{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. The author tries to limit the
number of non-land rares as a way to limit the cost of the decks. 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 Dark Confidant, Birds of Paradise, or Wrath of God. The decks are also tested by the
author, who isn’t very good at playing Magic. 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.}
I want to give a shout out to the male hoopsters of Caltech. Obviously, if they go to school at
Caltech, they are some extremely smart guys. That much is obvious. It’s like saying “Hey,
there’s an attractive woman in the Victoria’s
Secret catalogue!” The Beavers (that’s the name of Caltech’s teams, you
dirty boy, girl, or other) may have unraveled String Theory and comprehend Heisenberg’s
Uncertainty Principle, but apparently they haven’t figured out the intricacies of the zone
defense or the pick and roll. You see, a couple of weeks ago the boys from Caltech won their first
basketball game in 208 tries. That’s right, one and 207 since 1996. Think about everything
that’s happened in the world since 1996, and then realize that none of that included
Caltech’s men winning a basketball game until the first week of January 2007. So, a hearty
“Congratulations!” to them.
One win and two-hundred-seven losses. Wow. Why would you do something so long when you were so
bad at doing it? It obviously isn’t the sense of accomplishment. It can’t be the throngs
of adoring fans. The only I could come up with was love. Those guys love playing basketball. For
them, playing and losing beats not playing at all.
It was strange that I read about that game when I did. I had just finished last week’s piece
looking at some of the cheap decks that are strong contenders in Standard. I took the U/W Snow Control
deck for a spin in an online tournament. I made the finals, but I lost to Boros Deck Wins.
(“Surprise!”) To some folks, that wouldn’t be like losing. It is, though. If you
don’t win the tournament, you’ve lost. Or, to quote my favorite good-ol’-boy NASCAR
saying “Second place is first loser.” Sure, I may have won some packs, but it’s not
as if I won a tournament. Other than drafts, I haven’t won a tournament in a long, long, long
time. In fact, it’s been years.
Part of the reason for that is simply shrinking numbers. I’ve played in fewer tournaments.
A whole lot fewer. The fact is that there is only one place in town that I could play in tournaments,
and the times that they start their tourneys are not very convenient for an adult with a life and
family and friends and who doesn’t want to stay at the mall all afternoon and evening on a
Saturday.
Regardless, I haven’t won a Constructed tournament in about two and a half years, maybe more.
That includes real-life paper tourneys and fake-life online ones. Yet, I keep playing and keep
writing. I know that this will be hard to believe based on the quality of my writing and the
lackluster decks I create, but the writing and playing take up a lot of my time.
“How much time does it take?”
I typically write and/or play online between the time Luanne goes to bed (around 9:00 PM) and when
I go to bed (between 11:00 PM and midnight). Real-life playtesting with the gang is limited to Friday
nights. Sometimes, I get some extra time in when Luanne takes a nap on a Saturday or Sunday. This
doesn’t leave me much free time for anything else. When I say “much free time,” I
mean pretty much none. Let me put it this way. I just watched Dodgeball for the first time
ever last weekend. As much as I like Star Wars, I still haven’t seen Episode III: The
Revenge of the Sith. I’ve given up on trying to keep up with Lost, 24, and The
Shield. I figure I’ll catch those when my brother gets them on DVD. I even missed the
theatrical re-release of The Nightmare Before Christmas, one of my all-time favorite movies.
I could go on and on and on, but the bottom line is that my life consists of (in order of time
consumed) working (including getting ready for, going to, and coming from) a job that I abhor, spending
time with my wife, family, and friends, Magic, and everything else.
Don’t get me wrong. Except for the work part (a sadly necessary evil), I wouldn’t
change anything about that list. Without work, however, I could get caught up on movies (I still
haven’t seen The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Gladiator, or The Return of the
King) and make a dent in my pile of books. (Next up are Slack, about doing less in order
to be more productive; Bill James’s The Politics of Glory, about who gets into the
baseball Hall of Fame and why; and Hugh Laurie’s book – yes, the guy who plays
House – The Gun Seller. [A very good read, but not a patch on anything written
by his old comedy partner Stephen Fry… – Craig.]) Maybe I could even get better at Magic.
