Everyone Wants To See The Finished House

“It always amazes me to think that every house on every street is full of so many stories; so many triumphs and tragedies, and all we see are yards and
driveways.”

– Glenn Close

Everyone wants to see the end result when it comes to house shopping. They want to see the marble countertops, the brand new bathroom accessories. The
brand new refrigerator catches everyone’s attention, as does that big light fixture in front of the entrance. No one ever bothers to ask what the house
looked like during construction or checks to see if the contractors did their due diligence when building the initial framework of the house.

Magic players are the same way.

For the most part, we don’t want to see the process behind getting a deck to its final form (I’m going to fight the urge to include Cell references and
assimilating technology from other combatants to assume a final form. You’re welcome!); instead, we like looking at decklists. We like seeing a
well-thought out list that has all of the angles covered.

In fact, if a person does well with a list that we didn’t feel was in the optimal form, we tend to criticize instead of praise. Think about it: that person
just did well with a decklist that wasn’t optimized, one that wasn’t as well tuned as the other lists that person played against. That shows an understanding of matchups and their own decklists as well as an indication of player skill. Instead, we say “Really? Only three of
“X” card? How did he get away with four of that card?!”

Even more often than that, we have others who show us lists that aren’t complete/optimized and we shoot them down; this can happen at Friday Night Magic or
even in local play groups where we see a list or hear an idea from a friend and immediately shoot it down.

“Too slow, will never work.”

“What if they Thoughtseize you?”

“How do you beat Pack Rat/Master of Waves/Stormbreath Dragon/Supreme Verdict? Your idea won’t work in Standard.”

Just think… if we spent more time trying to flesh these alternate ideas out instead of shooting down anything that isn’t an optimized killing machine, we
wouldn’t get stuck in stale formats where everyone falls in line and plays the same decks. Remember, even the best decks were brews at one point, not the
advanced killing machines that they’ve become today.

Take a look at this list:

Mono-Black Devotion

Brian Braun-Duin

1st Place at Grand Prix on 10-20-2013

Standard

Creatures (15)

Lands (25)

Spells (20)

Sideboard

This is where Mono-Black Devotion started. No Bile Blight, less than four Pack Rats maindeck, two Whips of Erebos in the maindeck, Nightveil Specters over
Lifebane Zombie, Doom Blade maindeck…

If someone showed you this today, of course you’d say “Why the hell do you have two Pack Rats in the sideboard? Especially with two Whips in the maindeck?”
Some of you would even question the Temples as well as the Nightveil Specters over the Lifebane Zombies. Instead of noting the good about the deck, we tend
to focus on the bad.

Of course, some of these choices are based on the metagame back then, but my point still stands; Mono-Black Devotion wasn’t always the optimized mega
killing machine that it is now. The main shell is similar/the same, but it wasn’t always optimized. It took months of results, tuning, and testing to
sculpt the list that you face today.

All of that is meant to say: we should explore our ideas a bit more thoroughly than we currently do. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve heard say “I
wonder if Slivers is worth trying” that simply replied “nah, won’t work”. Upon questioning, it became clear they’d never tried to sleeve the cards up and
throw them around, they simply inferred that the deck was unplayable due to a personal thought.

We always want to seem like we’re ahead of the game, so we tend to naysay everything to look like we know what we’re talking about. It’s much easier to say
“oh, the person got lucky” when their inference is wrong than to have to admit that their idea/hypothesis was wrong when no one ever does well with
Slivers. People hate admitting they’re wrong (me too, actually).

So today, I’ve got some random ideas that I’ve come up with based on the M15 spoilers. Some are Standard, some are not. Some involve M15 cards, some are
ideas that M15 cards sparked (but weren’t good enough to be involved in). These are the frames, not the house with vinyl siding and a nice fountain in the
front garden. These are in the “dirt under the fingernails” phase decks. Some are not even good, but they’re the shells for ideas that I’ve had.

