander.

You Meet Your DM at the Store

Roon is a 4/4 for 2GWU with Trample and Vigilance that can be tapped in addition to paying 2 mana to blink a creature. Overall, a very good engine! This deck mainly makes use of creatures with enter the battlefield effects, our goal is to use Roon and other similar blinkers to squeeze extra uses out of those ETB abilities. Through this, we can get extra value out our creatures and stay ahead of our opponents! But, how does this connect to the dungeon theme?

The Dungeon Beckons You In

Venture allows you to enter 3 of the 4 dungeons. Take the Initiative allows you to enter the Undercity or progress your current dungeon. The majority of our "dungeoneers" as I will refer to them, allow you to enter a new dungeon or advance a single room when they ETB. With help from Roon and other blinkers, this mean we can continously have these dungeoneers venture over and over again to reap the dungeon rewards and make any card that has an effect that triggers when you complete a dungeon to come online faster.

There is also the Take the Initiative. This effect works like the Monarch, hit whoever has it and you take the Initiative, allowing you to advance a room in your current dungeon or enter the Undercity if you don't have an active dungeon. It even let's you venture every upkeep if you have it! But, we can also Take the Initiative via just playing any creature with an ETB effect that states so, like Feywild Caretaker... or blinking them! This means we can keep control of the Initiative pretty easily by blinking one such creature at the end of our opponent's turn before our upkeep. Roon's trample and vigilance also makes him good at defending the Initiative and taking it back.

However, we also have a few cards who help enable this strategy further without ETB effects. These include:

Dungeon Delver

Ellywick Tumblestrum

Hama Pashar, Ruin Delver

Varis, Silverymoon Ranger

Yuan-Ti Malison

These dungeoneers were selected for being powerful and repeatable venture triggers, while Ellywick herself can be a wincon if she ults and Yuan-Ti Malison lets us easily keep and trigger the Initiative, the two most important amongst these are Dungeon Delver and Hama Pashar.

Both of these cards do the exact same things, doubling our room triggers. Though we may not want to complete a Tomb of Annihilation campaign with these out, the other 3 benefit greatly from these cards! Especially the final rooms, the huge game swinging effects now getting to trigger twice. Talk about value! Though this is all nice, one may be wondering how we actually win.

The Infinite Lays Before You

This deck wins via combos, but we do it in style. As such, it makes use of four primary combos:

Archaeomancer + Time Warp + Any Repeatable Blink = Infinite Turns

Archaeomancer + Peregrine Drake + Ghostly Flicker = Infinite ETB + Mana

Deadeye Navigator + Peregrine Drake = Infinite ETB + Mana

Felidar Guardian + Restoration Angel = Infinite ETB

Now Infinite turns is a pretty obvious win con, but how do we win with infinite ETB creatures and mana? Well, if you saw the Radiant Solar above, that's the answer! Combo 2 and 3 can also be used on any creature with Venture or Take the Initiative for the same effect after acquiring infinite mana, giving us infinite venture triggers.

When we achieve infinite venture triggers, we're looking to progress two specific dungeons: Lost Mines of Phandelver and Undercity. We want to advance through the Dark Pool and Trap! rooms respectively to get our opponents to 0. Simple, clean, and not too difficult. Even if your opponents prevent victory that turn with a Teferi's Protection, I doubt they can survive an encounter with 80~ goblins/skeletons or a majority of the creatures in your deck with 3 +1/+1 counters on them.

You Meet a Veteran Dungeoneer

So, how do we play now that we know what the deck does? Overall, our goals before assembling a combo is pretty simple:

Early Game: Ramp! Play those ramp spells, that Farhaven Elf, and your mana rocks. Get out a few early dungeoneers if possible and play your early blink engines to start venturing. Focus on finishing Lost Mines of Phandelver first.

Mid Game: This is where the fun starts. A majority of dungeoneers are CMC 4 - 6. By this point we should also finish our first dungeon and all our cards that do a thing when we complete one are now online. Wicked! Last but not least, get Roon out around this time if necessary.

Late Game: By now we should be venturing through 3 rooms on average. We can focus on finishing dungeons like Dungeon of the Mad Mage and Undercity now for their powerful final room effects that will help us gather our combo pieces and win the game.

Before I leave you, here's some other important cards in the deck I wanted to call out. The Adventurers! Tomb of Horrors Adventurer, Undermountain Adventurer, and White Plume Adventurer are some of the best dungeoneers in this deck with Ellywick Tumblestrum and Radiant Solar. Each Takes the Initiative when they ETB, which we want out asap, but also provides a powerful effect. ToHA provides spell copying (which means more ETBs), UMA provides ramp, and WPA provides a Seedborn Muse-lite effect (super important for Roon). All of these effects get even stronger when we've completed a dungeon, becoming insanely powerful for their mana cost. Keep them safe and you'll be rewarded greatly once you finish a dungeon if you haven't before they arrive.

Lastly, here's a few cards I would love to add, but are too expensive or simply unobtainable for me currently and I highly suggest you consider.

Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines (Panharmonicon on a body)

Seasoned Dungeoneer (Veteran Dungeoneer but better... if only anyone was selling one without insane shipping to Canada)

Teleportation Circle (It's just a white Conjurer's Closet in this deck)

You Hear the Bards Sing Your Tale

Thanks for reading through my second deck tech! Coming up on 4 years game mastering for not just D&D 5e, but PF2e, Fabula Ultima, and a bunch of smaller TTRPGs, dungeons have always been some of my favorite parts. When the mechanic got introduced in AFR, I loved it! But Sefris just being a quirky reanimator deck made me sad. So, I'm glad to have put my own twist on the theme that allows me to play Ellywick, Hama, Nadaar, and Varis together... the AFR adventuring party! I hope you enjoy the deck as much as I do.

[mmorgcute]

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[inventors-fair]

Club Decks: What We Play

Fifteen decks, fifteen archetypes, fifteen strategies. For my students, not everyone can make a good deck, and/or they don’t necessarily have the resources to make what they’d like. Commander and stuff is the most difficult, but they enjoy Oathbreaker with the inexpensive and more or less accessible planeswalkers, and they don’t usually worry about Standard, Modern, or Pioneer. 

Club decks have a number of cards of different rarities that I use to model them off of my first starter decks, back in Alara. There’s a fair amount of repeats and a good chunk of power, and they’re easy enough to model so that students can make their own.

Depending on the year (2020-21 being pretty disruptive), there are different criteria for “leveling up,” which means beating a number of students and then beating me to get a booster pack and a level in my ledger. There’s no limit, except you can’t level up more than once a week. Hey, I make enough to make kids happy, but not enough to give them a zillion packs.

Below the cut are my club decks, some notable cards, and why I made them the way that I did. Enjoy this little slice of Magic! If you’re looking to start similar programs or you’d like details as to how things are run, let me know and I can provide extended decklists and explanations.

1. White Equipment Voltron

Notable cards include:

Healer’s Hawk

Taj-Nar Swordsmith

Strata Scythe

Little things turn into big things. With a little bit of destruction and a whole lotta keywords, this deck is all about building up to a single aggressive Voltron creature that wrecks shop. It’s good about teaching different card types and keyword interactions, and hey, it feels good to swing with an 11/11 creature that started off as a 1/1, right?

2. Blue Tempo Control

Notable cards include:

Pestermite

Everdream

Tidespout Tyrant

This is the deck for advanced players. The big blue comes out with a lot of disruption, and this is the deck that often gets described as either “unfun” or “my favorite deck.” Bounce it, counter it, bounce my land to cycle, return your threat, disrupt, and so on and so forth. Not every deck has a difficulty curve like this, but it’s satisfying to say the least.

3. Black Sacrifice Everything

Notable cards include:

Butcher Ghoul

Whisper, Blood Liturgist

Priest of Forgotten Gods

“Synergistic” is an understatement. The number of death triggers and sacrifice triggers can easily win someone a game if they know how to interact properly. Forcing decisions upon your opponent and exploiting some awesome stuff from your side of the field makes this deck easy to play if you want to have things die and VERY easy if you know how to manipulate the board.

4. Red Discard into Madness

Notable cards include:

Spinehorn Minotaur

Dragon Mage

Glint-Horn Buccaneer

I’ll admit, this deck is a bit of a pet project and one of my favorites. Ditching cards to draw cards feels great to me! I love madness, I love looting, and I love throwing a bunch of stuff away to make big things before getting it all back later. As much tuning as it needs, this deck is another advanced joy for people that love to make niche ideas work to the best of their ability.

5. Green Lands & Boys

Notable cards include:

Timbermaw Larva

Howl of the Night Pack

Kalonian Twingrove

Sometimes you just want an easy ramp deck. The small end of this gets lands and has some landfall, and the big end just wrecks shop with the big and powerful creatures that we all know and love from green. It’s easy to play and it’s easy to win with and sometimes, stomping is all you need to do. A great card for the Tim-Tams of the world.

6. UW Fliers Beatdown

Notable cards include:

Squadron Hawk

Watcher of the Spheres

Windreader Sphinx

I recently got my butt handed to me with this deck, and it’s not to be trifled with. Each deck has its own kind of evasion and whatnot, but this deck has got the early-game down and the late-game? Unstoppable. It’s designed to massacre you in the air and that’s what it does. Pumps, beats, and more. One of the first decks the kids loved.

7. UB Surveil Control

Notable cards include:

Notion Rain

Price of Fame

Thief of Sanity

“Really?” Yeah, well, here’s the thing: I built this deck when I didn’t have a whole lot of spare cards sorted, and that’s why I did it. As a block mechanic, though, surveil really is fun, and as a control player, the deck is pretty darn sweet. It’s beefy, powerful, and great flavor for the city. Fun fact: the Thief of Sanity I had is actually a misprint! It’s missing the rare sticker.

8. RB Goblins Snarl Rage Win

Notable cards include:

Goblin Instigator

Fodder Launch

Weirding Shaman

And this is another deck that the kids absolutely love. Fast fun, and furious, Goblins is a great tribal introduction that people go to when they want to show how easy and cheeky it can be. Burn ‘em out, make ‘em attack, turn ‘em sideways. This isn’t necessarily an easy deck, but if all you know is attacking, then you’re golden. Or, you can kill someone only through noncombat damage!