Romeo ← Not kidding himself on that one
Why do I do this to myself? I love playing Magic. Playing and losing beats not playing at all.
Don’t get me wrong. I’d rather play and win than play and lose. Ask any of the
so-called “casual” Magic players, and I’m pretty sure you’d get the same answer
from everyone. Except for those contrarians that say the opposite of what they think you expect them
to say.
“No we won’t,” they reply.
Interestingly, only Magic players seem to be confused by this. Seriously. Go to your next Magic
tournament and ask everyone this: if you knew that you’d never win another Magic game, would you
quit playing Magic? The answer will be a nearly universal “of course. Why would I play if I
knew I’d never win again?”
Now, find the people you know who like games but don’t necessarily play tournament Magic or
tournaments of any sort, and ask them: if you knew that you’d never win another game of Fluxx /
Carcassonne / Axis & Allies / Simpsons Treehouse of Horror Monopoly / Settlers of
Cataan/Family Guy Uno / Trivial Pursuit / Madden 2007 / Scrabble / Operation / Dance Dance
Revolution, would you quit playing that game? When I ask this to my non-tournament-playing family and
friends, they all answered “of course not. I don’t play just to win. I play to have fun
with you guys.” Well, all except for one. Jason said that he’d quit playing Scrabble if
he knew he’d never win another game. Then again, he’s our Scrabble king. “Obnoxious
off of the ‘o’ in ‘polo’ and the ‘n’ in ‘gin.’ Over
the triple word score. Plus I emptied my rack. That’s two-hundred-six plus…. Hey, where
are you guys going? This is only the third round. You still have a chance…”
I’m bringing this up now because I’m sure that everyone experiences self-doubt once in
a while. The exceptions are probably Donald Trump, Michael Jordan, and Paris Hilton. Lately,
I’ve been asking myself “why?” This happens to me a couple of times a year. It
usually happens when I’ve just come off a couple of weeks of writing about decks that
didn’t quite work and that I didn’t feel could have been fixed if only I’d had more
time. In other words, I feel like I wasted my time for those couple of weeks.
Something usually happens that makes me snap out of it, though. In this case, it was a ton of
responses both in the fora and via e-mail that said “I loved the Merfolk deck” or
“I’ve been working on a Thallid deck, too.” To be honest, I was stunned. Where were
the denigrators and playa haters? I mean, a couple of people offered suggestions on how to pronounce
“Thallid” (I thought it was “thay-lid;” they said it rhymed with
“salad”), but I got none of the “you suck!” that I expected to get.
In the interim, that is “last week,” I looked at some cheap decks that were doing well
on the tourney scene. A funny thing happened. I found that I liked playing those decks.
*gasp*
*swoon*
*yawn*
Somewhere around half of you are thinking “Well, duh. Of course, you liked playing those
decks. They’re good, and they win. Who doesn’t like to win?” It wasn’t just
the winning, though. It was that I was winning with a deck that didn’t feel like I was cheating.
The other half of you are saying “But you say that playing ‘net decks makes you feel
dirty! How can you betray yourself like that?” You mean, like I was cheating? Yeah, some
‘net decks make me feel like I’m cheating, for example, when I played Solar Flare at a
local tourney a couple of months ago. I actually apologized for winning a couple of matches. Yes,
really.
I didn’t feel dirty, and I didn’t feel like I was cheating with these decks, though.
Maybe it’s because they hadn’t made the big splashes that some others had. Maybe it was
that they were cheap decks. All I can say is that I played ‘net decks in a couple of
online tourneys, and I didn’t feel bad about winning the matches that I won.
Romeo ← Worried that he’s becoming a bad boy
Luanne ← Hoping that Chris is becoming a bad boy
I keep saying “decks.” I guess I should mention that the other deck that I played to a
second-place finish was the Black Rack deck. In fact, you may have read Frank Karsten’s piece a
couple of weeks ago when Black Rack
made a big jump in popularity. Heck, it even got not one, not two, but three exclamation points
from Frank. That’s a lot considering that writers have only a certain allotment of exclamation
points per year, and the year is very young. I may or may not have had something to do with that. I
can neither confirm nor deny it since I have no specific recollection of such events. I will say,
though, that control decks do not like discard, and they really, really, really don’t
like random discard.