One of my personal issues is fear of rejection, fear of being told that something I did wasn’t good enough. So I have a ton of ideas that I never
bother telling others about or even writing an article about because I immediately start poking holes in my own idea, finding issues that I can imagine
others telling me. Instead of trying to defend an idea that I start losing confidence in, I simply keep it to myself. Then, weeks/months later, I see a
winning/successful list that incorporates at least the central idea that I came up with and have a moment of selfish indignation. “I came up with that
first!” But… did I really? I didn’t have confidence in it, I didn’t flesh out the idea like this person did, putting the time in to learn the
deck/matchups; do I really deserve any recognition at all when I couldn’t even have the confidence/time to work on the list?

Not really…

So this is my “ideas” article. I’ve take some further than others, but they all started with a spark. How much you stoke the embers will determine how big
the flame becomes. If you let others stamp it out, then it never had the chance to grow in the first place…

Big Green X’s

This card has been noted in multiple articles, mostly for the effect this reprinting will have for the card’s price so Modern players can more readily
access it for use. The uses in Standard though, have been very few; convoke works really well when you have a critical mass of cheap, good creatures, and
Standard isn’t as readily abused as Modern in that regard.

However, my roommate TJ and I worked on a G/u Devotion deck with Chord, and the first time he (easily) chorded for a Hornet Queen to shut my Jund Monsters
deck down, I was convinced it had a home. While the inconsistencies of Devotion decks are still quite frustrating, the power couldn’t be denied.

I’ve seen a lot of people give the half-hearted “it’s ok, but not good enough” response on this card; however, in a devotion deck, there are a ton of times
you have a bunch of mana and nothing all that great to do with it. You want to add more powerful cards, but if you start adding
planeswalkers/non-creatures, your Garruk, Caller of Beasts becomes less powerful. You’ve already added Chord of Calling, you can’t really afford any more
non-creatures. How do you find a middle ground?

Enter Genesis Hydra. A great mana sink that allows you to get a huge creature in addition to a nice permanent, I don’t understand why people aren’t more
excited about this card.

So while there have been G/b and G/r devotion decks, I really liked the power of Prophet of Kruphix with Chord of Calling and want to try out G/u devotion.

G/U Devotion

Michael Martin

Test deck on 07-18-2014

Standard

Creatures (29)

Planeswalkers (4)

4 Garruk, Caller of Beasts

Lands (23)

Spells (4)

Another route we could take this idea would be with Deathrite Shaman and Satyr Wayfinder (perhaps with Commune with the Gods) since we need the cheap
creatures for convoke, but I didn’t dive in that far…

Most of these cards are pretty self explanatory in terms of why I included them, but I want to touch on a couple of points. Soul of Ravnica and Prime
Speaker Zegana both give you card draw engines you can search up with Chord of Calling; while Garruk does most of the heavy lifting in this deck, you can’t
Chord for him. Prime Speaker is the card of choice when you have a decent sized creature on board (like Polukranos) already and Soul of Ravnica is for when
you have a ragtag group of mana dorks and need a way to draw cards. If I have action in hand already (or a Garruk in play), I’ll go get a Prophet of
Kruphix to really push me far ahead. Of course, you need to be careful about removal spells when you do this as well.

I wanted to include Kiora’s Follower as Voyaging Satyrs five-through-whatever, but you can’t play it off of Burning-Tree Emissary.

Speaking of Burning-Tree Emissary….

Illusory Angel

On turn 3 (or 2 with a mana dork), you can cast Illusory Angel with the help of Burning Tree Emissary; even still, what can we do with that
information?

Well, my first thought was to try to include more free spells to let us cast Angel whenever we want. This meant Ornithopter and Astral Cornucopia. With
those spells, you start to want Shrapnel Blast and Ensoul Artifact. Then you want Darksteel Citadel….

Then our deck starts looking similar to the U/R Five deck that BBD played in a Versus video last week:

UR Five

Brian Braun-Duin

Test deck on 07-11-2014

Standard

Creatures (6)

Lands (24)