This is not an article about developing a hot new deck, or a good deck, or even a reasonable facsimile of a decent deck. If you are here looking for hot tips on how to play Mind’s Desire in Standard, I urge you to turn around and leave this damned place before you too are sucked in by its subtle charm.
Mind’s Desire is not a deck, it’s a twisted demon; a parasite that infects your brain and sucks all the gooey morsels out, leaving you nothing more than a haunted shell of a man. This is the tale of a downward spiral in the tainted, aberrant madness of something far more sinister than Magic or playing solitaire.
It is, indeed, a tale of Ten Thousand Goldfish! Mad, insane Goldfish.
Actually, at some stage I will give you a pretty good idea where Mind’s Desire sits in regards to strength and speed in Standard… but mostly I’ll just rant and rave like a lunatic. Saddle up!
The First Idea is Always the Worst Idea
In fact, that’s usually untrue in human thinking, but we’ll take on this deck-building experiment more in line with the concept of biological evolution. We start with a pile of sixty cards vaguely resembling a deck that contains within it a bizarre combo that is somehow supposed to enable Mind’s Desire.
No really, I’m serious here.
This is a combo engine I built that produces the perfect situation to Mind’s Desire into a bajillion cards and Tendrils of Agony your opponent out of the game. Or, conversely, to waste a lot of time. Your pick.
4 Second Sunrise
4 Read the Runes
3 Mind’s Desire
2 Tendrils of Agony
4 Cathodion
3 Chromatic Sphere
4 Extraplanar Lens
4 Gilded Lotus
4 Talisman of Progress
4 Talisman of Dominance
4 Solemn Simulacrum
3 Aether Spellbomb
4 Flooded Strand
1 Island
12 Plains
The engine, in case you don’t know or are happily uninformed, is combining Extraplanar Lens with Read the Runes and Second Sunrise. Ideally, you cast Read the Runes with about nine mana, leaving three floating. You sacrifice all your land (usually about five in this example) and then bring it all back with Second Sunrise. The result is two spells cast”for free” and then however much land being untapped and ready for whatever you just drew. Oh and you’re five cards up. Isn’t that swell?
The combo is accelerated by just about every other card in the deck. Cathodion is quite happy to be sacrificed to Read the Runes for additional mana, Solemn Simulacrum nets you a card while fixing your mana, so forth and so on. Make no mistake, it’s a really bad deck. On average, it goes off on turn… (oh I don’t know) ten or so? This is including the games where it draws none of it’s combo engine, but all it’s mana and, and resembles a souped-up V8 sitting in a mudhole.
Yes, I mentioned Mudhole intentionally. No offense to the originator of the engine (who has nothing to do with this woeful sin against nature), but this version of the deck was bad. Mudhole bad.
Its problems were numerous, but rather than give you a blow-by-blow that would stretch across two pages, and resemble a boxer beating the crud out of a defenseless bag of potatoes, lets move onto the next stage of the deck.
4 Chromatic Sphere
3 Tendrils of Agony
4 Talisman of Unity
4 Talisman of Dominance
4 Second Sunrise
4 Read the Runes
3 Solemn Simulacrum
4 Explosive Vegetation
3 Sylvan Scrying
4 Gilded Lotus
4 Mind’s Desire
4 Cloudpost
4 Temple of the False God
2 Flooded Strand
2 Windswept Heath
5 Plains
1 Forest
1 Island
It’s times like this I feel it’s unfortunate I’m not a drinking man. Since I’m only drunk about once every lunar cycle, I probably built this deck while I was sober. Thus, I can’t explain the deck away, like you did, that time you decided using power tools to make a deck box was a good idea. Not”you” in the figurative sense. Just you. You know, that guy? Over there. Yeah, you.
Here we have a deck which attempts to shed the highly restrictive Extraplanar Lens engine, and instead work with Cloudposts and Temples of the False God. Oh, how excellent. We’ve moved from using all Plains and having our mana fixed by Talismans, to relying on Sylvan Scrying. Of which, there are only three copies in the deck. Brilliant.
