MaximumC
06-03-2016, 03:09 PM
So, I've been meaning to write little articles about my casual decks. I've got a 4,000 count box full of different casual decks that I bust out to play with my kids, and it might make some amusing reading.
With each casual deck, the only requirements for deck construction are 60 cards, no sideboard, and I can only use stuff from the big ol' box of cards that is not already set aside for play in Legacy or Vintage. That cuts out a lot of powerful and expensive cards, but not all of them.
I thought I'd test out the idea here, and see if you folks find the articles fun or interesting or anything, So, let me know.
http://media.wizards.com/images/magic/daily/mm/2014/mm_wk13_293_cardart_urzascontactlenses.jpg
Urza’s Contact Lenses is a very special Magic card. Yes, I know it’s from an un-set, but since I don’t expect the DCI to be knocking on the door when I’m playing 60-card casual with my son, let’s not sweat the technicalities. Just like contact lenses in the real world, Urza’s Contact Lenses start and stop working when you clap your hands. Functionally, they can tap or untap as many times as you want. This is, of course, horribly abusive.
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Handlers/Image.ashx?multiverseid=9770&type=card
If you don't tell your kids what the silver board means, they'll never know.
There are precious few cards that really and fully take advantage of how abusive this is, however. Sure, you could run some complicated combo involving animating the artifact and giving it the ability to tap for mana, but there are limits to how much jank we’re going for here. Luckily, there are at least two cards that form 2-card instant win combos with Lenses, and they’re not totally useless on their own. (One of them is not Relic Bind because of Power Level Eratta that no one seems to care about ever fixing; and don't give me that garbage about it being printed with new text, they've oscilated on Animate Dead so many times it makes your head spin!)
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Handlers/Image.ashx?multiverseid=83912&type=card
One of only two cards to explicitly allow you to tap your own enchantments that I know of!
Enter Flame Fusillade. This little number used to allow you to win by paying 3R with a Time Vault in play, before it was fixed so that now you can win by paying 2 in the same situation. Specifically, and among other ambiguities,Time Vault has always been a little ambiguous about whether you get a choice to untap it when you would start a turn, or whether you can pay “Skip a turn” to untap it whenever you want. It used have the latter Oracle text, meaning that you could dump any number of extra future turns into Vault to keep untapping it. With Fullisade active, you now could untap it an arbitrarily large number of times to throw an arbitrarily large number of flaming arrows at your opponent from the future. I feel like there is a Magic novel in there somewhere waiting to be written...
Anyway, Time Vault no longer does that so it’s out of consideration. Absent some kind of other multi-card combo, probably involving Illusionist’s Bracers or Staff of Domination, only Urza’s Contact Lenses really lets you go bonkers with Fusillade. Admittedly, tossing a million flaming arrows out of a contact lens case is less cool than tossing them from the future, but the effect is the same: an arbitrarily crispy charred corpse.
So, the core of the deck is going to be the Fusillade + Contact Lens combo. The next question is how we’re going to support it. I usually figure you can do this in one of three ways. First, you can run tutors and just try to find them. This avenue has some merit here, where Fusillade is an overpriced Grapeshot on its own, and Contact Lens is laughably bad. Running lots of tutors allows you to only run one or two of these cards and get them when you need ‘em.
Second, you could run lots of card draw and dig, and hope to pull them off the top. This also has merit, since dig has the advantage of pushing you through your deck to find whatever you need - answer or combo - and typically is cheaper and faster than tutor effects. Look at Legacy decks that run 8x Preordain + Brainstorm to see this power. If we do this, though, we’re gonna want to run probably the full playsets of our combo pieces. Why? We get to shuffle them away if we don’t like them, and we want to maximize the chances of finding em quickly.
Third, you could run other cards which also synergize with the combo pieces to try and make them not-awful if you draw them alone. In this case, that means we’d like to find cards that get silly in conjunction with Contact Lenses or that untap repeatedly for Fusillade.