9. RG Monsters of the Jungle

Notable cards include:

Ruination Wurm

Footfall Crater

Mina and Denn, Wildborn

This is, surprisingly, the deck with what I feel is the lowest barrier to entry. You give big things trample. Now, there IS a fair bit of complexity in the number of combat tricks, with some buffs and some bloodrush cards along with it, but everyone knows that big things are big. The difference is in the variety of strategies available to you with access to red mana. 

10. GW Token Swarm

Notable cards include:

Raise the Alarm

Selesnya Guildmage

Growing Ranks

If you can be fast with this deck, then you can run someone over faster than they could ever react. If you can be slow with this deck, you can build up enough life and army power that you literally can’t be beat. There’s a lot to love about this deck and it’s not as easy as it might seem. Tokens are popular with a subset of MTG players, and I’m glad that they have lots of support.

11. BW Ghosts of your Past

Notable cards include:

Pillory of the Sleepless

Vizkopa Guildmage

Ethereal Absolution

Basically, this is in the same vein as the surveil deck, but like the surveil deck, this has been modified so you get the best out of the deck. There’s a little nasty sacrifice, some draining, lots of good stuff. This is a deck for players who want to be mean, but with the option to beat down as well. After all, the best games are one you play in good spirits!

12. GB Elves Reclamation

Notable cards include:

Eyeblight’s Ending

Shaman of the Pack

Immaculate Magistrate

Everyone loves elves. Except for the people that hate elves. You get them out, go wide, or go narrow. Either way, you’re beating in face. This deck can be impossibly fast and I love it, but without breaching the barrier of being overpowered. Heck, I’ve won and lost with all of these decks, but elves put up a struggle, and I love that for them.

13. UG Defenders and Butts

Notable cards include:

Axebane Guardian

Assault Formation

Feed the Pack

I’ve been 100% blown out by this deck before by a student who I underestimated. That’s fantastic. This is the kind of deck that students don’t understand until they see it being played, and that’s honestly great. It’s fantastic to watch them learn and I love watching them pull out all the stops to get the biggest butts possible. Can’t beat seventeen angry wolves!

14. UR Spellslinging Recursion

Notable cards include:

Thermo-Alchemist

Thoughtflare

Call the Skybreaker

Flashback, Jump-Start, and Retrace: people love to cast spells. There’s so much fun stuff that can happen in a stormlike brew, and though it’s definitely not storm, it encourages playing spells, and that’s what makes it fun. It appeals to burn and control players alike and makes them feels skillful to the max. It’s Izzet in everything but perfect flavor.

15. RW Combat Control

Notable cards include:

Thatcher Revolt

Intimidation Bolt

Citadel Siege

I actually let my kids down with this deck before. It was an underpowers Firesong and Sunspeaker deck, and it just wasn’t working. What else can you do? Blow things up and make ‘em big. This deck is a powerhouse of unimaginable proportions and I love playing with it. Smart combat makes for some tricky strategy, and it’s humbling for the reckless opponnent.

That’s all for now! Ask me about questions and I’ll tell you no lies. And hey, if you know any kids, play around with ‘em and see how they engage with MTG. What do they lean to? How can you use that to teach them? It’s an amazing game and I’m glad to be sharing it with you, too.

—Abelzumi

[thegeneralsnotebook]

July Feature: History of Colours Part 3 -- Purple

One of the things that I was a little afraid of going into this series about the histories of each of the main colours was that after the first few entries, the series would start to get a bit dry. I would have already talked about the big decks and so the later colours wouldn’t have a whole lot left to mention that hadn’t already been said. So far at least, I’m glad to say that this hasn’t happened, and now it looks like maybe it’ll be okay. After all, we’ve got a lot of important cards to mention when we get to Pink, and again when we get to Orange, and again when we get to Blue. So I don’t think that we’re going to run into any problems on that front at all. In any case, this month is about Purple, and it’s a colour that has its own narrative to tell.

That, by the way, is another thing which has surprised me so far in my research. Each of the colours so far has had a relatively nice theme emerge around their history as I pulled it together. Yellow’s was a tale of a brilliant beginning, a long period of loss, and then a slow but strong rebirth. White’s was a surprisingly thematic tale of a colour that, while it had given up the spotlight, had never given up the stage. For Purple, things are a little different, but no less appropriate, especially given the colour’s new royal connotations. Purple, I’ve found, has been a colour all about establishing dynasties, lines of decks passing a torch from one generation to the next, traceable back to a touchstone concept from older times. It was impressive how far back some of these lines reached, and indeed a few decks that I had thought emerged from whole cloth were actually perched on the shoulders of past giants that I had never even heard of before. 

Before we get started, I want to again extend heartfelt thanks to my source on all matters of the predate my experience with the game’s competitive scene: the one and only Emperor Bugle. This time I really would have been up the creek if not for him, though we’ll get to that particular event in its due time.

For now, come along with me, as we unveil the saga of the Dynasties of Purple.

Two big cards with big effects, but generally used for slightly different things.

Formative Days

As with all of the colours, the story of Purple has to begin at the beginning, at the dawn of Premier. There were three major decks featuring Purple at the time, but I have covered Royal Guidance and Taxes in the Yellow and White articles respectively, and I won’t be going into further detail on them here. Instead, let’s focus on our first touchstone, though in this case the torch first lit by Big Bombs was not to be picked up by Purple, and instead was eventually passed to a different colour, which we’ll talk about in its due time.