Oddly enough, this version actually does tend to go off faster than the previous one. It’s aided by two factors. First, instead of using awful jank like Cathodion, you cast useful land-search elements like Explosive Vegetation (which often gets powered out on turn 3), and then follow it up with a Temple on turn 4. That’s a lot of mana in a hurry! Plus, since you’re thinning your deck by searching out your land, you’re not drawing much of it. Drawing your land is almost as useful as drawing Tendrils of Agony, which is the single most useless card in the deck… until you want to win, of course. Then it’s golden.
Oh, and if you haven’t noticed yet, fetchlands have decent synergy with Second Sunrise – they return to play to fetch out another land for you! How nice! Unfortunately, Cloudpost comes into play tapped, which means, alas, it is not a combo with Second Sunrise.
That is actually revision six of the deck, but you’ve probably gotten all you’re going to want from this particularly version. The combo suffers because it is extremely weak against countermagic. Your goal is to Read the Runes and sacrifice all your lands, then Second Sunrise them all back into play. Guess what happens if your opponent counters the Second Sunrise? You scoop like an Affinity player to a resolved Akroma’s Vengeance, that’s what.
If you want to work on that variant of the deck, feel free. I recommend the usage of Mindslaver to either draw a counter, or to Mana Short them. That said, onto the next version of the deck.
An Affinity for Madness
You may have noticed that many Affinity decks contain Storm cards. Affinity decks seem to have a natural enthusiasm for being coupled with Storm cards like Reaping the Graves, Temporal Fissure, or Wing Shards. (No wait… the deck hates when you Wing Shards. Oops.) This leads us to a natural point: Mind’s Desire is a storm card!
So it must be good in Affinity!
No, I was not drunk. This was my actual (edited) line of thought. I removed the swearing and the”maybe with Affinity I’ll go off before turn 7″ remarks which should have at least three curse words inserted randomly. Explained in layman’s terms, a Combo deck usually lacks the necessary tools to defend itself against an opponent’s wrath. Going off rapidly is the deck’s strong point in battle. You can view the strength of your combo deck with the following chart.
Going off on turn 1 : Congratulations, you’ve been banned.
Going off on turn 2 : You fit into Type 1 just fine.
Going off on turn 3 : You’re fast enough to maintain grace in Extended.
Going off on turn 4 : The Goblin deck might have kicked your teeth in by now.
Going off on turn 5 : The Goblin deck probably has kicked your teeth in by now.
Going off on turn 6-9 : Your deck sucks.
Going off on turn 10 : Your opponent is a passed-out, drunken bum who stumbled into the gaming store looking for warmth. Your deck still sucks.
Now, this isn’t always true. People liked to call Mirari’s Wake a Combo deck from time to time, and it would often go off on turn 6 or so. Wake didn’t really need a lot to use its Combo though, allowing it to possess oodles of defensive measures making it possible to stall the game until turn 30. Several times per tournament. While the Goblin player ran out of sugar and passed out from boredom after chanting,”Please deck, I need Flaring Pains … Please deck…” for the last ten minutes.
The idea here is to push the Mind’s Desire deck into going off on turn 4. Turn 4 is early enough that your opponent might not have killed you and most modern disruption won’t have come online every game. So, we dip into Affinity for the acceleration and redundancy we need to, you know, go off before the cows come home.
4 Myr Enforcer
4 Frogmite
4 Chromatic Sphere
2 Tendrils of Agony
4 Chrome Mox
4 Thoughtcast
4 Mind’s Desire
4 Seething Song
3 Gilded Lotus
4 Rush of Knowledge
4 Talisman of Progress
4 Talisman of Dominance
4 Seat of the Synod
4 Great Furnace
4 Vault of Whispers
3 Glimmervoid
This is not my initial version of the Affinity-Desire deck. Originally I forgot that Seething Song existed, which is about as intelligent as a sack of rusty doorknobs.
The goal here is to perform the following chain of events:
1) Accelerate your mana. This usually involves getting a lot of Talismans in play or putting a Lotus on the table.
2) Get a high converted mana cost permanent on the table. Gilded Lotus and Myr Enforcer are best; Frogmite will often suffice in a pinch.