I like to try and hit two categories if I can, not just one. In this case, I think you can safely cover all three approaches using some other pet cards of mine: Puresight Merrow and Wake Thrasher. Merrow is a criminally underutilized 2/2 for 2 with an ability to untap itself for U/W. When it does, you get to check your top card and exile it if you want. If you give Merrow the ability to tap for mana using something like Karametra’s Favor, Paradise Mantle, or whatever, then you can exile as many cards from the top as you like. This gives you a possible way to change Fusillade into a Fireball that costs X3R, which is better than a kick in the crotch at least, and also gives you a way to tutor for your combo pieces.
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Handlers/Image.ashx?multiverseid=158745&type=card
Welcome to a card that has been aching to be broken open since Lorwyn block.
Remember, I said there were TWO cards that formed instant-win combos with Contacts! Wake Thrasher a blue Tarmagoyf... exactly half of the time. It gets +1/+1 until end of turn each time a permanent you control untaps. That means he’s gonna be a 5/5 or better on your turn pretty reliably, but on your opponent’s turn he will die to Prodigal Sorcerer. With Contact Lenses, of course, he asks the opponent if he or she has a chump blocker and then politely explodes them if he or she does not. Even better, Wake Thrasher does the same dance with a Puresight Merrow that can tap for mana! The synergy is real!
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Handlers/Image.ashx?multiverseid=157405&type=card
"Rawr, I'm a beast of a card and I've done nothing ever!"
So, next, if we have Puresight Merrow, we need to enable shenanigans by using some card that gives it the ability to tap for blue or white mana. There’s several good options, the best of them being Paradise Mantle, Utopia Vow, and Karametra’s Favor. Mantle is an equipment, so it sticks around if the creature dies. It’s also dirt cheap, at 0 to cast and 1 to activate. Utopia Vow doubles as creature removal in a pinch. Karamaetra’s Favor replaces itself, and if you stick it on a Puresight, it’s actually Demonic Tutor. Why? Because the enchantment attaches before the “Draw a card” ability gets to resolve, meaning Puresight can activate an arbitrarily large number of times with that ability on the stack. You can dig to what you want, then let the ability resolve, drawing it. You can do hilarious things with Skill Borrower or Laboratory Maniac from here, but that takes us a bit afield from where the deck is going.
Ultimately, I think only Paradise Mantle makes the cut here. The other options put us into Green, which by itself is not a huge problem, but sticking with U/R lets us take advantage of the “Dig” school of finding your combo piece. How? Let’s dip into another card that combos with Mantle AND Merrow AND (sometimes) Fusillade: Hardcore Weird! Er, Blistercoil Weird! If we have a Mantle on the Weird, we can chain as many 1-casting cost dig spells as we can draw. And, each time we do it, the Weird and any Thrashers around get bigger!
We need to consider the dig package. Since I have some spare Treasure Cruises laying around, I want 1 casting cost dig spells that dig deep (to find the combo) and also fuel my yard for Cruise. U/R gives us the best spells for this: Careful Study and Faithless Looting. 12 card draw package yes please!
Finally, I think a little countermagic is in order. Contact Lenses let us peek at our opponent’s hand. If we find a removal spell lurking there that could spoil our combo, best to dig for a counterspell before trying to go off.
TAP DANCER 1.0
Creatures (12)
4 Blistercoil Weird
4 Puresight Merrow
4 Wake Thrasher
Artifacts (8)
4 Paradise Mantle
4 Urza’s Contact Lenses
Spells (16)
4 Flame Fusillade
4 Careful Study
4 Faithless Looting
4 Treasure Cruise
Disruption (3)
3 Mana Leak
Lands (21)
4 Evolving Wilds
4 Scalding Tarn
6 Island
5 Mountain
I've only done a few games and a single full match with this list so far, but it works more or less as you'd expect. If it gets gas, it can churn through itself very fast and assemble the combo promptly by turn 3. However, if it doesn't get anywhere with its initial dig spells, things can stall out pretty badly. As I play more matches, I'll update this thread with other refinements.
The absolute best part about this deck is actually winning with Contacts. When you do, you get to stand up and do a little castanet dance, or at least give yourself a big round of applause as you repeatedly activate the Contacts an arbitrarily large number of times. Personally. I like to clap out the beat to "I Want to Live in America" from West Side Story, but you can clap anything you want.
