Video: Cobra in Vintage!

Round 1

Round 2

Round 3

Round 4

Cobra

Drew Levin

Test deck on 07-17-2014

Vintage

Creatures (7)

• 4 Lotus Cobra
• 1 Blightsteel Colossus
• 2 Notion Thief

Planeswalkers (3)

• 1 Tezzeret the Seeker
• 2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

Lands (15)

• 2 Volcanic Island
• 2 Underground Sea
• 2 Tropical Island
• 3 Polluted Delta
• 3 Misty Rainforest
• 3 Scalding Tarn

Spells (35)

• 1 Brainstorm
• 1 Fastbond
• 2 Mana Drain
• 2 Duress
• 4 Force of Will
• 1 Demonic Tutor
• 1 Time Walk
• 1 Ancestral Recall
• 1 Mana Crypt
• 4 Gush
• 1 Time Vault
• 3 Burning Wish
• 1 Merchant Scroll
• 1 Voltaic Key
• 1 Black Lotus
• 1 Mox Emerald
• 1 Mox Jet
• 1 Mox Pearl
• 1 Mox Ruby
• 1 Mox Sapphire
• 3 Preordain
• 2 Mental Misstep

Sideboard

• 1 Yawgmoth's Will
• 1 Duress
• 1 Timetwister
• 1 Tinker
• 2 Trygon Predator
• 2 Ancient Grudge
• 4 Yixlid Jailer
• 2 Nature's Claim
• 1 Talrand, Sky Summoner

This deck is unreal greedy. There is no other way to put it.

When I found the prototypical list on morphing.de, it had something like five more four-plus drops than it does now: another of each of the planeswalkers, another Notion Thief, another sideboarded Talrand, and probably a Hundroog somewhere. It didn’t have a Brainstorm, it didn’t have a Fastbond, it had one fewer land, and it didn’t have any disruption in the sideboard.

I think all of the changes I made are positive, and I think the end result is a deck that is legitimately sweet. I think it might just be correct to ignore Dredge and hope to never play against it so that the deck can focus even more on beating Workshops, but that risks getting into a(n article-length) discussion about how to allocate sideboard space in situations where choices are all very polarized. Suffice it to say that I would have liked even more Trygons, even more Disenchants, and even more mana.

I love the Gush/Fastbond engine. I think it’s unbelievably good, and I want to see where else it can be put to good use. I’m aware of a Storm deck that plays Gush, so that will probably show up in this space in a bit, but really, I just want to play with Lotus Cobra, Gush, and Fastbond forever. It’s such an unreal feeling when everything is basically free. I hope you vicariously enjoyed Cobra/Gush/Bonding the Junk deck on turn 2 as much as I enjoyed doing it.

Given the nature of Magic Online’s transition — both in terms of format availability and interface — I want to come back to you all with a pair of polls about the direction of this column for the next little bit. More to the point, I have two questions:

As always, I appreciate your feedback and use it to guide the direction of this column. Thank you for reading, and I look forward to seeing the results
come in.