Now, I would not be surprised by a slight sense of deja vu encountered when first clicking on that link, because indeed this early deck does bear a striking resemblance to some Harmony Purple Farming decks that have been active as recently as this year’s Winter Store Championships. The modern versions have significantly less Friends, different Epics, and some useful Resources in them, but the basic idea is absolutely still the same. PR Twilight contributes well to fighting Epics when paired with a lot of extra flip Events and a high-flipping deck in general. In addition the deck features a good host of what Purple control tools existed at the time, capped off by the brilliant Ursa Vanquisher, a card which may or may not be showing up again in this article a little ways down the page. Indeed, this was Farming before the term “Farming” was even part of the CCG vernacular. And, your eyes do not deceive you where that Full Steam in the upper left is considered. Once upon a time, a 4/0/4 vanilla actually did deserve to be a Rare, and especially in a deck so focused on its flips it was an excellent card to have.

As we move along into Canterlot Nights, we come to a deck that I’ve mentioned before, in the moment that it came during White’s article. I gave it little more than a footnote at that time, but I don’t believe that this time I can get by without giving it a full treatment. Unfortunately, I am also not qualified to properly discuss the minutiae of its construction, so for that I will defer to my source, who has written rather extensively on the topic. I refer of course to One Pace (and seriously do block some time from your schedule if you intend on clicking that link; when I said Bugle had written extensively I wasn’t kidding). One Pace is an important deck for a lot of reasons, and probably could serve as the basis for a whole article all on its own. From my research I can confidently enough say that what you see in there is the foundation upon which combo was built, a formulation of reduced-cost Events and deck-thinning that rings eerily recognizable even today. History may not repeat itself, as Mark Twain said, but it sure does often rhyme.

Finally, we close off these early days with a little list that may not have ever captured much in the way of tournament success, but certainly captured a fair few hearts and minds in its time in the public eye. This being the Antisocial Luna Farming deck that first came at the concept of building a deck with no Friends, and was a popular-enough topic of discussion.

The times, they were a’changin, and Purple was finding its stride.

The Great Realignment

Every one of these articles, I’ve realized, is going to contain a section that could plausibly be headlined by DJ and Maud, even in the colours other than Orange and Pink. Simply put, Rock & Rave was such a momentous and seminal event in the history of the game that the time before and the time after it must be kept separate from each other.

In Purple’s case, however, there was at least a small amount of time before the Great Pink & Orange War fully took hold where one new dynasty was able to be laid down, and what an important dynasty it wound up being. At this point, we have advanced to the 2014 NA Continental Championships, and within the Top 8 of that event there were two important Purple decks.

The first was the winner of the whole thing, a deck named Maudlike, notable for being one of the very first competitively successful tri-colour lists, and itself a harbinger of things to come with its relatively slow, Farming/Control oriented playstyle. Indeed, while Maud was to become best-known in a pure Farming context, her strengths in a Control deck willing to use her Power to consistently confront Problems have also been broadly recognized throughout history. And yes, here we see Ursa Vanquisher again, still devastatingly effective at defending Troublemakers in a world so lacking in other ways of dealing with them.

But in actuality I think that it is the other Purple list that appears in the Top 8 that is the more important one to take note of. It’s a deck that I personally had never heard of before doing this research, but it appears that it may be the progenitor of the Vinyl/Purple control dynasty, which as we all know eventually led to brilliant success. Unfortunately the original primer for the deck has since been removed from Reddit, but here again Bugle saved me, and so I can present to you Charlotte’s Tower. The key theme that I would pull from this deck is repeatability, as so many of its key control features are repeatable, and especially difficult to deal with in an era where Resource removal was not always considered quite so essential as it is today. It’s easy to see the hallmarks of features that we would come to expect in a modern control deck, with targeted answers against opposing Troublemakers, limited but effective removal, and so much value generation, whether it be AT with All Team Organizer, or cards with DJ. It’s an important piece of history, so I was very happy when this decklist surfaced.

Now, as we move on to the Absolute Discord era, it is true that Purple’s fortunes fade somewhat. Pink and Orange rose to the fore, and there will be more to write about this time as we get to those colours. But I do want to make two important notes here.

The first concerns Princess Luna, The Setting Moon, a card which entered the game in Celestial Solstice and left an indelible impression, particularly in the field of combo. I don’t believe that I’ve managed to avoid mentioning Dragon Express in any of the previous articles, but I’ll save the full writeup for one of the most infamous decks in history for the Orange article.

The second is about a deck that I discovered while hunting around for decklists of the other items on this list. It hadn’t come up in my discussion with Bugle, but the contemporary sources mentioned it as a “meta” deck of the time period, so I thought it was probably worth including. It went by the name of Dusk Radiance Mastery, and is mostly closely viewed as an evolution of the ideas first expressed in Royal Guidance, though with a few key updates. Most notable at the time was the inclusion of Twilight Sparkle, Friendship is Magic as the Mane. It also included some fine tech to deal with the meta, like Critter Stampede to crush One Pace’s needed 6 AT to play its Element of Magic. A fine inheritor of what was at the time a flickering flame. Not to fear, though. Unlike Yellow, Purple’s time in the shadows turned out to be very brief.

Stride found.

