Blog Elemental – A Big Fat Egg
June 29, 2004
Darksteel feels like a black hole to me. I never made a Darksteel menu, and I didn’t write any articles – deckbuilding or otherwise – between the release of Darksteel and Fifth Dawn. I didn’t make a single MTGO deck centered around a Darksteel card. Skullclamp was taking hold by the time I started tinkering with deck ideas, corresponding to a downward spiral of my Magic enthusiasm. I have several of these blindspots in my deckbuilding history.
This isn’t to say that Darksteel is a boring set. Quite the contrary, as I look at the cards now all sorts of wheels start spinning in my head. Although I’m sure whatever deck ideas I could envision have already been tried and either refined or discarded, today I want to explore a few cards from my most recent blindspot.
Here are just a handful of cards I think are a) neat, and b) missing from decks I’ve seen:
Chimeric Egg
Gemini Engine
Nemesis Mask
Neurok Transmuter
Reshape
Shriveling Rot
Spellbinder
Wand of the Elements
Maybe people have written articles about these cards and I missed them (my internet reading during Darksteel also experienced a lull), but right now I am starting with a personal blank slate with regards to these cards.
I probably only have space and time to explore one of these cards today so I’ll start at the top. If I’m ever at a loss for writing content, I’m sure I’ll return to the above list.
Two ideas pop into my head immediately when looking at Chimeric Egg. The first is blue bounce, since you can conceivably get a lot of mileage out of one of your opponent’s non-artifact spells by getting her to replay them again and again. One way to do this is with Cowardice, but that might just backfire on your poor Egg and I’ve never been very successful at building Cowardice-based decks. Here is a much more straightforward idea…
Humpty Dumpty
4 Aether Spellbomb
4 Mana Leak
4 Boomerang
4 Chimeric Egg
4 Vedalken Shackles
3 Echoing Truth
3 Vex
3 Concentrate
2 Fabricate
1 Crystal Shard
1 Regress
4 Spire Golem
4 Lonely Sandbar
19 Island
The other idea that comes to mind is to use cards that can generate charge counters. I’ve already described a bunch of these cards in my Fifth Dawn menu installments. I think this idea is probably about as straightforward as the one above, just an entirely different deck (by the way, how cool is Silent Arbiter with Forgotten Ancient?).
Egg-Drop Soup
4 Energy Chamber
4 Sun Droplet
4 Chimeric Egg
4 Power Conduit
3 Dismantle
2 Naturalize
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Coretapper
4 Silent Arbiter
4 Forgotten Ancient
4 Mirrodin’s Core
4 Wooded Foothills
2 Grand Coliseum
11 Forest
2 Mountain
I’m fairly sure people have probably tried similar decks to these two and come up with better configurations. I’m equally sure Chimeric Egg has more uses than I’m seeing. That’s the problem of trying to think up decks so long after a set has been out. Feel free to post your own brilliant concoctions in the Forums.
Blog Elemental – The Second Gray Shade of Dawn
June 28, 2004
Here we go! The last menu installment, artifacts K though Z (well, technically W).
Class IV (Cards I like that others are talking about or using)
Summoner’s Egg
I like Rukh Egg. I dislike Wrath of God. So begins one of my least insightful explorations for why I like a card ever. Just like Rukh Egg, this is a neat trick with your own board sweepers and unlike Rukh Egg your board sweepers aren’t limited to starting with red as your base color. Duh. What I really wish is that there was some card in recent expansions to make a low hand size valuable (think Cursed Scroll or Scalding Tongs), which would make Summoner’s Egg especially fun. Maybe this paves a way to finally use Balance of Power. Or not.
Vedalken Shackles
Of the many ways my odd underdog proclivities manifest themselves, one is to really want to build established archetypes that competitive players no longer deem viable. If Suicide Black is out of favor, I think it’s fun to give it a try. Same with Stompy, 5cGreen, and even Blue Control. Other people have wondered aloud whether Vedalken Shackles signals a revival of a mono-Blue control deck. If this is just random musing and a deck never surfaces, I’m sure to give it a try in a casual deck.
Class III (Cards I like that no one else seems to like)
Salvaging Station
There are certainly enough of these”cog” cards to make a deck. Since a deck that revolves around one-mana artifacts has never really existed, I’m attracted to the idea on principle (which should have been obvious from the white part of my menu). For this reason I won’t be disappointed if my”Constructing Preconstructed” idea starts with the Nuts and Bolts deck. I’d like to have an excuse to try out Salvaging Station and see what happens.
Class II (Cards I really like that others are talking about or using)
Razormane Masticore
I hated Masticore when it was legal in Standard. I mean hated. Even when I played Masticore in my own decks I hated it. I hated it almost as much as I hated Morphling. Masticore and Morphling almost drove me away from Magic for good when they were Standard-legal. I hated them. Do you get the message yet? I! Hated! Them!!
…
So it seems strange to me that years later I would embrace Masty’s prickly little brother. The thing is, Razormane Masticore isn’t unfair, nor is it in any way unstoppable. In fact, it’s a pretty interesting critter with implications for decks wanting to fill their graveyards, have fun with Madness effects, a colorless beatstick, and/or get some repeatable creature control in the deal.
Silent Arbiter
This card singlehandedly makes so many of my slow, dumb deck ideas possible. The name and flavor text also makes it conceptually interesting. Toss four Silent Arbiter into a deck and you are probably half-way to surviving until you can pull off that Skirk Fire Marshal trick you’ve concocted. Unfortunately, I think Silent Arbiter is going to annoy me near to death when I play against it, but I guess I can’t have it both ways.
Staff of Domination
It just… does… so many… things! I wish the art was better, but who cares since it just… does… so many… things! The Staff fits into the mono-Blue control deck I mentioned earlier, but I frankly want to use it in almost every monocolor control strategy I can think up. Forget being a combo engine piece, I’ve long said that versatility is a very attractive trait for me in Magic cards and I’m not sure a more obviously versatile card has ever been printed.
Class I (Cards I really like that no one else seems to like)
Currently nothing to see here.
I wasn’t sure whether to include Myr Quadropod on the menu or not. I like Mr. Four-Feet, but I think almost every time I use Ensouled Scimitar that Myr Quadropod will follow along too. So then the question becomes whether there are decks I want to build using Myr Quadropod that don’t include Ensouled Scimitar.
(strains to think)
Nope. I think I’m good.