Well, there’s one week I’ve missed. Sometimes life takes a turn for the busier and something has got to go. Mostly going out goes out of the window but sometimes Magic gives first.
In my last article, I started working on decks for the Bath Magic Invitational 2002 by building up and playing a bunch of Peasant Magic decks. I was surprised by the number of emails I got about Peasant Magic; obviously, the format is much more popular than I thought. I received Tog decks, Reanimator decks, and even Rift decks.
I also missed a whole bunch of cards, like Phyrexian War Beast, that I should probably consider playing. My only excuse is the fact that I’ve never played with many of them. I started playing around Mirage and played Standard almost all the time since then. Cards from an older time rarely pass across the void I call my mind.
This week I’m going to look at another format I might get to play if I make the top-four: 5-Color Magic.
As with any format I don’t play regularly, the first thing I do is pounce onto the internet and get a look at what people are playing, the articles people are writing and any tourney reports I can find. Thankfully, 5-color has its own website (http://www.5-color.com) so I started there. After five minutes I’d read through the articles, and gone over a couple of the decks.
It seems that fast, aggressive decks are the most popular with 3-2-1 Contract, a deck based around playing spells that cost 1, 2 or 3 mana, Suicide Black based decks, and Green weenie decks at the top of the list. Following that there are a whole host of control decks employing different strategies. I dropped a few decks into Magic Suitcase and carried on looking around.
The next place to look was, of course, the Star City 5-Color Tech Center. For a site that’s often derided as”just for casual players,” StarCity has a lot more articles on Extended, Standard and Limited formats than Five or Multiplayer but there are still plenty of articles. I started by re-reading an article I wrote about 5-color some time ago. One thing that struck me was how much I avoided rare cards. I’m not as worried these days about losing one rare or another and, given that I’ll only be playing two rounds of 5-color at the very most, and I can only lose once, I’m really not that worried about playing for ante.
One set of articles on Star City really stood out, though: Abe Sargent series on building your first 5-color deck. He’s written four parts so far, with a few more to come, and he’s working on three decks as he does so. The articles are well-written and I thoroughly recommend them to 5-color players, novices and experts alike.
So; a mind full of new information, ideas to consider and decks to build. Unfortunately for me the first two thoughts I had were about Cycling and rebels.
Cycling is in the forefront of my mind at the moment thanks to Onslaught. As I wrote in my previous five article, it allows you to cycle through land gluts and, if you play with other cycling cards, dig for land of the right colour. It also allows you to miss out a colour entirely!
Each colour has at least five cards that cycle for colorless mana. Pick any four and two of the fifth and you satisfy the eight cards of one colour minimum but don’t need to play any land of that colour. This means you can play mono decks in 5-color magic.
I had another look over the Magic sites and articles I could find on 5-color to see if anyone else was doing this and they weren’t.
Why not?
It’s within the rules. You can still lose. It’s certainly not broken. So why not?
I posted this question to a couple of mailing lists and got the same answer each time:
“It’s not really living up to the spirit of 5-color magic.”
And here is where the real problem with me and 5-color lies: I like playing tournaments. Extended, Standard, Limited, pretty much anything really. I don’t play tourneys to make cool, new decks work; I don’t play tourneys because I like the company (although many of my best friends are Magic players). I play tourneys to win. I play because I like the challenge of looking at such a diverse game, making a bunch of decisions and beating everyone else in the room.
That’s not what 5-color seems to be about.
I’m sure that there are people who play 5-color who play to win – but by far and away, the majority of people play because it’s fun. It’s fun to play with all the old cards again. It’s fun to put 250 cards together and play off for ante. It’s even fun for some people to build obscene mini-combos into each deck as alternative ways to win.
Basically, it’s fun!
Are rebels fun? Is it fun if I play a mono-coloured deck, never get colour screwed and search out rebel after rebel, turn after turn?
For me, if I’m winning? Yes.
For you? Probably not.