EO Block: The Age of Legends

EO Block is where the modern Purple story really starts. All at once, the colour got a lot of amazing cards. And then it got even more in HM. And then even more in MT. The result was a colour that was a juggernaut in competitive play, with multiple viable archetypes, and a foundation for a dynasty that was set to last a long time.

Before we talk about decklists, there are a number of individual cards that need to be mentioned. The first is the new Mane Character that the colour received in EO: Princess Twilight Sparkle, Ambassador of Friendship. It didn’t take long for people to realize that Purple’s new keyword in the set, Meticulous, was an excellent ability for Control, and this card’s ability to start making it happen on Turn 2 when paired with Ancient Research as a starting Problem was a great starting point for any Control deck. Plus, Twilight got you extra AT too, a theme that was going to keep building as more sets came out. HM granted the colour Princess Twilight Sparkle, Cover to Cover, an absurd value generator that quickly earned a reputation as an automatic inclusion in virtually any Purple deck. And finally, there is the Purple EO Event suite, backstopped by the card that eventually got banned, Interdimensional Portal.

Portal, by the way, was already doing unfortunate things as soon as EO released, though at the time everyone was blaming the new Pink/White Bulk Biceps. All Tied Up, which made a strong impression on the scene before being quite swiftly banned, offered only a taste of what was to come. In addition to using Portal for its more traditional Control roles, that deck was able to take advantage of a fortuitous interaction with Bulk to create an infinite supply of 2-AT Immediate speed removal.

HM and MT were where the colour really hit its stride though, with HM offering us another touchstone, Zipporwhil and the dynasty of classical Purple/X control that followed it. By the time MT hit and gave us Purple/White multicolour cards for the first time, White was cemented as the dominant secondary colour for Purple, and the combination became a mainstay in tournaments all over the world. The two colours admittedly suffered somewhat from being incredibly slow when paired together, and often failed to win within the allotted time limit even if they would have theoretically pulled ahead if given infinite time. But Purple had established one of its most successful dynasties, and one that would continue right up to the establishment of Core.

However, Purple/White was not the only important multicolour combination that we got from MT. Indeed yet another dynasty was going to be founded, this one utilizing Orange, and blazing a trail for classical Chaos Control, best typified by Grand Pause’s Waking Nightmare, here depicted in its 2016 NA Continentals T8 form. Similar to how archetypal Purple/White control relied on Eff Stop to replay control-oriented Events, so too could these make use of cycled Chaos effects to frustrate an opponent’s attempts to break down its walls. This also maintained its form for quite a while and inspired many successors, including (one assumes) the Chaos Control that New Dawn seems likely to bring us.

Oh, by the way, Tantabuse was somewhere in here too, and included some Purple, but I will get to it in its own due time.

Finally, rounding off the EO Block, there was another entry in the 2016 NA Continentals worth mentioning, Too Spoopy, placing in the T16. This Blue/Purple combination was something of an oddity for its time, playing Purple at an extremely anomalous speed. Even so, its combination of large amounts of frighten synergy and strong Events from both of its colours proved potent.

Some dynasties are built to last.

The Modern Era

The start of Defenders of Equestria, even though it wasn’t actually the beginning of the Core format, is still the point I use as the beginning of the current “Modern Era” of the CCG. And from this point forward, most of the decks being covered here should be relatively familiar to most of the readership. Essentially through this era Purple remained the King (or should I perhaps say Princess) of value, though Ambassador began to fall off somewhat in favour of a resurgent DJ Mane. While DE may be remembered generally as the era of Hot Wings, and of Pink in general, Purple still managed to feature on both sides of the 2017 NA Continental Final.

Bugle’s eventual winning deck Vinyl’s Bag of Tricks was already mentioned in the White article, and will get its full credit in the Pink article. Instead, I want to dedicate this space to discussion of the deck that got 2nd, the one simply and poetically called Butts.

In some senses, as a DJ/Purple control deck, Butts appeared superficially similar to the broad direction that Purple was going in around this time. Indeed, watching the Finals match between these two offered a… qualified form of thrills, but I can personally attest that it was a grand thing to watch. When we dig closer into Butts though, it becomes plain that this is a deck absolutely going its own way. Most obvious is the 53 card total, even now an extreme anomaly, and quite a bit more so in an era where consistency was absolutely everything when playing control. But probably even more important than that is the fact the deck is only playing two colours, and bucked the by-then nearly-universal trend of splashing White for Eff Stop and point acceleration. Instead, eminently_sensible committed to making it work with only two colours, and it’s a testament to his own skill that he was able to make it work so well. Per usual on these important and highly-technical decks, I defer to the author himself, in the link above.

Now, that brings us to the Beyond Block, and, thankfully for me, brings the end of this article into clear sight. Not so quickly though, because no sooner did Seaquestria get started than we saw another dynasty laid down, its echoes and heirs still making themselves felt in the present day. That deck was BRB, here depicted in its 2018 NA Continentals incarnation, reaching second as piloted by George Z. Purple and Pink yet again come together, but in the new Core format and so decidedly changed from their past allegiance. BRB was a cornerstone deck in the realignment of the Control playstyle that was happening in the aftermath of the first Core rotation, and while honest debate persists as to whether it can be correctly referred to as a Control deck, I personally fall on the side that says it is. This simply was what Control had become in the new era, no longer so reliant on Troublemakers but much more keen on removal and taking its points from confronts and faceoffs when they were available. It’s even perhaps somewhat fitting that it passed its torch on to the same three colours that Bugle had won with in 2017, completing a thematic loop as Tempest Pink/White emerged as the Control standard-bearer in a meta that was getting swamped by the resurgent Yellow. Notably, there was a Blue variant as well that managed to reach 2nd Place at the 2019 EFNW tournament.

