Embracing The Chaos - The Deck That Didn't Get There

A strange thing happened as I was writing this. It started as sort of a real-time chronicle of thought processes in building this deck. I figured it’d be entertaining to follow along with what I was thinking as I was building, so most everything below with the exception of simple grammatical corrections came right from my brain onto the page. At about the 1,700 word point, I realized that the deck simply wasn’t coming together the way I had hoped. I had visualized the strategies playing off of each other, but instead of two synergistic engines, I simply had two disparate pieces, one of them only half a strategy.

I was a little stuck. Do I give up and start over? Do I try to salvage something from what I’ve started? As I write below, I left the whole thing hanging for two days, the document still open on my screen. I’m not even sure what I was hoping for.

As promised last week, I’m going to take a run at a Mimeoplasm Zombie deck. The focus will be twofold: Mill and control the opponents’ creatures in order to use The Mimeoplasm and the synergy of what Zombies can do for each other. We’ll take advantage of Mimeoplasm’s blue to use some of the great new Zombie cards from Innistrad. The green gives us a significant departure from the red of Lord of Tresserhorn (which means giving up Deathbringer Thoctar, one of the best of all Zombies), but access to more things that make us get there a little faster.

It bears mentioning that when I make a deck, I make a deck to play, not necessarily to win. I definitely want to win, but the focus on the deck will be setting up games that are interactive and that I actually have to use my tactical skill set in order to win, not just flop cards on the table.

One of my major dislikes of combo decks is that they’re so one-sided, and I want multiple dimensions to the game—threat assessment, punch/counterpunch, situational development, and most importantly, interaction. Interaction isn’t you watching me combo off. It’s you responding to my threats and me responding to yours. It’s me wondering if you’re the bigger threat than the other guy, or how I might use the two of you off of each other. When we do it right (and by right, I mean “getting the desired result,” not “morally correctly”), it leads to the games we talk about and remember fondly. Sure, people will remember Nim Deathmantle, Oona, Composite Golem, but not with any warmth. As I’ve said before, the trick of this format isn’t in breaking it; it’s in not breaking it.

Instead of just putting together a deck and telling you what I hope it does, I’d like to chronicle the path that I take to assembling the deck. As of this moment, the only idea I have is the two engines. Sure, there are some cards that I know I’d like to play and some cards that suggest themselves, but I want to hopefully capture the thought processes as we go along. We have the Zombie Engine and the Mimeo Engine (or the mill part). The Mimeo Engine will feed the Zombies, since it will mostly involve milling everyone. In addition to a few fatties and some mana ramp, green is going to also give us some regrowth capability for when our non-creatures end up in the yard.

The first thing I’ve done is open a spreadsheet and labeled columns Creatures, Artifacts, Enchantments, Sorceries, and Instants. Along the way, if there are Planeswalkers that seem good, I’ll add another column for them. Lands will come along at the end.

Starting with the Mimeo Engine, I want to mill stuff. My first stop is magiccards.info. I hope no one is upset with me that I don’t use Gatherer, but magiccards.info simply has more easy-to-use search capabilities. My search is “his or her library into his or her graveyard,” yielding 73 results. The only one of them that’s not Blue, Black, or an Artifact is Lammastide Weave, which we could play if we want to (but we’re not going to). Obviously, we can’t play all of them, so I’m going to start with 20 (then 20 or so in the Zombie Engine and 20 more). I’m suspecting that we’ll cut back to around 15 in order to bump up the number of Zombies, but the first cut is:

Altar of Dementia, Archive Trap, Chancellor of the Spires, Curse of the Bloody Tome, Extractor Demon, Geth, Lord of the Vault, Grindclock, Grindstone, Jace Beleren, Jace’s Erasure, Jace, Memory Adept, Keening Stone, Lich Lord of Unx, Memory Erosion, Mesmeric Orb, Mindcrank, Mindshrieker, Nemesis of Reason, Selhoff Occultist, Sewer Nemesis, Shared Trauma, Sword of Body and Mind, Undead Alchemist, and Whetstone.

Side note: As I was doing the search, I added a column to the spreadsheet called “Jank.” So far, Brain Freeze, Chains of Mephistopheles, and Infernal Genesis have made it.

That’s 24 cards. The good news is that Geth, Lich Lord of Unx, and Undead Alchemist are all also Zombies. Still, we need to cut a few. First out is Chancellor of the Spires. I don’t like the idea of players resolving mulligans and then getting screwed over by the Chancellor.

