{From Right Field is a column for Magic players on a budget or players who don’t want to play netdecks. The decks are designed to let the budget-conscious player be competitive in local, Saturday tournaments. They are not decks that will qualify a player for The Pro Tour. As such, the decks written about in this column are, almost by necessity, rogue decks. They contain, at most, eight to twelve rares. When they do contain rares, those cards will either be cheap rares or staples of which new players should be trying to collect a set of four, such as Wrath of God, City of Brass, or Birds of Paradise. The decks are also tested by the author, who isn’t very good at playing Magic. His playtest partners, however, are excellent. He will never claim that a deck has an 85% winning percentage against the entire field. He will also let you know when the decks are just plain lousy. Readers should never consider these decks "set in stone" or "done." If you think you can change some cards to make them better, well, you probably can, and the author encourages you to do so.}
Right off the bat, I gotta apologize for the last couple of columns. I know that I’ve been off my game. Decks that looked promising simply tanked on me. This, of course, bummed me out. In turn, I wasn’t in My Happy Place when I was writing. I apologize. You deserve better.
Really. You do. I’m not being facetious. If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be here. I mean, I’d be here, as in where I’m at as I write this. I just wouldn’t be published on Star City. You know what I mean. Anyway, I’m sorry.
As far as this week goes, as I promised I wanted to look at making budget versions of some of the decks that are clearly the king of the hill of KBC, starting with Black Hand.
Black Hand’s power comes from the undercosted creatures that Black now has access to. Green is typically the color of creatures with efficient mana-to-power ratios. Black doesn’t normally get that without a drawback. For example, both Takenuma Bleeder and Trained Armodon are 3/3 creatures for three mana. Granted the Armodon has double-Green in its casting cost versus a single Black for the Bleeder, but that’s not an issue in mono-colored decks. To get Black a 3/3 creature for three mana, Wizards gave it the “lose a life when it does something” drawback. And we’re falling all over ourselves to play it!
Meanwhile, Trained Armodon is standing in the corner like the geeky girl who doesn’t yet realize that she’s hot. “But . . . but . . . I’m a 3/3 for three mana, too. Why doesn’t anyone want me?”
This doesn’t even consider the 3/3 for two mana creature, Raving Oni-Slave. FYI, I hate him.
Yep, he’s beefy. Yep, he can run the table. Yep, he can be your downfall just as easily. In fact, let me tell you the story of how my own Oni-Slave killed me . . .
Dr. Strangehand or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Hate the Slave
I was playing against White Weenie and went second. On his first turn, he dropped a Lantern Kami, and on his second a Hand of Honor. I dropped Raving Oni-Slave on my turn, going to sixteen. (He had swung with the Kami on turn 2.) Sure, he couldn’t go anywhere with the Hand of Honor on the other side of the board, but, if the Hand swung, I’d be trading two damage for three. I’d take that trade. On his third turn, he swung again, putting me at thirteen. Before I could attack, he cast Otherworldly Journey on my Oni-Slave. Uh-oh. I was down to ten. With no Demon that I could drop on turn 3, I played an Ogre Marauder and was soon at seven when the Oni-Slave came back into play. On his next turn, he swung with the Hand and the Kami, putting me at four. He then cast a second Otherworldly Journey on my Oni-Slave. Leaving and coming, it took six more of my life. Game over.
The Problem with Black Hand
From the perspective of a budget deck builder, the Black Hand deck isn’t too bad. It only has three problems: Yukora, the Prisoner; Ink-Eyes, Servant of the Oni; and Umezawa’s Jitte. Those are three pretty big potholes on the road to Black Hand victory. Luckily, there are enough cards to choose from that we can dull the pain of losing those cards.
That’s Not What I Said!
Sometimes, when I write stuff like that, I get a flood of e-mails that go something like this:
Romeo,
No wonder you’re such a scrub! How can you say that Goblin Chariot is as good as Goblin Sharpshooter?!?
Your Biggest Fan,
Mitch
Look, I know, at least at the upper ends, when a card is much better than another. For example, Yukora, the Prisoner, is better than Gutwrencher Oni. I know that. The Prisoner is a 5/5 for four mana. The G-Oni is a 5/4 for five mana. When we’re trying to create a deck that doesn’t use Yukora, though, the Oni isn’t a bad replacement. Sure, it’s a turn slower. However, it has two things going for it. It tramples where the Prisoner doesn’t, and you can have more than one on the board at a time. (Also, when the G-Oni leaves play, you don’t lose your Hand of Cruelty.) Then again, the Prisoner doesn’t make you discard.