Finally, rounding out the notable modern decks, we do have one more that could form a dynasty all its own, that being Alicorn Tribal as popularized by i8Pages in an Everfree Northwest T4 from 2019. Certainly it’s an open question for the future to see if that style of deck will see any heirs, but in a world where tri-corns are going to keep being a thing it’s a reasonable guess to make that there exists some potential for it.

New Dawn: Looking Ahead

Purple has enjoyed an amazingly storied history over the course of the development of the game’s meta. Many trends and larger arcs owe their beginning to an idea that was originally expressed with a Purple deck, and in the present day the colour has a well-earned reputation for being very good at the things it does: control, Troublemakers, and value through AT generation. What this means though, is that New Dawn is shaping up to offer an exciting, if uncertain future. Current signs point to some novel directions to the colour, with a firmer eye toward farming, and some legitimate arrows pointing in the direction of aggro. And if there should be any theme that jumps out about the history of Purple, it should be the relative lack of effective aggro. Thus the onset of New Dawn appears to be precisely that where Purple is concerned, and who knows if next year we will even recognize the colour that it has become. Yet even then, I think we can rest assured when we look back on this era, we’ll be able to trace a line of decks owing their inspiration and substance to an important foundation that emerged somewhere in the mists of the new set.

[kingofincoherencymtg]

War of the Spark Draft Weekend

Went to a second event today and could have recorded it right away but instead played Pokemon Go and proceeded to not even after I got back from that. (At least I caught an Azelf)

So I got first again, somehow, even though my level of luck and deck building choices said I shouldn’t.

I went 4 color.

I almost went five but luckily made better choices. Still, I shouldn’t have done as well as I did. It was another proliferate deck and I know how those play so I had that going for me.

First was a 2-0 against a Blue/Red combat tricks deck

Then a 2-0 against Blue/Black control

And finally a 2-1 against White/Blue aggro

Decklist for those interested

//Main 1 Arlinn's Wolf 1 Aven Eternal 1 Battlefield Promotion 1 Bloom Hulk 1 Callous Dismissal 1 Centaur Nurturer 1 Courage in Crisis 1 Eternal Skylord 4 Forest 1 Gleaming Overseer 1 God-Eternal Bontu 1 Grateful Apparition 1 Guild Globe 6 Island 1 Kasmina, Enigmatic Mentor 1 Kiora's Dambreaker 1 Kiora, Behemoth Beckoner 1 Leyline Prowler 1 New Horizons 3 Plains 1 Prismite 1 Relentless Advance 4 Swamp 1 Tamiyo's Epiphany 1 Tithebearer Giant 1 Vraska, Swarm's Eminence 1 Wanderer's Strike

//Sideboard SB: 1 Band Together SB: 1 Snarespinner

[soybeeftacos]

SPAM’S NOT DEAD. SPAM. IS. NOT. DEAD. YES.

I was so happy to see that all-around-great-dude Luke S. won a GNK in Toronto this past weekend, playing Near-Earth Hub of all things. This post is just a link to the deck, you can read his brief write-up over there.

But, basically, I’m yearning for the Netrunner I miss — asset spam, uninteractive decks that can punish a sloppy Runner, decks that do more than just try to advance agendas behind ice. Netrunner was always a game of multiple styles of play to me, and once asset spam comes back as an even marginally effective strategy, I’ll probably jump back into the game.

I’m not sure if NISEI can be thanked for this, to be honest, as they seem to have followed the design philosophy of the herd (e.g., MUSHIN BAD, ASSET SPAM BAD, THINGS THAT DON’T LET ME MATH OUT THE SOLUTION BAD). But, we’ll see how things go once NISEI releases its new cards in March.

Congrats, Luke. Keep the asset spam fires a-burnin’.

[elkchallenges]

Intro (Plus, What is Hatelocke?)

Hi all! elk here!  I’m a longtime player of a number of different strategy games, but my favorites include Magic the Gathering, Hearthstone, Elements the Game, the Godfather board game, and the first focus of this blog, the Pokemon series.

I certainly have my favorite pokemon - just name a grass type starter and odds are it’s on my favorites list - as well as a love for out of the box strategies, wacky cheese, gimmick teams and more - but with the challenges I’m planning to take on, I can’t afford to just play what I like, I’ll have to figure out what’s best.

I recently discovered the world of nuzlocking, and I absolutely adore it.  With careful preparation, I dove in headfirst, and completed the three most recent Nuzlocke Run of the Month competitions, getting a perfect run in UltraSun Champlocke and FireRed Stunted Growth, while earning a third place 4 death + 2 failed run in “Easy Mode” Shield.  Along the way, those who watched my runs probably think of me as a water type specialist, but honestly that’s just the way those particular runs played out rather than an overarching preference.