Even so I put the following deck together on suitcase and had a play. Please, please don’t run away screaming yet…
Mono White Five:
White(96):
4x Defiant Falcon
4x Defiant Vanguard
4x Fresh Volunteers
1x Lawbringer
1x Lightbringer
4x Lin Sivvi, Defiant Hero
3x Nightwind Glider
4x Ramosian Captain
3x Ramosian Commander
4x Ramosian Lieutenant
4x Ramosian Sergeant
3x Ramosian Sky Marshal
2x Rappelling Scouts
2x Reveille Squad
4x Steadfast Guard
3x Thermal Glider
4x Whipcorder
2x Cho-Manno, Revolutionary
4x Soltari Priest
4x Soltari Monk
3x Soltari Champion
2x Weathered Wayfarer
4x Crusade
4x Glorious Anthem
1x Enlightened Tutor
4x Empyrial Armor
2x Disenchant
3x Armageddon
1x Balance
1x Land Tax
3x Wrath of God
4x Swords to Plowshares
Green(18):
4x Barkhide Mauler
4x Bloated Toad
4x Darkwatch Elves
4x Hush
2x Lull
Blue (18):
4x Cloud of Faeries
4x Lingering Mirage
4x Rebuild
4x Rescind
2x Veiled Serpent
Black (18):
4x Disciple of Malice
4x Expunge
4x Swat
4x Sicken
2x Rebel Informer
Red (18):
2x Brand
4x Scrap
4x Lay Waste
4x Flame Jet
4x Order / Chaos
Land (82):
58x Plains
4x Secluded Steppe
4x Drifting Meadow
4x Blasted Landscape
4x Mishra’s Factory
4x Standing Stones
4x Dust Bowl
As you can see, this deck doesn’t mess around. I’m going to cycle through stuff until I start to pick up a rebel searcher or two – and with 26 of them in the deck I will see one – and start bringing out creatures to kill you. Sure, you can cast Wrath of God but there’s no way ‘m going to put all of the rebels from my hand into play in one go. Are you mad?
This deck also has three problems.
Firstly it is easily hosed. Tsabo’s Decree? Engineered Plague? These cards will cause a real problem. Persecute for White hurts just as much.
Secondly, by restricting myself to one colour, I’m not playing with all of the power cards from the other four colours that everyone else is playing with.
Finally this deck is a real chore to shuffle. Yes, you heard me: I’m worried about shuffling. Just think for a second. Normally, you don’t shuffle decks too often but remember what a pain it was during Masques? Now make the deck more than four times bigger…
I posted something similar to the decklist above to the Star City mailing list and Rui Oliveira posted the following reply:
“Trust me you don’t. Really. Unless you are only building that deck for those three rounds. Someone built a Rebel deck around here and after an afternoon of playing two things happened:
– No one wanted to play against him.
– He had a blister from searching and shuffling.”
Hmm. Do I want blisters?
I don’t play Five, and I don’t expect I’ll get to play many people after the tourney, so putting people off playing me isn’t really a problem. Blisters may very well be.
I’m doing it again.
“…putting people off playing me isn’t really a problem.”
Is this the ‘spirit of 5-color’ I keep hearing about? Is this how I really feel about Magic in general or just 5-color?
I guess part of the problem is that I’m building a 5-color deck to be competitive. If I make the top 4 of the Bath Magic Invitational, I want to make the final. I want to win damn it. I don’t want six rounds of hard work to be thrown away by turning up with an untuned, colour screwing deck. I want to show up with the Cadillac of decks, the Rolls Royce of decks, a deck to storm past, crush and dismember the other decks.
But hey, that’s me.
Well, a part of me.
There’s another part of me that understands the philosophy behind 5-color completely. I want to be able to play long, fun games with cards that I can’t play with anywhere else. I want to be able to build fun combos into my decks. I want to be able to pull off an abusive spell that will make my opponent laugh and cringe at the same time.
That part of me has been beaten down and hidden from sight for a long time because that part of me loses matches. That part of me plays rogue decks when I know they aren’t as good as the decks I should be playing. That part of me wants to try and break stupid Enchantments and Artifacts in Standard.
Even so it’s still there and what is the Invitational – whether it’s one in Bath or The Real Thing – if not a place to have fun, to show off your deck building skills. I’ve already decided to play a Peasant deck of my own because I want to have some fun, so why not play a deck I want to play in 5-color too? If I want to play Cycling cards and Rebels and I think it’ll be fun – why shouldn’t I?
Should you consider your opponents when you build a deck?
Is winning more important than people talking to you, liking you, wanting to play against you again?
If I turn up to the Bath Magic Invitational, win six rounds in a row and play a ruthless, mono-coloured deck and win, what will other people think?
Maybe they’ll think I really like to win? Maybe they’ll think”If that’s what it takes to win, I don’t want to be a winner.” Maybe it’ll put them off.
The Bath Magic Invitational serves two purposes: Very much like the real Invitational. We want to reward the top local players and we want to get people excited about playing Magic. Look, if you do well next year, you could be playing these wacky formats. If you do well, see how you’ll be rewarded!
So I guess I should play a deck I want to play, but one I’d like to play against, too – one that I’d like to watch. (This also assumes that playtesting would have proved your deck to be as unstoppable as you think it is – I think it has some weaknesses, namely that you may cycle a lot and still see a lot of dead cards – The Ferrett)
So I’ll compromise. I’ll still play rebels, but pack less of them. I’ll zip a few colours with Cycling cards, but I won’t play a mono-coloured deck. In fact I’ll base the deck on an old deck I used to play:
Old Style, UWb Counter Rebels by Jim Grimmett.