It’s the same with Umezawa’s Jitte. I know that Manriki-Gusari isn’t per se “better than” the Jitte. But, if you don’t have twenty or twenty-five bucks to spend on one card, the Gusari has some advantages. The Gusari trumps the Jitte because it kills it. It also kills Sword of Fire and Ice and any other equipment including competing Manriki-Gusaris. In addition, like the Gutwrencher Oni, you can have multiples of the Gusari out, but you can only have one Jitte at a time.
Finally: The Deck
As usual, I spent a fair amount of time figuring out which cards to use and in what numbers. I’m not going to bore you with the – let’s see – six iterations of this. The end result was Bad Day at Black Rock.
23 Lands
1 Shizo, Death’s Storehouse
1 Tomb of Urami
16 Swamp
1 Island
4 Waterveil Cavern
23 Creatures
4 Hand of Cruelty
4 Nezumi Graverobber
4 Wicked Akuba
4 Ogre Marauder
3 Takenuma Bleeder
4 Gutwrencher Oni
14 Other Spells
4 Kiku’s Shadow
4 Manriki-Gusari
4 Distress
2 Death Denied
Sideboard
4 Hinder
4 Honden of Night’s Reach
4 Hideous Laughter
3 Reito Lantern
I know that the creature base looks simple. “He just dropped the Bleeder by one, and ran with it.” On the contrary, I looked at Nezumi Cutthroat as a four-of with only three of the other two-manacreatures. Raving Oni-Slave had been in there. Scourge of Numai showed up for a while. In the end, I found this base to be the best.
Yes, there are a couple of rares. Both are lands. Neither is expensive, and both can be huge. At first glance, the Storehouse doesn’t seem to make much sense in here. There aren’t any Legends. No, but it kills other Storehouses. Once in a while, the flipped Graverobber steals a Legend, too. Giving it Fear is nice. The Tomb is more offensive. Against decks without fliers or a way to deal with a 5/5 (“Beware Kiku’s Shadow!”), it can be worth the investment of land. Just don’t ever use it if you’re not completely sure it will survive, unless you have to in order to stay in the game, say to block an Eiganjo Freerider. (Of course, I would argue that, if you’re popping off the Tomb just to survive, you won’t survive much longer.)
Oppressive Will is important. I had been playing Hisoka’s Defiance in that sideboard slot, but the Defiance doesn’t stop Final Judgment or Enduring Ideal. The other ones should be self-explanatory. The Black Honden is for the control decks, Hideous Laughter is for other weenie decks, and Reito Lantern is ******
Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned from Black Hand
I hate it when a deck that I just know in bones is good, but I can’t get it to work. The cards are all there. The mana’s fine. But it just won’t work. What am I doing wrong? In this case, I wasn’t leaving the Gusari on an active creature. The biggest lesson I learned was that, if your opponent can swing the next turn, leave the guy with the Gusari back. Inevitably, if I swung, the next turn, a Jitte would hit, and that was the end of my army.
The second-biggest lesson was to wait to kill the Jitte until combat started. If you kill the Jitte as soon as they cast it, they’ll just drop another. I don’t know why it always works like that. Apparently, people other than me are able to get multiple Jittes in hand. I kill one. They drop a second right away, equip, swing, kill my guy. It’s awful. Don’t kill the Jitte until combat starts!
Where’s My Big Buddy?
As beefy as he is, the Scourge of Numai just didn’t make the cut. I have to say that it was a close call. I almost dropped the Wicked Akuba for him. In fact, if you were to do that, I couldn’t argue with you. I left him out because of one simple piece of math: 2 + 2 > 4.
You see, this deck seems to live and die but its two-mana spells. They are some of the most powerful in the block. While the other guy might drop a Scourge on turn four, you can kill it with Kiku’s Shadow and drop a Nezumi Graverobber on turn 4.
Speaking of the Graverobber, still, too many people see him as a sideboard card. He’s good in the maindeck. So what if you’re not playing against Gifts or Reanimator? You don’t like the idea of a 4/2 swinging on turn three? How about making them pitch a Kokusho and then stealing it? Even better – okay, not better, just more fun – take a Sakura-Tribe Elder, sacrifice it to grab a land, lather, rinse, repeat. Like I said, fun times morning, noon, or night.
Heigh, Ho, Heigh, Ho, It’s Off to Play We Go
Given the modicum of success that this was having online, I packed it up for the tourney.