Learning from some of the best nuzlockers on Youtube and Twitch like PokemonChallenges, Aquablade11, and WolfieVGC, and combining what I’ve learned from them with some of the things I’ve learned from other games and podcasts like Limited Resources and Arena Decklists, I want to give some of the hardest challenges in the world of Pokemon a shot.

First up: Hatelocke!

The rules of Hatelocke are as simple to understand as they are hard to follow.

Base nuzlocke rules:

1. Only catch the first encounter per route.

2. If that encounter is a duplicate (or banned), it doesn’t count as your encounter.

3. Gift pokemon and static pokemon may be freely captured and used.

4.  When a pokemon faints, it’s dead.  That’s it.  Box it and never use it again.

5. HM use is permitted as needed to advance through the game

The hatelocke challenge adds the following rules:

6. Play through all 30 games in the mainline series.

7.  You must take a full party of 6 into the Elite 4.

8. Any mon that enters the Hall of Fame is banned from all remaining runs (and like duplicate mons, doesn’t count as your encounter).  If there are somehow no legal starters left, you use the first mon you catch as your starter and box the starter immediately. (Branched evolutions are treated as separate mons)

And finally, difficulty modifiers:

9.  X items are banned in all instances.

10.  Levels are capped to the highest level of the gym leader at the start of the leader battle, and to the champion’s level for the start of the E4.  

11. Rival battles may not be skipped.

12.  I will be playing on an emulator with trade evolutions patched out.

13.  Unlike other nuzlockes, legendaries are permitted in hatelocke - the unique mons restriction already does a good job of preventing the worst of the legendary abuse.

Those who complete the full gauntlet earn recognition on the r/nuzlocke server as Hatelocke Masochists - which is my goal!  Let’s go!

[dailymtgflavortext]

I don't know if you answer this kind of questions. But, I am trying to build an edh deck for the first time, and I have no idea where to start. The only thing I have right now is the commander (which I want it to be Teneb), since I want the deck to be around reanimation. Do you have any recommendations or tips for an EDH newbie like me?

Oh for sure, I’m happy to give advice!

When I start a new deck, the first thing I do is make a new decklist on Tappedout for it. There, I can organize things a bit better and store a list of “maybes.” Makes it easier to visualize what your deck is gonna be in terms of numbers and statistics too.

Then, I look for cards that go with whatever theme I’m trying to build around. I generally go to edhrec.com first and look up my commander of choice. It spits out a whole page of cards that other people commonly use with that commander. I wouldn’t build the entire deck out of that list, but it is an excellent resource to find stuff that will work well for you!

After that, I’d go to gatherer.wizards.com and use their advanced search to find cards that contain certain tidbits of text in the colour(s) you want. You will get way more results than you need, but if you sift through them you’ll find what you’re looking for eventually.

At this point, you should have a pretty healthy list of cards that may end up in the final version of the deck. Now, you need a framework of other cards to use them with. Land, ramp, card-draw, removal, commander protection, that sort of thing. You generally want around 35-37 land in your deck, depending on how much other ramp you have. That’s what I go by, anyway. I mean, keep in mind you want a way to win games (probably). Don’t fill your entire deck with utility cards! It’s easy to accidentally build a deck that ramps like mad into big draw-spells, then draws nothing but more ramp. Make sure you add some win-cons! I guess your commander is a big Dragon, so commander damage is always a viable option. Voltron it up and go crazy.

Once you have all that down, go through your list of cards and get rid of stuff you don’t need. If you have tons of redundant effects, take some out. If you wanted to add a small subtheme into your deck only to realize it ended up being too small, maybe you should just remove it entirely. Maybe you added some cards you thought would work well, but upon looking at them in a bit more context, you realize they aren’t actually that great. This is the tough part, really.

Once you get it down to 100 cards, you’re done! Then, you can play with your new deck and make more changes as you see how it works. There are always cards that look good in theory, but in practice you just never want to play them. I played my Scarab God deck for the first time today, and I found two cards that I never wanted in my hand. It’s not that they’re bad cards, I just didn’t ever need them, and there were always other things I wanted to do more. So, away they go to be replaced by something else.

I hope my thought process helps you out a bit! I could recommend some good edh “staples” for you if you want, I dunno how specific you want me to be here. Good luck with your deckbuilding!

[commandertheory]

So what is your take on the craziness that is The Locust God?

These are awesome colors and a plague of locusts is a sick reward for doing the broken things that Izzet spellslinger decks were already doing. My Locust God list is basically just fast mana, card draw, and anthems to make my bugs beefier; initial testing has shown that this deck is hella fun. Here’re the cards:

Accelerating the End

Fast mana is super important because the deck doesn’t really get rolling until the God’s on the field. I mostly went for stuff that could get him down two or more turns early, with the notable exceptions of Thought Vessel (because having no max hand size is sweet in a deck with this much card draw) and Thran Dynamo/Gilded Lotus (because they’re so useful in the turns after you cast him).

Coalition Relic

Basalt Monolith

Gilded Lotus

Grim Monolith

Mana Crypt

Mana Vault

Sol Ring

Thought Vessel

Thran Dynamo

Worn Powerstone

Ancient Tomb

Myriad Landscape

Temple of the False God

Summoning the Swarm

I tried to stick to effects that drew at least three cards (anything less didn’t seem like it was worth the card slot), with consideration being paid to the ratio of cards drawn to mana cost.