Jace Beleren is next. In other decks, players are going to leave alone Baby Jace until you stop helping them draw cards. In this deck, they’re going to see right away where you’re going. Not being a fan of helping my opponents to cards, this is a reasonably easy cut.

Jace’s Erasure is next. It doesn’t do much on its own, and I’m going to need to focus bonus slots on the actual card draw, not what card draw does for me. Finally, I’m cutting Curse of the Bloody Tome. While it’s cool, it only focuses on one player, which I can’t change once it’s been cast, and I’d rather have the flexibility of Grindstone and friends.

This leaves us with 20 cards, a few of which might be subject to review, but for now, they’re all on the sheet. I suspect that a few of the eight artifacts that mill will get cut, and I’m not all that sold on Shared Trauma.

New Jank column addition: Guiltfeeder.

Looking at all the Jace cards led me to Jace’s Archivist and Windfall. They’ve been added. We’re at 22 cards.

The second part of the Mimeo Engine is the cards that regrow things. Searching on “Return” yields 974 results, so we’re going to have to narrow our parameters. Just narrowing it to green leaves us with 109, so I think I’m just going to have to use my card knowledge. Off the top of my head, I have:

All Suns’ Dawn, Elven Cache, Eternal Witness, Recall, Regrowth, Restock, Shrouded Lore, Woodland Guidance.

Eight is too many. Woodland Guidance is a touch expensive, especially since there aren’t going to be too many Forests in the deck, so that’s an easy cut. Elven Cache is just too pricey. I’m playing Oversold Cemetery as part of the Zombie Engine, so Eternal Witness has to stay. I think there’s not positive EV on Recall, so it’s out. Twenty-seven is the number of the counting.

Now we’ll start looking at Zombies. There are 253, and we’re looking for about a tenth of that. First up is Grimgrin. Other must-haves include:

Cemetery Reaper, Corpse Harvester, Death Baron, Eastern Paladin, Graveborn Muse, Gravedigger, Korlash, Heir to Blackblade, Lord of the Undead, Marauding Knight, Noxious Ghoul, Phyrexian Delver, Shambling Shell, Skinrender, Skullbriar, the Walking Grave, Undead Gladiator, Undead Warchief, Vengeful Dead, Vengeful Pharaoh, Vulturous Zombie, Western Paladin, Withered Wretch. With 22 listed there (including Grimgrin), we’re at 49 cards.

Others worth considering, but no room for: Nefashu, Order of Yawgmoth, Phyrexian Crusader, Plaguebearer, Unbreathing Horde.

We can’t play Zombies without playing Army of the Damned, Grave Titan, Nim Deathmantle, Rise from the Grave, and Syphon Flesh. That takes us to 55 cards, which isn’t leaving us much for ramp, draw, and control elements. I’m starting to wonder if the two Engines might dilute things a little too much—but we’re going to forge ahead anyway. It looks like a few Mimeo elements are going to have to go.

It occurs to me that if we’re milling other peoples’ stuff, Grimoire of the Dead is kind of a beating. 56.

For control elements, we’ll need Damnation, Decree of Pain, and Life’s Finale. That’s 59, and we’re not even close to a coherent deck. Still we have no ramp, card draw, or enchantment and artifact removal. We’re going to need to make some hard decisions. I think about cutting most of the mill elements and just making it a Zombie/Control deck, designed to late game use Mimeoplasm on stuff that’s gotten killed if folks can’t handle the Zombies. Or maybe a toolbox of some kind, again using Mimeoplasm as a late-game card.

Let’s try another shot at making this work. Cut Grindstone, Whetstone, Windfall, and we’re back down to 55. Some mana ramp is required, and since our spots are tight, I think I’ll go with the bigger hitters of Explosive Vegetation and Skyshroud Claim, mostly because mana our curve is relatively low. We don’t really need to spend several turns ramping. I then realize our Forest count will be pretty low, but we may have threshold quite early, so Skyshround Claim becomes Far Wanderings. Add Sol Ring to take us to 58.

We can’t play the tribal theme without Patriarch’s Bidding. Despite it being my favorite card, Living Death simply doesn’t work here because we’re filling up other peoples’ yards as well.

Because we occasionally want to fill up our own graveyard with Zombies, we’ll use Greater Good and Read the Runes for card draw. 61. We still need a cut, so Shared Trauma goes. No one is going to help us out with it (unless that someone is playing Karador), so we’re back at 60—with the target being 63.