There was no tourney. No enough people showed up. There weren’t even any packs we could draft! What’s up with that? The five of us who were there – me, Charles, Jonathan (finally), Charlie, and Travis “The Legend” (“Thank God There’s Only One!”) – decided to play Pirates instead. If you’ve never played Pirates, it’s a blast, even when you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s a collectible card game that’s also miniatures. Yes, really. You punch the ships out of the cards, along with any crews or special stuff you get, and sail around doing battle and collecting treasure. I’ve never liked miniatures before, mostly because of the space they took up. The great thing with Pirates is that you can disassemble the ships, put them back on the cards, and easily transport them. And entire fleet and crew take up no more space than a Magic deck.
Really, though, I digress. Just check our Pirates when you get the chance.
Speaking of Pirates, Where’s the Nezumi Cutthroat?
Get it? Cutthroat? Pirates? Am I the Master of Segues or what? Anyway, if you’ve been playing Magic this Summer, you’ll notice that Black decks are everywhere. This makes the Cutthroat less than wonderful. In the early stages of KBC, when Black Hand was a fringe deck, a 2/1 with Fear for two mana was excellent. Now, not so much. Let’s see, for two mana, I can have a 2/1 that can’t block all of the Black critters comin’ my way but that can be blocked all to pieces, or I can have a 2/2 like Wicked Akuba that can suck the life outta my opponent if it hits them. Oh, yeah, and it can block if it needs to.
The Make-Believe Tournament in Which the Author Finishes in the Top Four
Regardless, the bottom line is that I didn’t get to play it a sanctioned tourney this week. Let’s pretend I did, though. In round one, I would have beaten Joe’s Reanimator deck – finally! – because I had maindeck graveyard removal in the Graverobbers. I would have flattened a White Weenie deck in round two. Round three would have been another tough matchup against Adam’s Snakes deck. Finally, in round four, I would have won the mirror match. Then, it the top four, I would have lost to Adam’s Snakes deck again. (It always happens that way, doesn’t it?) Not bad for a deck in which the only two rares are lands, huh?
Safe at Home
After having my entire fleet sunk by broadside attacks from French ships (coulda been worse; coulda been rear assaults, what with them being French and all), I started thinking about other Black-based KBC decks. My mind drifted back to a B/R Spirit-Arcane deck that Karl Allen and I were working on. Essentially, it dealt some early damage via beats then finished with a lot of Spirit and/or Arcane spells while Thief of Hope was on board. We called it, unimaginatively, SpArcky. Even though it was late on Friday, I began working on a post-Saviors KBC version. Again, I’m going to spare you the details of how I got from Point A to Point G. Suffice it to say that SpArcky now looks like this:
24 Lands
3 Lantern-Lot Graveyard
11 Mountain
10 Swamp
24 Creatures
3 Bile Urchins
3 Frostling
4 Hearth Kami
3 Pain Kami
3 Ghost-Lit Raider
4 Thief of Hope
4 Scuttling Death
12 Other Spells
4 Glacial Ray
4 Soulless Revival
4 Manriki-Gusari
15 Sideboard
4 Nezumi Graverobber
4 Honden of Night’s Reach
4 Honden of Infinite Rage
3 Hideous Laughter
This deck is able to neutralize Umezawa’s Jitte in three ways. First and most obvious is the Hearth Kami. Second, the Gusari on an active creature. Third and most subtle is the ability to prevent combat damage. Yes, I know that there’s no Kami of False Hope or Ethereal Haze. The combat damage prevention happens when you block with a creature that has a built-in sacrifice mechanism. If you sac before combat damage is on the stack, the Jitte never triggers. Everyone knows it’s true for Sac-ura-Tribe Elder, and it’s just as true for Scuttling Death.
Playing with SpArcks
First, this deck can deliver early beats. Don’t hesitate to cast a turn 2 Hearth Kami and then use a turn 3 Frostling to remove a Sakura-Tribe Elder before swinging. Typically, this deck deals twelve to fifteen damage via combat. The rest is sucked off of your opponent life’s total via the Thief’s triggered ability.
When you have a choice to sacrifice stuff, try to sac Scuttling Death. It brings back all of the other Spirits. Of course, you want to make sure that there are Spirits to bring back, too. If you’re going to sac more than one in a turn, make sure that the smaller ones go in first if you don’t already have something in there that the Scuttling Death can get.
A sweet side effect of this deck’s abilities is the fact that it actually has some game against the Gifts deck because Final Judgment isn’t the end of the creatures. Take this series of plays at the end my third game against one Gifts opponent.