I had some soul searching to do. Here I was, playing someone else’s decks – not Talen
Lee’s or Joshua Claytor creation, but one from the faceless Aether of the Internet
– and enjoying it. Into what vile sort of creature was I turning?
Luanne was reading over my shoulder when I wrote that. “You’re so silly,” she
said. “There’s nothing wrong with you playing other decks. It gives you more time to
play.”
“What does that mean?” I was being a bit defensive, feeling guilty about not feeling
guilty for playing ‘net decks.
“Settle down, Beavis. I mean that you spend so much time making your decks work every week
that you don’t just get to play Magic for the sake of playing Magic. You’re always playing
a game and taking notes and writing about the last game and playing another and taking more notes and
on and on and on. Sometimes, I sit here, and I wonder if you’re even having fun.”
“Oh, I am.” Really, I am. I enjoy working on decks, making them better, and writing
about them. From her vantage point, it may look like I’m not because I do a lot of scowling,
staring, and spitting, but I am having fun. Nothing like spitting to bury the fun-o-meter’s
needle all the way to the right. “I’m having fun.”
“Sometimes, you need different fun, though.” I started worrying where my wife was
going with this. If it involved the lingerie model
down the street, though, I’d be okay with it. “There’s nothing wrong with playing
just to play. That’s what you used to do, right?”
“Well, yeah…”
“As long as you get your article done, don’t worry about it. Now,” my little
shift manager said, “play some more Magic, and write!”
“You’re the greatest.”
“I know…”
And she is, too.
This is how I got over my guilt about playing cheap, previously-proven, ‘net decks.
What about the not-so-cheap ones? What about ones like Dragonstorm Combo? Well, I still
couldn’t pull the trigger on one like that. I would feel dirty playing those. That begged a
question. Could I make some of these expensive ‘net decks cheaper? Okay, yes, obviously, I
could make them cheaper. All I had to do was drop the rares. The real question then was could I make
them cheaper but still make them decent decks?
For Dragonstorm, the answer was surely a big fat “no way.” The deck has to have
Dragonstorm and Bogardan Hellkite to be a Dragonstorm Combo deck. Moreover, while some versions
don’t run Lotus Bloom, the best (i.e. most consistent) versions do. They also run those eight
dual lands. Sure, I could grab any Dragon with Dragonstorm, but Mistform Ultimus and Dragon Whelp
weren’t going to get the job done. You want to Storm up four Dragons, and you want those Dragons
to end the game when they come into play. Cheap Dragonstorm Combo? No such animal.
I next turned my Scroogeriffic eye toward Boros Deck Wins.
I’ve been a fan of this color combination since, well, the Winter of 1998-99 when I started in
Magic. Surely, a deck with a ton of weenies and burn could be budgetized easily, right?
Wrong.
I know that the deck’s been tearing it up over the last few months, and I knew what was in
the deck. It’s just that I never really knew what was in the deck. Know what I mean?
No? Okay, what I mean is that I didn’t study it. I saw “weenies and burn.” I had
slowly collected all of the cards, but I never sat down and priced the thing. You could have bowled me
over with a Coco puff. Let’s start off with the manabase. I’m not even going to consider
the Forge[/author]“]Battlefield [author name="Forge"]Forges[/author] and Sacred Foundries. You know how I feel about the dual lands now. Use what
you have. Budget to get the rest. Switch in Guild lands if you have to. There are two Gemstone Mines
at seven bucks each and three Flagstones of Trokair at – what the frack?!? –
twelve bucks for the cheap version. That’s fifty bucks just for the non-dual-rare lands. Man,
am I glad that I followed the advice of that really cute Magic writer and got my Flagstones when they
were cheap. What was that guy’s name again?
Oh, right. Chris Romeo. *giggle*
Anyway, there aren’t any great substitutes for those two lands. We could go up to a fourth
Boros Garrison, but that doesn’t really address the reason why the Gemstone Mine and the
Flagstones are in the deck. The Mine is a way to get Red or White painlessly from a land that comes
into play untapped. The Garrison allows it to be “reset,” too. The Flagstones both thin
the deck and act as anti-Wildfire tech. You will end up with a land in play after Wildfire
wipes everything out if you had a Flagstones in play before hand. All we can really do, then, is
replace one of the Mines with a Garrison and the other Mine and the Flagstones with Plains.