3) Cast Rush of Knowledge to refill your hand. Ideally you will be drawing a new hand of seven cards, which allows you to pick and choose what you want for the next turn.”Draw Sevens” are some good in a Combo deck.
4) Go off on the following turn.
Affinity helps in that it gives you free spells and the cheap, multi-purposed Thoughtcast, which both helps you to go off and helps you to draw out of slumps. Plus, it gives you access to Glimmervoid, which is a really great land for this deck since it’s two and a half colors.
Sometimes you will actually need to cast Tendrils of Agony. That’s partially why Gilded Lotus keeps ending up in the deck. Sometimes you will end up with both your Tendrils in hand, which means you have to cast the damn thing to have any shot at winning. Lotus helps out since it tends to be turned up by Mind’s Desire, making it three”free” points of mana.
The biggest problem is that, while the deck could go off really fast if it turned up the combo rapidly, it would often simply sit there and do nothing if didn’t. On the plus side, occasionally you would be forced to win games through Desiring out four Myr Enforcers and smashing face. This is a plus in the sense that’s it’s cool to have lots of Enforcers on the table, but a huge negative in that it’s an exceptionally crappy a win condition for a Combo deck. And it lacks style.
So, of course, I had to find even worse cards to work with. Frogmites and Gilded Loti aren’t good enough, we need to scrape Mirrodin for a real bottom-of-the-barrel card to get this deck humming. Oh boy.
4 Chrome Mox
2 Tendrils of Agony
4 Mind’s Desire
4 Explosive Vegetation
1 Talisman of Unity
3 Frogmite
2 Blinkmoth Urn
4 Chromatic Sphere
4 Talisman of Dominance
4 Rush of Knowledge
4 Thoughtcast
2 Trade Secrets
3 Gilded Lotus
4 Seething Song
4 Tree of Tales
3 Island
4 Seat of the Synod
4 Great Furnace
A quick scan of the decklist won’t likely turn up the offending card. The human brain is a very well designed organ, years of evolution working to protect and enhance the human race to the point where we dominate the Earth. Part of its skill is the ability to repress things so painful that you would retch and turn aside from the trauma. But if you look closer, you will discover this deck’s horrible secret.
Yes, that’s right. Blinkmoth Urn. Blinkmoth Urn!
For some reason, I became almost immediately enamored of this card and worked with for a couple revisions of the deck. We’re on decklist nine, revision twenty-five by the way. Don’t worry, I was just goldfishing the deck in the attempt to make it go faster. I played very few”real” games with these decks.
Blinkmoth Urn proved to be two things :
- First, unlike Gilded Lotus, which wasn’t all that great for acceleration, the Urn actually churned out mana, often generating ten or twelve colorless on turn five. I’ve had games with this version of the deck where I’d have something like thirty mana on turn seven. Unfortunately, if you refer to the chart above, thirty mana on turn seven still sucks. The card is probably good somewhere, but not in this deck.
- Second, also unlike Gilded Lotus, it was the last card you wanted in multiples and even worse for being entirely useless. Not only was it almost as bad as a land when digging with Mind’s Desire, the damn thing actually kills you from time to time. Golly gee, how pleasant that must be. The Blink moths actually revolt and mana burn you to death.
Stupid Blink moths. Damn them and their insane mana production.
Assuming some amount of luck, this deck can go off as early as turn five with consistency. If things got really out of hand I could see it going off on turn 4, but that’s highly unlikely to occur in more than one percent of your games, even if you are undisrupted. Generally, if it doesn’t mana burn itself out, you will go off on about turn six.
I did find Blinkmoth Urn to be surprisingly good when combined with Trade Secrets. Unfortunately, both cards have glaring weaknesses. Blinkmoth Urn is essentially a slow card that takes a full turn to active. Though someone will eventually notice”Wow, this produces nearly infinite mana, hooray!” and use it in, I don’t know, Urza’s Dragon decks, it’s not so good here. Trade Secrets gets you killed. Sure, sometimes your opponent fills his hand and doesn’t do much the next turn which leads to you winning. And sometimes the Goblin player draws his whole deck except for one card and attacks with four Goblin Piledrivers. Seriously. That’s what they should do.