I find myself in a bit of a bind because one of our colors, green, has some really good artifact and enchantment removal, but given that our numbers are already tight, we don’t seem to have the luxury of dedicating lots of slots. That probably means creatures that can get multiple types, so we look at staples like Acidic Slime and Woodfall Primus. Primus is slightly problematic due to the triple green, but we can certainly load up on lands that make black and green such as Bayou, Overgrown Tomb, Tainted Wood, and the new Woodland Cemetery, not to mention Reflecting Pool and Exotic Orchard, then all the blue-green lands. Slime is definitely in (61), but let’s think about Primus.

One of the other problems with the low amount of green is that it makes Survival of the Fittest more difficult to effectively play. Survival is such a good card and certainly fits the theme of getting stuff in our graveyard while kind of being card draw. It’s worth the risk, so that’s 62.

I stop. Full stop. This deck is awful.

This page then sits on my desktop, still open, taunting me, for two days as I figure out why it’s not going to make it. It’s not using the elements to their fullest—the control of blue and black and the utility of green. I’m trying to shoehorn two things into one, and the synergy that I had hoped for simply isn’t appearing. It’s back to the drawing board.

The first thing I do is look at my Mimeoplasm list from a few weeks ago. I’ve played it a handful of times, and it’s been some fun, but it’s been less than powerful. I played a game where I got the whole ramp suite going, and I had ten more lands than everyone else, but I was doing nothing. I see about 14 cards that can come out.

Out: Crystal Ball, Hedron Crab, Penumbra Wurm, Phyrexian Ingester, Riddlekeeper, Sangromancer, Tornado Elemental, Xathrid Demon, Khalni Heart Expedition, Lurking Predators, Visions of Beyond, Garruk Wildspeaker, Promise of Power, Shared Trauma, Jace’s Archivist.

So what direction do we go? I really don’t want everyone else’s Mimeoplasm deck. I think I’m going to try to get a little janky with some control and bounce elements. Bouncing Mimeoplasm seems kind of good since the creatures are exiled. If I have to use my own guys, I can get them back with Riftsweeper.

The first thing in are the bouncers: Equilibrium, Cloudstone Curio, and Crystal Shard. I put Portcullis in the Jank column for the moment. When I’m looking at things that bounce a permanent, I come across Heimdar, Rimewind Master. I know we have to use him—and all the basic lands become Snow-Covered. Deny Reality seems like it might get some mileage, so that’s definitely in.

If we’re going with the bounce theme, we’re going to have to think about more enters-the-battlefield triggers. Mystic Snake is a definite, and we’ll need a creature-killer or two. I think I’ll keep it simple and go with Bone Shredder and Shriekmaw. There’s already Acidic Slime, and one more utility destruction creature would be good. It’s either Indrik Stomphowler or Woodfall Primus. I’m trying to otherwise keep the curve on the low end, so I think I can use the Primus.

I still want some milling, so Geth will have to come in, especially since he does such great double duty. We’ve now put in 10 to cover the 15 we took out. Since graveyard removal, especially targeted, is going to be a bit of a blowout for us, we’re going to have to put in Willbender. And since the morph is always Willbender, we’ll include Mischievous Quanar as well. And who am I kidding? This deck needs Survival of the Fittest.

Looks like we have four slots left and still need some card draw. Dimir Cutpurse serves two purposes (the draw and discard), so he’s in. Wall of Blossoms makes sense since popping it back into our hand is full of value. Krosan Tusker also performs two roles in that he gets a card (and a land) and contributes to Oversold Cemetery, so he’s in. For the last spot, we’ll drop in Demonic Tutor so that we can get that one thing we need to get rolling (I’m betting that it will be Damnation, Decree of Pain, or Life’s Finale most of the time).

After all that, here’s the list:

The Mimeoplasm

Sheldon Menery

0th Place at Test deck on 10-09-2011

Commander

Creatures (29)

Planeswalkers (2)

Lands (37)

Spells (32)

This deck looks interesting and way more playable than the previous version of The Mimeoplasm. The General is definitely a later-game part of the strategy, after running some of the other shenanigans. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m not going to run a contest or anything, but if any of you better-at-deckbuilding-than-me types want to take a shot at a Mimeo/Zombie deck and it’s good and fun, I’ll be happy to feature it. Next week, we’ll Embrace the Chaos with my build of Karador, Ghost Chieftain.