With each casual deck, the only requirements for deck construction are 60 cards, no sideboard, and I can only use stuff from the big ol' box of cards that is not already set aside for play in Legacy or Vintage. That cuts out a lot of powerful and expensive cards, but not all of them.
I thought I'd test out the idea here, and see if you folks find the articles fun or interesting or anything, So, let me know.
http://media.wizards.com/images/magic/daily/mm/2014/mm_wk13_293_cardart_urzascontactlenses.jpg
Urza’s Contact Lenses is a very special Magic card. Yes, I know it’s from an un-set, but since I don’t expect the DCI to be knocking on the door when I’m playing 60-card casual with my son, let’s not sweat the technicalities. Just like contact lenses in the real world, Urza’s Contact Lenses start and stop working when you clap your hands. Functionally, they can tap or untap as many times as you want. This is, of course, horribly abusive.
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Handlers/Image.ashx?multiverseid=9770&type=card
If you don't tell your kids what the silver board means, they'll never know.
There are precious few cards that really and fully take advantage of how abusive this is, however. Sure, you could run some complicated combo involving animating the artifact and giving it the ability to tap for mana, but there are limits to how much jank we’re going for here. Luckily, there are at least two cards that form 2-card instant win combos with Lenses, and they’re not totally useless on their own. (One of them is not Relic Bind because of Power Level Eratta that no one seems to care about ever fixing; and don't give me that garbage about it being printed with new text, they've oscilated on Animate Dead so many times it makes your head spin!)
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Handlers/Image.ashx?multiverseid=83912&type=card
One of only two cards to explicitly allow you to tap your own enchantments that I know of!
Enter Flame Fusillade. This little number used to allow you to win by paying 3R with a Time Vault in play, before it was fixed so that now you can win by paying 2 in the same situation. Specifically, and among other ambiguities,Time Vault has always been a little ambiguous about whether you get a choice to untap it when you would start a turn, or whether you can pay “Skip a turn” to untap it whenever you want. It used have the latter Oracle text, meaning that you could dump any number of extra future turns into Vault to keep untapping it. With Fullisade active, you now could untap it an arbitrarily large number of times to throw an arbitrarily large number of flaming arrows at your opponent from the future. I feel like there is a Magic novel in there somewhere waiting to be written...
Anyway, Time Vault no longer does that so it’s out of consideration. Absent some kind of other multi-card combo, probably involving Illusionist’s Bracers or Staff of Domination, only Urza’s Contact Lenses really lets you go bonkers with Fusillade. Admittedly, tossing a million flaming arrows out of a contact lens case is less cool than tossing them from the future, but the effect is the same: an arbitrarily crispy charred corpse.
So, the core of the deck is going to be the Fusillade + Contact Lens combo. The next question is how we’re going to support it. I usually figure you can do this in one of three ways. First, you can run tutors and just try to find them. This avenue has some merit here, where Fusillade is an overpriced Grapeshot on its own, and Contact Lens is laughably bad. Running lots of tutors allows you to only run one or two of these cards and get them when you need ‘em.
Second, you could run lots of card draw and dig, and hope to pull them off the top. This also has merit, since dig has the advantage of pushing you through your deck to find whatever you need - answer or combo - and typically is cheaper and faster than tutor effects. Look at Legacy decks that run 8x Preordain + Brainstorm to see this power. If we do this, though, we’re gonna want to run probably the full playsets of our combo pieces. Why? We get to shuffle them away if we don’t like them, and we want to maximize the chances of finding em quickly.
Third, you could run other cards which also synergize with the combo pieces to try and make them not-awful if you draw them alone. In this case, that means we’d like to find cards that get silly in conjunction with Contact Lenses or that untap repeatedly for Fusillade.