The interesting thing about some of the Affinity builds produced is the surprising capability for mimicking an aggro deck in a pinch. Imagine casting Desire and getting two Frogmites, a Somber Hoverguard and a Myr Enforcer alongside a Talisman or land. Yeah, you just randomly drew out over ten power in creatures. What’s up with that?
The negative thing is that the deck has a lot of trouble using its cards effectively. You want a ton of artifacts, but at the same time, you want Chrome Mox to actually do stuff. Shockingly, since removing an artifact from the game has all the effect of bringing tea cups to play hockey, you find yourself trying to strike a balance between colored and colorless cards. That results in a weaker overall deck, as it forces you to use cards like Somber Hoverguard. Now the Hoverguard is pretty decent when used for a Rush of Knowledge, but overall it’s just a bad Myr Enforcer.
So, after some discussion of the deck, I was lead onto the promised land of turn 5 kills.
Phil Samms was right about everything.
Or maybe not.
The unfortunate tone at the start of the article results from the fact that the deck eventually managed to reach the point where it was almost good. Almost! In a world without disruption, it would probably be good enough to play. Unfortunately we don’t live in that world. A Desire deck must be able to go off on turn 3 or 4 in order to be competitive, no version I’ve built has managed that feat more than 1% of the time. One percent isn’t good enough.
Regardless, I was lead to the promised land of Chain of Vapor by … Um .. Magpiesmn. Le sigh. See I’d read about using Chain of Vapor before, but I wasn’t too impressed with it until I’d gotten more of a knack for goldfishing the deck. Going back to using the Chain lead me to two thoughts: First, Chain of Vapor can be extremely good. Second, more than two is too many in the deck.
While you can use the Chain to go off, you often find yourself wishing for more explosive cards to set the deck up, leading to Chain being an poor card in multiples. Oh, sure, it’s basically two spells to storm per Chain, regardless of sacrifice effects, but that doesn’t ultimately help you draw cards or produce mana. It does, however, like to sit dead in your hand until the turn you go off – at which point you’ve usually drawn at least a quarter to a full third of your deck.
This is the current latest revision of the deck:
4 Gilded Lotus
2 Chain of Vapor
2 Tendrils of Agony
4 Mind’s Desire
4 Thirst for Knowledge
4 Talisman of Progress
4 Talisman of Dominance
4 Chrome Mox
4 Thoughtcast
2 Future Sight
4 Seething Song
2 Frogmite (note that you can replace this with any zero casting cost artifact you feel like, it doesn’t matter – though Spellbook is likely the best choice)
4 Chromatic Sphere
4 Glimmervoid
4 Vault of Whispers
4 Seat of the Synod
4 Great Furnace
This deck works extremely well for being a prototype design. Almost every card has synergy with the correct themes needed for a Mind’s Desire deck. The deck’s power comes from overwhelming mana production, cheap card drawing, and mana consistency. The eight Talismans and four Chromatic Spheres coupled with Glimmervoid gives it shocking mana consistency for a deck that is, in fact, three colors and running all of sixteen land.
The Chrome Moxes pull double duty, accelerating out early Talismans and card drawing, yet still acting as storm copy bait in the late game of the deck. Future Sight is included simply because the deck rotates around the exact theories that make the Sight powerful: Cheapness, light land density, and card drawing.
Once you become well-versed with this deck, you should be able to go off consistently on turn 5 if you aren’t disrupted. By consistently, I mean in goldfishing the deck is capable of going off on turn 5 about 60% of the time. (Maybe even more, as Apprentice adores giving me no-land hands. Almost 30% of the time I have to mulligan, which is rather absurd…) Those are solid numbers, as I have run this deck over a hundred times for verification.
Unfortunately, the ability to go off on turn 4 requires an almost impossible”God draw” of a bunch of Talismans, two or three zero-mana cards and a Chain of Vapor. That sounds easy to put together, but you have almost no time for drawing cards – you have to assemble them on the fly, which doesn’t work if you did get card drawing or if you don’t draw exactly what you need.