I had lethal damage on the board. With my opponent at seven, I had a Thief of Hope, Scuttling Death, two Frostlings, and a Bile Urchin on board. I had seven lands in play and two Soulless Revivals in hand. When my opponent cast Final Judgment, I sac-ed both Frostlings to kill the Thief, I popped the Urchin to drop him to six, and then sac-ed the Scuttling Death to give itself -1/-1, bringing back the Thief. Instead of casting the Soulless Revivals at the end of his turn, I waited so that I could use the Thief to maximize his life loss. I drew and played a land. I dropped the Thief. I followed that with Revival Spliced onto Revival, getting the Death and the Urchin. That dropped him to five. I cast the Urchin, dropping him to four. At the end of his turn (in which he did nothing of consequence to the outcome), I popped the Urchin to drop him to three. Back on my turn, I cast the Death to bring him to two, popped it to get back the Urchin, and cast the Urchin. That left him at one. Then, the Urchin bit the big one to end the match.
Please, don’t misinterpret what I’m saying here. The fact that this deck has the ability to beat Gifts doesn’t mean that it should regularly do so. Think of it like a model who wants to act. Just because someone puts her in a movie doesn’t mean she’s any good. It just means that she’s in a movie. Heck, one or two of the scenes may be even be good. Actually, it’s not really anything like that. I just needed a way to squeeze some cheesecake in here.
The Final Countdown
After I was satisfied with the B/R Thief deck, I started asking myself, could there be a mono-Black Thief deck? The answer was kinda. The great thing about the B/R version was the instant-timed and cheap stuff that could be Spliced, thus saving some spells for later use. For example, six mana meant that I could cast Soulless Revival, Splicing on both Glacial Ray and Soulless Revival, for example. This triggered the Thief’s ability and left me with two more Arcane cards in hand, cards that could be used to trigger his ability again. For those of us on a budget (i.e. we can’t get four copies of Sickening Shoal), there aren’t a lot of cheap, instant-timed ways to trigger the Thief. I tried Rend Flesh, but that was hit or miss. Ditto with Horobi’s Whisper. Most of the other spells were too costly, mana-wise. I had Waking Nightmare and Swallowing Plague in the deck for a few games, but I ended up with something I called Bad Day at Black Rock after the great Spencer Tracy flick.
24 Lands
17 Swamp
4 Waterveil Cavern
1 Island
1 Shizo, Death’s Storehouse
1 Tomb of Urami
22 Creatures
4 Bile Urchin
4 Wicked Akuba
4 Nezumi Graverobber
4 Thief of Hope
4 Scuttling Death
2 He Who Hungers
14 Other Spells
4 Kiku’s Shadow
4 Soulless Revival
4 Manriki-Gusari
2 Devouring Greed
15 Sideboard
4 Hinder
4 Honden of Night’s Reach
4 Hideous Laughter
3 Honden of Seeing Winds
This mono-Black version turned out not to be as good as the B/R version. The reason was simple. The B/R version had more good, cheap, instant-timed Arcane spells, more creatures that could sacrifice themselves, and, well, Hearth Kami. When the only way to deal with the Jitte is to sac a creature before combat damage or use the Gusari, the deck just isn’t as efficient.
And One Last Deck
As Jay Moldenhauer-Salazar mentioned in his “official” Magic piece last week, I got dibs on the Barrel Down Sokenzan – Seismic Assault deck for Standard. Sadly, Seismic Assault is not in Ninth Edition (a.k.a. 9E). That gives you about two weeks (depending on when this gets published) to play the deck. With no testing, here’s how I would build the deck I call Double-Barreled Assault.
24 Lands
24 Mountain
8 Creatures
4 Hearth Kami
4 Two-Headed Dragon
28 Other Spells
4 Chromatic Sphere
4 Magma Jet
4 Barrel Down Sokenzan
4 Seismic Assault
4 Wayfarer’s Bauble
4 Shrapnel Blast
4 Pyrite Spellbomb
Obviously, the point of this deck is to throw damage at your opponent. The ultimate way to do that is to drop a ton of Mountains, cast Barrel Down Sokenzan for every Mountain you have, and then pitch every land to the Seismic Assault, pointing it at your opponent. That won’t always work. So, there are two other potential win conditions. One is the sadly-underrated (and also not-in-9E) Two-Headed Dragon. The other is Shrapnel Blast.
How do you play the deck? Survive with burn long enough to win. I wish it was more complicated than that, but Red rarely is.
As usual, you’ve been a great audience. Join me next week, when I do a budget version of the Gifts Ungiven deck.
Oh, snap! You’ve been Punk’d! You can’t make a budget version of Gifts Ungiven!
FromRightField-at-AOL-dot-com