The Weekly Shift Sift: Exiting The Spiral

Well, we have just a few weeks to go before Planar Chaos wipes the field as we know it, changing Sealed Deck builds everywhere. It’s hard to get people to read you when there’s that much change in the air, but I know I could get you in here early.

‘Cause I have have a preview card up at MagicTheGathering.com tomorrow.

I could spoil it today. Sure, Wizards would fire me, but I bet everyone would come thundering into my article for this day, just to read up on what the new and amazing card I’m revealing. It would be cool, except that I don’t have the art, so hey. I won’t do that.

Instead? I’ll sigh a little tear right now. For this is the last Time Spiral-only deck I’ll be analyzing.

Boo!

Sealed Deck Pool

Ferrett Steinmetz

Test deck on 01-14-2007

Time Spiral Limited

Creatures (43)

Lands (4)

Spells (26)

White
Solid Playables: Amrou Seekers, Cloudchaser Kestrel, D’Avenant Healer, Pentarch Ward, Tivadar of Thorn

A weak, weak White. I’ve moved the Ivory Giant down off the solid playables list because it’s very good – but only if you have a lot of White to back it, which we don’t. When that doesn’t happen, I wind up watching my own army turn sideways, but only to let the other guy through to my face.

Not good.

On the “underrated” side, we have D’Avenant Healer, which is fairly powerful once you get it active – which isn’t a given, since the double-White makes it difficult to cast it on turn 3 when you really want it. But the ability to both heal and ping attacking and blocking creatures changes combat quite nicely in your favor. I wouldn’t go nuts with it, but I’ll almost always throw it in if I’m in White in any significant way at all.

Aside from that, we’re at dreck. There are no Castle Raptors here to launch an offense, no Momentary Blinks to mount a defense, no Temporal Isolations to blunt our opponents’ swords. What we have here then is a scant handful of evasion creatures and some protection, and that’s not nearly enough for me.

Blue
Solid Playables: Cancel, Errant Ephemeron, Giant Oyster, Sage of Epityr, Slipstream Serpent, Snapback, Viscerid Deepwalker

This is solid Blue, with some great tricks (Cancel, Snapback) and some of the marquee critters (Ephemeron, Slipstream Serpent). But there’s not enough of it for me to go, “Wow, I gotta get me some of this.” Ephemeron’s a thing of beauty, as it usually is, but unless a color is exceptionally strong on the tricks – which this isn’t – then I want a lot of good guys to back me up.

This does not have an abundance of good guys, nor is it trick-heavy, so it’s a possibility but not a certainty.

Two notes on picks here: Sage of Epityr is one of those cards that’s been moving up as I’ve played it. I wouldn’t have normally run it, but Time Spiral with all of its bombs and weird colors seems to benefit from a quick deck restacking more than other formats. No, I don’t know why. So now I’ll run this as an auto if I’m in heavy Blue.

The Giant Oyster, on the other hand, is slow removal. Oh, you laugh, but when your nice little wall starts taking out your opponents’ utility 1/1s repeatedly, you’ll see that it works. I wouldn’t run it in Draft – ever – but in the slower Sealed format, it’s quite an amusing combo of a tapdown and removal. Just be very careful about how you untap it, since it’s all too easy to forget to untap it once the creature it’s clamping down on has died.

Black
Solid Playables: Corpulent Corpse, Dark Withering, Deathspore Thallid, Phthisis, Pit Keeper, Skulking Knight, Trespasser il-Vec

Now, I like Black. I know that I like Black just a little too much for my own good, so whenever I see a Black card pool I like, I look again. But in this case, we have a solid pool of Black with two removal spells and some of Black’s better creatures, so this looks pretty good to me.

Of course, Black’s solid playables aren’t always great; if I can’t get a Corpulent Corpse on turn 1, it arrives annoyingly late. And Phthisis can often be a house, but it can also stay trapped in your hand. (On the plus side, if you have a slow hand, dropping a suspended Phthisis will often cause your opponent to match your speed while you both build up arms.) And Skulking Knight dies way too often.

Black’s risky. Either you get the cards at the right time, or they’re not particularly good. (I’m looking at you, outrageously-expensive-or-ridiculously-cheap Dark Withering.) But I think we have enough here to scrape it together.

I should note that Evil Eye of Urborg is a good card. I’ve seen it used well. However, I’m reasonably sure that despite its goodness, I’m too dumb to know when to drop it and when to hold it, so I’m just gonna stay out of that argument.

Red
Solid Playables: Coal Stoker, Empty the Warrens, Grapeshot, Rift Bolt

Wow. It’s as if Red tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Hey, would you like a solid package of storm enablers?” So indeed, given that they’re all a single mana, this looks like a strong splash color.

The rest? It’s okay. Bogardan Rager is expensive but can often take down things that have to go right then, and a few of the other cards – Basalt Gargoyle, Flowstone Channeler – are all right. Aside from that, this Red has nothing to pull me in beyond this four-card splash.

Green
Solid Playables: Ashcoat Bear, Durkwood Baloth. Herd Gnarr, Phantom Wurm, Savage Thallid, Search for Tomorrow, Thallid Germinator, Thallid Shell-Dweller, Thrill of the Hunt, Tromp the Domains

Again, it’s like the cards are speaking to us. I hear the gentle breeze of a Tromp the Domains whispering in my ear: “I’m powerful when I have a lot of creatures and a lot of lands. And here are several good 1/1 token generators to create a lot of creatures. And here’s a Search for Tomorrow to get you lands. And if that’s not enough, why not a Herd Gnarr to help out?”