One crazy idea I’m going to try instead is to use one copy of Pillar of Paruns where that
second Gemstone Mine was. There are only two slots in the deck for which it could be used (Giant
Solifuge and Lightning Helix). So, there’s no way I’d use more than one. I may find that
I’ll have to go down to zero, but I’ll start at one. The only other options for this deck,
mana-wise, is to run Boros Signets, and Boros Deck Wins does not want to use turn 2 getting a
mana artifact into play. It wants to drop creatures or play burn. As a last ditch effort to make the
deck cheap, I may run the Signets just to see, but I don’t have any decent expectations for them.
From the manabase, I headed to the Instants and Sorceries. I had good news and bad news here. On
the good side, only one slot of rares in that section. The bad news? It was Char. Forty dollars
worth of Char, to be exact. Ugh. “Quick,” I called to my trusty sidekick, Fred.
“Fire up The Gatherer!”
Of course, I first looked at Red Instant-timed burn spells. Oh, for Yamabushi’s Flame to be
Standard legal again. Sadly, nothing comes close to Char. Fiery Temper deals three damage for three
mana. Fiery Conclusion deals five for two but costs you a creature, too, and it only hits creatures.
Cackling Flames can hit either creatures or players, a major benefit of Char. It’s only three
damage, and it costs four mana. Sometimes, it can deal five damage, but only if you’re hand is
empty. Regardless, I didn’t like the four mana cost. This deck is designed to top out at three
mana. Onto the Sorceries!
You might think that we don’t want to look at Sorceries at all. Instants are more versatile.
True, but this is a Slight-type deck. It typically isn’t holding mana open for the end of the
opponent’s turn. Moreover, Char is usually designed to go to the opponent’s head. Once in
a while, it will be used to clear the way for creatures, but it’s usually “to the dome with
ye!”
With that in mind, Blaze and Flame Fusillade jumped out at me. The first is an X spell. The
Fusillade is a nice trick. Neither got my motor revving. Then, I saw it. My old friend and sometime
crush.
*sigh*
I started asking myself “Why not use Threaten?” Wasn’t the point of Char to
directly lower the opponent’s life total (later in the game) or remove a blocker (earlier)?
Threaten does that. Imagine that the opponent has a Loxodon Hierarch or a Sporesower Thallid out.
Threaten is four damage for three mana. Just take the other guy’s creature, and bash him with
it.
Functionally, though, Threaten is even more damage than that. Let’s say that you have two
Knight of the Holy Nimbus ready to attack. A Sengir Vampire stands in the way. If you had Char, you
could kill the Vampire and get four damage through. With Threaten, however, you take the Vampire and
get eight damage through.
With that, I had convinced myself. Threaten it was.
Finally, I had to tackle those creatures. Whoa. Other than the four Knight of the Holy Nimbus and
the three Scorched Rusalka, all of the creatures are rares.
Kinda.
Depends on your frame of reference.
Icatian Javelineers can be had for between seventy-five cents and a buck. Online, they go for
between one and two tickets, though, my latest check shows that they’re closer to two. In real
life, though, I don’t mind paying between three and four dollars for a set of those guys.
Soltari Priests, either in their original or the new, improved, purple version, are pretty
expensive, clocking in at between sixteen and twenty dollars for a set. Online, though, a set of four
goes for between eleven and twelve tickets. I think we should spring for those in whichever version
we’re playing. They are one of the best two-mana creatures in Magic right now. Nothing Red can
kill them, Flowstone Slide excepted.
This paragraph beat me the hell up. What do I say about Savannah Lions? It’s iconic.
It’s a 2/1 for one mana and no drawbacks, other the fact that Sprout can kill it on the first
turn it swings. With the Priests and Javelineers in the mix already, I can’t tell someone to
also spent twenty-eight dollars on Soltari Priests to fork out money on the Lions, too. Can I?
Um… no, no I can’t. But I thought about it. See? That’s what the
“…” was for. I was thinking there.
