The buzz is in the air, the slow building excitement of a new Type 2 ready to be explored and exploited in the months leading up to Regionals. How will Darksteel shake up the metagame? Will any of the anointed Tier 1 decks stumble and fall? Will any Tier 2 or completely new archetype rise up to take their place? Will there be any secret tech that flies under the radar long enough to surprise and conquer like Ralphie Treatment or Turbo-Haups in years past?
I’ve played quite a few different decks in Type 2 since States – R/G Beasts, Elvish Wedding, Clerical Life, Affinity, B/r Cemetery, DNA. While I had a grand time with most all of them, a lot of the times I found myself with a small and nagging dread when putting the decks together and playing them. It was the dread of being caught with your pants down, of not having an answer to something heinous your opponent snatches out of left field and tosses upside your unsuspecting noggin. It’s sad, I have the soul of a control player who wants to have answers to everything, but my mind loves creatures and permanents too much to fully embrace my Wraths of God and Akroma’s Vengeances.
So I keep returning to Cemetery decks…
I have a long love affair with Green/Black graveyard recursion. Around the time that 5-Color Kastle was gaining some national attention abusing the synergy between Survival of the Fittest and Living Death, I was working on something similar based around Oath of Ghouls. My local metagame had lots of control decks along with Goblin/burn decks built to combat them. I was finding my Green creatures getting Wrathed and Bolted into oblivion time and time again. Eventually I found the answer to my prayers in other good Oath from Exodus.
The decklist from an old tournament report…
DDT (circa August 1998)
4 Oath of Ghouls
3 Survival of the Fittest
3 Living Death
3 Ebony Charm
2 Recurring Nightmare
4 Birds of Paradise
3 Wall of Roots
3 Wall of Blossoms
3 Spike Feeder
2 Uktabi Orangutan
2 Mindless Automaton
1 Spike Weaver
1 Cloudchaser Eagle
1 Coffin Queen
1 Crypt Rat
1 Shard Phoenix
1 Fallen Angel
1 Spirit of the Night
3 City of Brass
6 Swamp
14 Forest
62 Cards
Sideboard:
3 Emerald Charm
2 Gaea’s Blessing
2 Nekrataal
1 Cloudchaser Eagle
2 Thrull Surgeon
2 Harbinger of Night
2 Stromgald Cabal
1 Scragnoth
I called the deck DDT as an anagram for Dancing Dead Things, and I had great success with it locally. It was chock full of reusable utility, and while it lacked the explosive power of 5C Kastle’s Living Deaths, it’s slow and steady card advantage on the back of Oath of Ghouls would ultimately snatch inevitability and pull out the game.
Flash forward to 2003. Cemetery decks have been a solid Tier 2 performer in the Onslaught Block Constructed environment (I went 4-2-1 at a PTQ with it), and people have expanded the idea into Type 2. I wavered on the choice of playing it or Affinity for States and then chickened out and played a R/G Beasts ‘n’ Burn deck that performed mediocre. Others picked up the mantle though and performed well with Cemetery:
B/G Cemetery
A Standard deck, as played by Grey Lowe on 2003-10-25
5th – 8th place at States/Champs in USA: Ohio
4 Birds of Paradise
3 Cabal Interrogator
4 Troll Ascetic
3 Viridian Shaman
3 Solemn Simulacrum
2 Graveborn Muse
4 Ravenous Baloth
3 Nekrataal
2 Visara the Dreadful
3 Oversold Cemetery
4 Empyrial Plate
3 City of Brass
14 Forest
8 Swamp
Sideboard
3 Persecute
3 Stabilizer
1 Cabal Interrogator
3 Terror
2 Glissa Sunseeker
1 Viridian Shaman
2 Naturalize
Grey’s deck immediately jumped out at me mainly that he made Top 8 in Ohio, which had a ridiculously high number of players. That a deck makes it to the top of that heap immediately gains my respect. Grey backs the hard-to-kill Troll Ascetic with Oversold Cemetery to get him back in case his opponents finally did manage to kill him off, and adds Empyrial Plate as the kicker. The beauty of the Plate is that it encourages holding back your cards, being stingy with them in order to power up the Plate, and in the control-heavy environment that States proved to be, having that bias built in no doubt helped him.
Here’s another Top 8 build from States:
B/G Cemetery
A Standard deck, as played by Jeremy Muir on 2003-10-25
5th – 8th place at States/Champs in USA: Vermont
3 City of Brass
10 Forest
10 Swamp
2 Caller of the Claw
1 Elf Replica
4 Wirewood Herald
1 Viridian Shaman
4 Ravenous Baloth
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Vine Trellis
4 Phyrexian Plaguelord
3 Ravenous Rats
3 Solemn Simulacrum
1 Decree of Pain
2 Lightning Coils
3 Oversold Cemetery
3 Terror
Sideboard
2 Duplicant
1 Soul Foundry
1 Viridian Shaman
1 Lightning Coils
1 Terror
2 Nekrataal
1 Infest
2 Mind Slash
1 Elf Replica
1 Nantuko Vigilante
2 Scrabbling Claws
Jeremy is well known as forging his own path and I’ve always enjoyed his decklists for originality and rogue flavor. Jeremy incorporates the Wirewood Herald elf-tutor chain into the Cemetery skeleton for a neo-Survival utility role, along with the more usual suspects. Lightning Coils is an interesting twist, with one also in his sideboard I’m guessing it must have tested pretty well.