You did realize though, that I was basically goldfishing to produce the best deck possible on paper, right? The basic problem with this deck is that it loses to a very small set of cards, but those cards tend to show up. So it’s still not a great deck. But I digress, onto revision twenty-one.
Final Version
4 Chromatic Sphere
3 Gilded Lotus
3 Chain of Vapor
1 Spellbook
2 Tendrils of Agony
4 Mind’s Desire
4 Thirst for Knowledge
4 Thoughtcast
3 Future Sight
3 Seething Song
1 Talisman of Indulgence
4 Talisman of Progress
4 Talisman of Dominance
4 Chrome Mox
4 Seat of the Synod
4 Great Furnace
4 Vault of Whispers
4 Glimmervoid
This would be the final version of the deck I worked on. It’s not any better than revision eighteen, though, so don’t pay too much attention to it. If you want match-up information, you should go look at Affinity and then consider it without counterspells… that’s about how solid this deck is, give or take being Piledrivered for twenty a few times. You can, will, and do go off a reasonable amount of the time, but you’re vulnerable to disruption. The three primary”worry” cards you will face are Akroma’s Vengeance, Stifle and March of the Machines – all of which basically end your game. Beyond that, Shatter, Naturalize, Mind Sludge and Blood Moon are all huge problems for the deck. So, in every color and match-up, the deck will usually have problems that it can’t do anything to protect itself from.
Fission mailed!
Warning Signs
So what would make Mind’s Desire good in Standard, should such cards be printed in the next couple of sets? Well, let’s go over the simplest problems:
Talismans are good (Extended-worthy, really), but the deck hurts for something that sits between Talisman of Progress and Gilded Lotus. Even something dorky like Worn Powerstone would give it a push in the right direction, allowing the deck to be a bit more explosive when it comes to its mana. Heck, I’d probably run Sisay’s Ring in this deck, since it costs four to cast and comes into play untapped. With the lack of anything approaching the strength of Thran Dynamo or Grim Monolith, though, the deck is never going to get too insane.
The deck’s almost complete lack of cheap card drawing is a real kick in the pants. Thirst for Knowledge and Thoughtcast are both great cards – assuming you have the artifacts to fuel them, which is why the artifact lands have to stay in the deck. But I’d happily add cards like Words of Wisdom or (dare I mention) the holy Brainstorm, which would strengthen the deck and smooth the combo draws, making it easier to go off.
Bringing up Brainstorm brings up the whole issue of having no tutors or real deck manipulation. You could utilize Long-Term Plans, but since Mind’s Desire functions around using multiple cards in the same turn, it doesn’t really work to give up a card for long-term gain (especially since it would have to be cast on turn 2 to be effective). Without stuff like Brainstorm or Impulse, or cheap tutors, the deck has serious trouble going off consistently – both because you can’t find the pieces, and because you can’t manipulate the deck to get more land out of it. Running too much land causes your Desires to be really futile – not only do additional lands not really power up the Desire, they make the storm copies of Desire a lot weaker.
Other Directions
As a combo card set up to create a win-in-a-single-turn effect, Mind’s Desire will probably never be as fully viable in Standard as it has been in Extended. There are too many missing elements, though like I said, those elements could be printed. They just probably won’t be.
However, if you sit and play the deck for a while, you will rapidly realize that the combination of Future Sight and the deck’s elements form an extremely powerful engine, one that sits in line with the Runic Sunrise engine while not being anywhere near as easy to counteract. With that in mind, it may be possible to build a Wake-like combo-control deck that utilizes Mind’s Desire to finish the job in one turn, while still maintaining the abilities of a standard control deck. Geordie Tait bashed on me a couple times with a U/W control deck based around Isochron Scepter; that deck had some of the pieces of the engine, and from time to time showed off how powerful Future Sight can be.
I’m not done with Mind’s Desire just yet. But for now, I’m going to go look at my current”favorite” deck to play in Standard.
And by now, I mean next week.
-Iain”Taeme” Telfer
If you don’t like using the forums, feel free to e-mail me at Illyith underscore Tal at hotmail dot com
Yes, that’s not in English.