Brainstorm: In this build, it’s not only efficient card selection; it’s also insanely efficient token generation.

Memory Jar: It’s pretty sweet that you can pay the cost in advance and have this ready to fire off as soon as you drop the Locust God.

Teferi’s Puzzle Box

Mindmoil

Whirlpool Rider

Whirlpool Warrior

Whirlpool Drake

Consecrated Sphinx

Oath of Jace

Rhystic Study

Cephalid Coliseum

Blue Sun’s Zenith

Careful Consideration

Fateful Showdown

Pull from Tomorrow

Read the Runes

Stroke of Genius

Thirst for Knowledge

Rush of Knowledge

Chandra, Flamecaller

Jace, the Mind Sculptor

Braingeyser

Cathartic Reunion

Collective Defiance

Compulsive Research

Dream Cache

Faithless Looting

Mind Spring

Recurring Insight

Reforge the Soul

Time Reversal

Time Spiral

Wheel of Fortune

Windfall

Winds of Change

The Plague

There’s a lot of filthy stuff you can do with a bunch of locusts.

Skullclamp: Sac one token, draw two, make two more tokens, etc.

Ashnod’s Altar: Goes infinite with Skullclamp, but it’s not bad on its own, either. Sac all your tokens for mana, spend that mana to cast a “draw X cards” variant to get twice as many tokens as you started with.

Bident of Thassa/Coastal Piracy: Draw a million cards and double your tokens every turn.

Keep Watch: Draw a million cards and double your tokens once.

Coat of Arms/Shared Animosity: Locust power^2.

Purphoros, God of the Forge: Another extremely effective force multiplier.

Obelisk of Urd

Throne of the God-Pharaoh: Good way to help your locusts scale up to the number of opponents.

Gravitational Shift: Not only does it triple your locusts’ power, but it also protects you against all the dirtwalkers cowering beneath your swarm.

Mana Echoes: FYI: each token counts itself when it triggers Mana Echoes; if X locusts enter the battlefield at once, you get X^2 mana.

Battle Hymn: Generate mana off your locusts.

Opposition: If you’re not yet ready to kill your opponents, you can just lock down their mana and creatures.

Miscellaneous

Alhammarret’s Archive

Mizzix’s Mastery: Gives you another use of your draw spells.

Psychosis Crawler: If you were already planning on drawing tons of cards…

Wrapping Up

You can take a look at the full decklist here. Please let me know if there are any important cards you think I’m missing, as the deck is very much a work in progress. Thanks for reading!

[beatsandskies]

nuANCED Review: Mercenaries

So it has been a while since I’ve done one of these posts, and I had decided that when I restarted I was going to focus on the remaining Tempest and Saga block decks. I’ve noticed while doing my compendium posts that the Masques and Nemesis decks definitely have a change of focus compared to the earlier ones. It’s not just that a sideboard hasn’t been listed, but they feel like they are purposely…

[fetalai]

“He’s gone bananas with these remotes.” - Me, after Sam Suied scored a Successful Field Test that let him install seven new cards all at once. [Scenes from Netrunner’s 2017 North American Championship at Gen Con]

Sam pulled off the sickest play in the lead-up to scoring SFT -- his opponent was keeping great control of the board up until this point in the Losers Finals match-up, but then he neglected to trash an Advanced Assembly Lines. Before the end of the runner’s turn, Sam used a Project Vitruvius token to retrieve a Clone Suffrage Movement from Archives, then installed it with AAL. Rezzing CSM, he returned a Friends in High Places to his hand at the start of his own turn, and installed a mix of threats (including a Blacklist to stop Bloo Moose from firing) that the opponent had to spend time dealing with. This setup allowed Sam to score SFT next turn and flood the board with Donkey Kongs.

Congrats to Sam, who is having a stellar 2017. After coming in second at regional after regional for several years, he took down TWO regionals this year, and then won the North American Championship! He also tried to steal my deckbox at Gen Con, but that’s okay because I’ve been stealing his runner decklists (shoutouts to Headlock Reina) for years.

[beatsandskies]

Theme Deck Review Compendium: Urza’s Destiny “Assassin”

Another deck filed in the “did I have this or did a mate?” category. Assassin A mono black deck which pairs aggressive creatures with disruptive spells. I do have it now though. Official product information webpage (archived) Screenshot circa 2013 “Assassin” has a simple goal: Kill, kill, kill. With swarms of small black creatures and plenty of ways to eliminate the opposition, this deck is…

[beatsandskies]

nuANCED review: The Plague

I’ll level with you: bit disappointed with this one. Mostly due to high expectations. The basic deck was more or less flawless. At least when considered under the constraints of a Theme deck: the rarity restrictions, generally have 3-ofs at most rather than playsets, accessibility for newer players, the need to showcase a new set and so on. It could be argued that The Plague bends, if not flat…

[beatsandskies]

Advanced Thoughts: Flames of Rath

Shock. Shock by Randy Gallegos I’ve been trying to work out what was happening with this deck – both the basic and the advanced versions – for a while. It doesn’t look like what you expect a Tempest era red deck to look. Where are the Jackal Pups? Why does the powered up version drop the Mogg Fanatics? Obviously it can’t include Shock as that was first printed in the next set: Stronghold. But I…