I like to try and hit two categories if I can, not just one. In this case, I think you can safely cover all three approaches using some other pet cards of mine: Puresight Merrow and Wake Thrasher. Merrow is a criminally underutilized 2/2 for 2 with an ability to untap itself for U/W. When it does, you get to check your top card and exile it if you want. If you give Merrow the ability to tap for mana using something like Karametra’s Favor, Paradise Mantle, or whatever, then you can exile as many cards from the top as you like. This gives you a possible way to change Fusillade into a Fireball that costs X3R, which is better than a kick in the crotch at least, and also gives you a way to tutor for your combo pieces.
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Handlers/Image.ashx?multiverseid=158745&type=card
Welcome to a card that has been aching to be broken open since Lorwyn block.
Remember, I said there were TWO cards that formed instant-win combos with Contacts! Wake Thrasher a blue Tarmagoyf... exactly half of the time. It gets +1/+1 until end of turn each time a permanent you control untaps. That means he’s gonna be a 5/5 or better on your turn pretty reliably, but on your opponent’s turn he will die to Prodigal Sorcerer. With Contact Lenses, of course, he asks the opponent if he or she has a chump blocker and then politely explodes them if he or she does not. Even better, Wake Thrasher does the same dance with a Puresight Merrow that can tap for mana! The synergy is real!
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Handlers/Image.ashx?multiverseid=157405&type=card
"Rawr, I'm a beast of a card and I've done nothing ever!"
So, next, if we have Puresight Merrow, we need to enable shenanigans by using some card that gives it the ability to tap for blue or white mana. There’s several good options, the best of them being Paradise Mantle, Utopia Vow, and Karametra’s Favor. Mantle is an equipment, so it sticks around if the creature dies. It’s also dirt cheap, at 0 to cast and 1 to activate. Utopia Vow doubles as creature removal in a pinch. Karamaetra’s Favor replaces itself, and if you stick it on a Puresight, it’s actually Demonic Tutor. Why? Because the enchantment attaches before the “Draw a card” ability gets to resolve, meaning Puresight can activate an arbitrarily large number of times with that ability on the stack. You can dig to what you want, then let the ability resolve, drawing it. You can do hilarious things with Skill Borrower or Laboratory Maniac from here, but that takes us a bit afield from where the deck is going.
Ultimately, I think only Paradise Mantle makes the cut here. The other options put us into Green, which by itself is not a huge problem, but sticking with U/R lets us take advantage of the “Dig” school of finding your combo piece. How? Let’s dip into another card that combos with Mantle AND Merrow AND (sometimes) Fusillade: Hardcore Weird! Er, Blistercoil Weird! If we have a Mantle on the Weird, we can chain as many 1-casting cost dig spells as we can draw. And, each time we do it, the Weird and any Thrashers around get bigger!
We need to consider the dig package. Since I have some spare Treasure Cruises laying around, I want 1 casting cost dig spells that dig deep (to find the combo) and also fuel my yard for Cruise. U/R gives us the best spells for this: Careful Study and Faithless Looting. 12 card draw package yes please!
Finally, I think a little countermagic is in order. Contact Lenses let us peek at our opponent’s hand. If we find a removal spell lurking there that could spoil our combo, best to dig for a counterspell before trying to go off.
TAP DANCER 1.0
Creatures (12)
4 Blistercoil Weird
4 Puresight Merrow
4 Wake Thrasher
Artifacts (8)
4 Paradise Mantle
4 Urza’s Contact Lenses
Spells (16)
4 Flame Fusillade
4 Careful Study
4 Faithless Looting
4 Treasure Cruise
Disruption (3)
3 Mana Leak
Lands (21)
4 Evolving Wilds
4 Scalding Tarn
6 Island
5 Mountain
I've only done a few games and a single full match with this list so far, but it works more or less as you'd expect. If it gets gas, it can churn through itself very fast and assemble the combo promptly by turn 3. However, if it doesn't get anywhere with its initial dig spells, things can stall out pretty badly. As I play more matches, I'll update this thread with other refinements.
The absolute best part about this deck is actually winning with Contacts. When you do, you get to stand up and do a little castanet dance, or at least give yourself a big round of applause as you repeatedly activate the Contacts an arbitrarily large number of times. Personally. I like to clap out the beat to "I Want to Live in America" from West Side Story, but you can clap anything you want.