That’s solid Green. When you look at the synergy between, say, Empty the Warrens and Herd Gnarr, or between Grapeshot and the suspend spells here, it looks like a nice little deck just between Red and Green alone.

Gold, Artifacts, Lands
Solid Playables: Gemstone Mine, Lotus Bloom, Mystic Enforcer, Prismatic Lens, Sol’Kanar the Swamp King, Terramorphic Expanse, Urza’s Factory

Well. Given the abundance of mana-fixing here, the only question is “Three colors or four?”

I weighed the options here and I know that I definitely want Green and Red – the synergy is just too strong to ignore. Green is strong enough to stand on its own, but the Red isn’t, so either Blue or Black is going to have to fill in as the secondary main color.

Blue’s good, don’t get me wrong – but remember what I said about creatures? We don’t have much here. Whereas Black has roughly the same number of combat tricks, but some decent guys to help carry the load. So after some serious thought devoted to this, I went with G/B/r.

But can I go further? I mean, if I wanna get greedy, I can go G/B/r/w and get not only the back end of Thrill of the Hunt, but the very fabulous Mystic Enforcer (and possibly Harmonic Sliver to side in if necessary, since we have no enchantment removal to speak of in G/B/r). Or I can note that I can splash effortlessly and throw in Sol’Kanar, figuring that a Dreadship Reef, a Prismatic Lens, or a Gemstone Mine will be enough to pay the Blue mana.

Or do we go for all five colors? Oh, man, that never works for me. I gotta stick to four.

In the end, I decided that the whole Thrill of the Hunt thing would work against the threshold that made Mystic Enforcer so magically delicious. I’d be emptying my graveyard on the one hand and trying to fill it with the other, and plus Pit Keeper didn’t help, so given a choice between a 5/5 always swampwalker and a 6/6 sometimes flier, I went with the flier.

I did have some problems cutting, though. I couldn’t tell whether Lotus Bloom was worth it, and I had enough mana-fixing in my deck, so I left that on the sidelines. It might have been nice with storm, but my feeling is that I’d probably watch it clog my RFG zone since I had enough suspend spells already. Likewise, even though Thrill is useful without the flashback, I had enough evasion and kill that I wasn’t worried about it.

I also wanted the Phantom Wurm in the deck, since it’s awesome to stall the ground against G/R decks, but it was too pricey and my mana curve was top-heavy to begin with. Likewise, I’ve discussed the exclusion of Evil Eye, and I’ll stand by it here; in a deck that wants to swarm with Tromp the Domains, I’m not sure that a guy who creates a one-man attack field is the way to go.

Here’s what I went with:

6 Forest
1 Gemstone Mine
3 Mountain
1 Sol’kanar the Swamp King
5 Swamp
1 Ashcoat Bear
1 Coal Stoker
1 Corpulent Corpse
1 Dark Withering
1 Deathspore Thallid
1 Dreadship Reef
1 Durkwood Baloth
1 Durkwood Tracker
1 Empty the Warrens
1 Faceless Devourer
1 Grapeshot
1 Herd Gnarr
1 Mindstab
1 Phthisis
1 Pit Keeper
1 Prismatic Lens
1 Rift Bolt
1 Savage Thallid
1 Search for Tomorrow
1 Skulking Knight
1 Terramorphic Expanse
1 Thallid Germinator
1 Thallid Shell-Dweller
1 Trespasser il-Vec
1 Tromp the Domains

But how’d it do? Well, I faced three solid opponents who really knew what they were doing, and two guys who seemed so clueless that I felt bad about facing them. Needless to say, my only loss was to one of the clueless guys.

This deck worked surprisingly well despite the surfeit of mulligans that come when you’re running this many colors. I mulliganed to five twice and won, so hey. Good on that. It came at people from a lot of angles; they had to kill my good creatures, which was cool, but all the while I was looking to ramp into a gigantic Empty the Warrens followed by a Tromp, which I got off twice.

Even nicer? The sixth-turn kill where I had fourth-turn Herd Gnarr, fifth-turn suspend Rift Bolt, sixth-turn Bolt my opponent to the head, cast Ashcoat Bears, cast Empty the Warrens, swing across an empty field with a gigantic Herd Gnarr. That was fun.

Not so fun? Mulliganing to four in the key game against one of the not-so-goods – the kind of guy who’s not flat-out terrible in that way that only MODO can bring you (the other bad opponent mana-burned three times), but you can tell when he Rift Bolts your Ashcoat Bears rather than taking two points the next turn that he really doesn’t know which targets to pick.

The games, surprisingly, went very long at times, since I had enough removal to match my opponent’s B/R destroy-heavy decks, so I wound up grinding out wins on turn 18 more than once. That was odd, since I thought this was a quick deck, but generally it was a long slow crawl to a Phthisis to take down my opponent (Greater Gargadon is not a bonus when the ‘This comes to town), or ramping into some sort of 1/1-fuelled swarm.

But, hey, you know, I won. That’s cool. I’m down widdit.

Next week? Reader feedback. Woo hoo!

The Weekly Plug Bug:
Since I was gone last week, you may have missed what’s been happening in my webcomic Home on the Strange. Well, Izzy and Tanner have been fighting because Izzy – who does not want to admit that she is dating Tanner – discovered that Tanner is still talking to his evil ex-girlfriend. So when sleazy GM Seth calls up and invites Izzy back to his campaign, she’s more than willing to go. But what will she discover at the Moriante house?

Signing off,
The Ferrett
TheFerrett@StarCityGames.com
The Here Edits This Site Here Guy