Back to Gatherer I went. The question became was the mana cost or the power more important to me?
After a lot of debate with myself, I decided that it had to be mana cost. Without another one-mana
creature, this deck will be relying totally on the Javelineers and Rusalka as the first-turn plays.
But, we also want to get some damage through. A turn 1 Lions usually hits once and maybe twice before
the ground gets clogged. What if we went to the air, though? So, instead of three of the Lions,
I’m putting in three Suntail Hawks. Why not all four? Not only do I have a single Lions online,
but I want White mages to at least start their Savannah Lions collections.
Finally, Giant Solifuge. There’s not even anything close to this guy. Lightning Elemental
is also a 4/1 with Haste for four mana, but it doesn’t have Trample. Also, it can be targeted.
As some pundits have pointed out, the Solifuge is like a direct damage spell that can take out
creatures while also going to the opponent’s head. What they mean is that, thanks to the
Trample, Haste, and untargetability, the opponent who wants to kill this has to have Pyroclasm,
Sulfurous Blast, Wrath of God, or someone to act as a sacrificial lamb in combat. So, they throw a 1/1
or 2/2 up there, lose it, and take two or three damage.
As I said, Lightning Elemental comes closest to the base stats of the Solifuge. Same cost. Same
power and toughness. I don’t like it as a replacement for the Solifuge, though. In another
deck, one with more burn, maybe I’d use it. With no one on the other side of the Red Zone, the
Elemental can be gold. Not in this deck. So, I ended up with a toss-up between Viashino Sandstalker
and Suq’Ata Lancer.
One advantage that they both have over the Solifuge is that they cost one mana less. In a weenie
deck running only twenty-one lands, that’s nothing to sneeze at. They can both be targeted,
which means a well-timed Shock kills them when it couldn’t even look at the Solifuge. However, a
1/1 can’t take either one down. The Sandstalker, being a 4/2, survives that battle while the
Lancer with its Flanking doesn’t even get into a fight with a 1/1 blocker. The blocker is dead
before the fight begins. I decided on the Lancer to start with only because it doesn’t require
an investment of mana on each and every turn. (Speaking of which, Basalt Gargoyle is in the back of my
mind as a pinch-hitter because it’s a 3/2 flier for 2R. Just saying.)
All of this leaves me with:
Boros Deck’s Cheap, V.1.0
2 Mountain
6 Plains
4 Forge[/author]“]Battlefield [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]
4 Boros Garrison
1 Pillar of the Paruns
4 Sacred Foundry
4 Icatian Javelineers
3 Scorched Rusalka
3 Suntail Hawk
1 Savannah Lions
4 Knight of the Holy Nimbus
4 Soltari Priest
1 Giant Solifuge
3 Suq’Ata Lancer
4 Rift Bolt
4 Threaten
4 Volcanic Hammer
4 Lightning Helix
Non-Dual-Land Rares
1 Pillar of the Paruns @ $2.50 each = $2.50
4 Icatian Javelineers @ $1.00 each = $4.00
1 Savannah Lions @ $7.00 each = $7.00
2 Soltari Priest @ $4.00 each = $8.00
2 Soltari Priest @ $5.00 each = $10.00
1 Giant Solifuge @ $8.00 each = $8.00
3 Suq’Ata Lancer @ $0.50 each = $1.50
Total Cost of Non-Dual-Land Rares = $41.00
Again, we have a deck that’s just over forty bucks for the non-dual-land rares. We could get
it under forty by using Viashino Sandstalker or Basalt Gargoyle in the Lancer’s slot, but, oh, I
have a good feeling about Suq’Ata Lancer.
So, how’d it do? Since I’m pretty much out of space (i.e. I’m at the end of
Craig’s editing patience), you’ll have to check in next week.
Romeo ← Becoming such a tease
Chris Romeo
FromRightField-at-Comcast-dot-net
P.S. I have been remiss in not keeping up with the ol’ Magic budget here. The good thing is
that I can start over next week. I had saved some money and bought two Ohran Vipers. There may not be
too many Coldsnap rares that are worth buying, but Ohran Viper is definitely one of them, especially if
you like Green. And I like Green.