Here’s one more States Cemetery deck:
B/G Cemetery
A Standard deck, as played by Dylan Gamboa on 2003-10-25
2nd place at States/Champs in USA: Nevada
3 City of Brass
11 Forest
1 Plains
8 Swamp
2 Caller of the Claw
1 Gigapede
4 Nantuko Husk
4 Wirewood Herald
3 Rotlung Reanimator
4 Ravenous Baloth
4 Birds of Paradise
1 Silklash Spider
1 Visara the Dreadful
2 Troll Ascetic
3 Solemn Simulacrum
4 Lightning Coils
4 Oversold Cemetery
Sideboard
3
“>Decree of Pain
3
“>Naturalize
2
“>Persecute
2
“>Stabilizer
2
“>Windswept Heath
3 Worship
Dylan’s four Cemetery/four Lightning Coil deck – with no way to kill/sacrifice your own creatures outside the lone Visara – reveals that he anticipated facing tons of creature control from his opponents, and his Top 8 placing means he was probably dead on.
These very different decklists illuminate what I feel is so enticing about Cemetery decks – as an archetype it is incredibly customizable. If you feel you have a pretty good handle on the likely metagame you face, you can really build your deck to thrive in the environment. If your metagame is wide open, you can build your Cemetery deck for maximum flexibility and utility.
Recently on Brainburst, Jarrod Bright proposed a Cemetery deck updated with Darksteel. Since any combination of Green/Black nowadays is assumed to somehow be attributed to Sol Malka, he calls it”The Rock” but we know that it’s all about the Cemetery:
The Rock
Jarrod Bright
3 Bane of the Living
4 Birds of Paradise
3 Nekrataal
4 Ravenous Baloth
4 Ravenous Rats
4 Twisted Abomination
3 Viridian Zealot
4 Death Cloud
4 Oversold Cemetery
4 Skullclamp
3 City of Brass
12 Forest
8 Swamp
Sideboard
4 Headhunter
4 Infest
4 Oxidize
3 Withered Wretch
His deck looks pretty much like your standard Oversold Cemetery deck with a few important additions from Darksteel. The biggest boost is Skullclamp, which gives some much-needed card drawing to a deck that doesn’t mind its creatures dying. He’s also high on Viridian Zealot, which I’m a little hesitant to embrace – first off, he’s pretty Green intensive, and despite Birds and Cities, this deck won’t always give you the right mana to play and use the Zealot early. Plus, you can’t Skullclamp the Zealot and use his special ability. I still very much like Nantuko Vigilante; Skullclamp makes morph creatures into much more of a threat, and having two different morphs (alongside the Banes) make each of them more effective. Jarrod also gives lots of good reasons for including Death Cloud, but while I think the Cloud is a powerful card in search of a good home, I don’t think it fits real well in this deck.
With Jarrod’s deck percolating in my brain, Ben Stark posted another deck that caught my eye.
Harvester Black
Ben Stark
4 Cabal Interrogator
4 Chittering Rats
3 Greater Harvester
2 Nekrataal
4 Ravenous Rats
4 Rotlung Reanimator
4 Consume Spirit
4 Dark Banishing
4 Phyrexian Arena
3 Smother
4 Blinkmoth Nexus
20 Swamp
Sideboard
4 Emissary of Despair
3 Oblivion Stone
3 Persecute
3 Pulse of the Dross
2 Terror
Now, I was a big fan of Braids and had some success with Braids decks locally and in larger tournaments. Greater Harvester was one of those cards that have been growing on me ever since I saw the Darksteel spoiler. But seeing Ben’s deck so quick on the heels of Jarrod’s made me realize – the Harvester could very well be a great addition to the Cemetery decks! Obviously, Cemetery effectively blunts the Harvester’s drawback, and when recurring utility creatures the drawback often becomes a benefit. The problem with running the Harvester in a traditional G/B Cemetery deck is the Harvester’s triple Black casting cost; you can’t count on Birds and Cities of Brass to reliably smooth out the double Green that you’ll want for Baloths with the triple black of the Harvester. Now, I’ve noodled around with a more heavy Black Cemetery build that splashed Green for utility before, so this decklist came about pretty naturally:
John Deere Cemetery
by Bennie Smith
4 Chrome Mox
4 Skullclamp
3 Oversold Cemetery
4 Ravenous Rats
3 Bottle Gnomes
4 Bane of the Living
4 Nantuko Vigilante
3 Nekrataal
4 Solemn Simulacrum
3 Gravepact
4 Greater Harvester
4 Mirrodin’s Core
3 Forest
13 Swamp
In my article Finding the Sharp Edge of Darksteel, Part II, I floated a mono-Black Harvester deck idea and in the forum threads people who’d playtested the deck insisted that the cards you gain from Skullclamp and Simulacrum more than make up for the card you lose in playing the Mox. So I ported that idea over here, where the Mox gives you an important degree of acceleration since we aren’t running Birds of Paradise. Green has been reduced to a tiny role in the deck, but an incredibly important role – the Vigilante handles enchantments and artifacts quite nicely in one efficient little package before taking up the Skullclamp and swinging for four points of damage. Green will be even more important in the sideboard for things like Viridian Shaman and perhaps a few Naturalizes for good measure.
Gravepact is an experiment to see if it can help keep the ground clear enough for Harvester to end the game in one or two hits. We’ll see how it goes; I’ll be following this up when I have a chance to more fully playtest the deck and I’ll keep you posted on the matchups and evolution of the deck as we march towards Regionals. It’ll be here before you know it!