Creatures (13):
3x Lin Sivvi, Defiant Hero
3x “Defiant Falcon
2x Defiant Vanguard
1x Jhovall Queen
1x Thermal Glider
3x Ramosian Sergeant
Other Spells (22):
4x Counterspell
4x Absorb
3x Dromar’s Charm
2x Dismantling Blow
3x Wrath of God
1x Rout
2x Tsabo’s Web
3x Fact or Fiction
Land (25):
8x Island
4x Plains
4x Adarkar Wastes
2x Salt Marsh
3x Caves of Koilos
4x Coastal Tower
I’ll need to multiply everything up by about 4 times to get the numbers of cards I’ll need. The rebel engine will be easy, but we’ll need to make sure we get lots of the 2/2 guys like Fresh Volunteer, Whipcorder and Steadfast Guard to try and cope with the aggro decks like 3-2-1 Contract.
As we’re playing Blue and Black, we can add in all the tutors we want, as well as counters and a pile of card drawing, while will work very well with the Cycling cards we’ll use for Red and Green.
Assuming we have around 84 land, 18 Red, and 18 Green cards, that leaves us 130 cards to play with. We’ll need around 50 to 60 creatures and 50 to 60 spells.
Three Colour Five:
White(84):
4x Defiant Falcon
4x Defiant Vanguard
4x Fresh Volunteers
1x Lawbringer
1x Lightbringer
4x Lin Sivvi, Defiant Hero
3x Nightwind Glider
4x Ramosian Captain
3x Ramosian Commander
4x Ramosian Lieutenant
4x Ramosian Sergeant
2x Ramosian Sky Marshal
3x Steadfast Guard
3x Thermal Glider
4x Whipcorder
2x Cho-Manno, Revolutionary
3x “Soltari Priest
3x Soltari Monk
3x Soltari Champion
2x Weathered Wayfarer
4x Crusade
4x Glorious Anthem
1x Enlightened Tutor
2x Dismantling Blow
3x Armageddon
1x Balance
1x Land Tax
3x Wrath of God
4x Swords to Plowshares
(No Parallax Wave? – The Ferrett)
Blue (28): Counter spells and card drawing.
4x Counterspell
4x Absorb
4x Dismiss
4x Arcane Denial
4x Fact or Fiction
4x Brainstorm
4x Accumulated Knowledge
(No Mystical Tutor? – The Ferrett)
Black (18): A few counters but mainly Tutoring power.
2x Rebel Informer
4x Dromar’s Charm
1x “Demonic Tutor
1x Diabolic Tutor
1x “Vampiric Tutor
1x Demonic Consultation
4x Contract from Below
1x Tainted Pact
1x Yawgmoth’s Will
1x Living Death
1x Oversold Cemetery
Red (18): Mostly Cycling, but a few Fire/Ice for good measure.
2x Brand
4x Scrap
4x Lay Waste
4x Flame Jet
4x Fire / Ice
Green(18): Mostly Cycling, but a few Wax/Wane to help out with enchantments.
4x Barkhide Mauler
4x Bloated Toad
4x Darkwatch Elves
2x Hush
4x Wax/Wane
Now we just need to sort out the land. We need a lot of WW in the deck and quickly need to see UU, too. We can live with just one Black mana for a while, and so our mana needs to reflect that. Starting with Dual Lands (12) and adding the CIP dual lands from Invasion (8) we can also add Cycling lands if we want (up to 24!) along with basic Islands, Plains and Swamps. Out of our 84 land, I’d like to see over half producing White and Blue, and maybe a quarter producing Black.
Land (84):
16x Plains
4x Secluded Steppe
4x Drifting Meadow
12x Island
4x Lonely Sandbar
4x Remote Isle
8x Swamp
4x Coastal Tower (4U, 4W)
4x Salt Marsh (4U, 4B)
4x Adarkar Wastes (4W, 4U)
4x Scrubland[/author]“][author name="Scrubland"]Scrubland[/author] (4W, 4B)
4x Underground Sea (4U, 4B)
4x Tundra (4U, 4W)
4x Mishra’s Factory
4x Dust Bowl
We could add any number of extra Pain Lands, fetch Lands, Search Lands to the deck, and I may add four to eight for each color, after I’ve had a go testing the deck out.
I think the deck can cope with 3-2-1 Contract and other aggro decks as long as it sees an early rebel Searcher. Once the chain is established and a spare Rebel and a few counters are in hand, the game should be close to over.
I think this deck is much closer to the real spirit of 5 than my first deck in this article. You can get colour screwed – but you can get out of it. You have access to powerful spells in many colours and the power of the Rebel search engine and the search cards in Black will allow you to thin your deck and get to them.
Well, it’s not easy building a five deck, so I’d better get to it. 250 cards to find and so little time. With one week left before the Invitational I have my Peasant Deck built up, and a few backup decks and a Five deck chosen, now I just need to choose the easy one: Standard.
Cheers, Jim.
Team PhatBeats.