{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 Wildfire, Llanowar Wastes, or Birds of Paradise. 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.}
This Week’s Campaign Promise: Party at Romeo’s House!
When I win the 2006 Magic Invitational — an event I can only attend if you vote me in — I will have a huge par-tay at my place. Of course, I don’t want this misconstrued as a bribe of any sort. This is not to say that you have to vote for me to be invited to this party. Everyone will be invited. I’m just sayin’: par-tay at my house. I will even invite some of my ex-girlfriends like Daniela, Irina, Patricia, and, of course, Jen & Jen. If there’s a party, The Jens have to be there.
Voting for the Fan Favorites is currently underway!
[Hate to break it to ya, fella… you’re not on the ballot. — Craig.]
When We Left Our Intrepid Hero…
I was up to the third version of the deconstructed precon deck from Guildpact called Gruul Wilding. I had dropped all of the Auras and the beefiest creatures and was looking at this decklist:
Creatures (25)
- 2 Viridian Shaman
- 4 Bloodscale Prowler
- 4 Dryad Sophisticate
- 2 Gruul Guildmage
- 4 Scab-Clan Mauler
- 2 Scorched Rusalka
- 3 Tin Street Hooligan
- 4 Wild Cantor
Lands (23)
Spells (12)
One thing I need to keep my eye on is the mana. There is no way that I’m going to add Stomping Grounds, since the price is outrageous at this early point in its lifecycle. Karplusan Forest has to be on the radar (especially since it’s a Staple Rare). Pinecrest Ridge is a distant third because this deck needs its lands untapped all the time. You don’t want to use a Pinecrest Ridge to cast a Wild Cantor because you lose the tempo of being able to get a second-turn Scab-Clan Mauler without sacrificing the Cantor, and you couldn’t get a Bloodscale Prowler on turn 2 at all.
How was it going, do you think? Check it out…
Game 1: My opponent was playing a R/B deck with hasty Red critters like Ronin Houndmaster, and Auras like Galvanic Arc and Strand of Undeath to complement Necromancer’s Magemark (and probably Fencer’s Magemark, which I didn’t actually see). It was a back and forth battle, won largely on the back of Wildsize. Wildsize saved one Bloodscale Prowler from Last Gasp and let another beat a Houndmaster in combat. Neither Tin-Street Hooligan nor Viridian Shaman made any difference in this game. (1-0)
Game 2: Throat-Slitter showed up in this one along with Veil of Secrecy to make him unblockable and untargetable. Fortunately, my opponent didn’t want to lose any of his creatures to combat. That means that I was able to swing pretty much unfettered. When he finally did leave someone back to block, Wildsize saved my guy, killed his, and got damage through. Volcanic Hammer did the final three damage. Again, neither Tin-Street Hooligan’s nor Viridian Shaman’s triggered abilities mattered. (2-0)
Game 3: Finally, a Jitte! Not many people rejoice at that, but I’d changed the deck to handle artifacts more readily, and none had shown up. This was a Boros R/W deck with the aforementioned Umezawa’s Jitte. Not wanting to lose a creature to which the Jitte would later be Equipped, he let the Rusalka hit on turn 2, which gave me a 3/3 Mauler. The next turn, the Viridian Shaman took out the Jitte. After that, it was beats and burn for the win. For the third straight game, the spell that dealt the final damage was Volcanic Hammer. (3-0)
Intermission #1, During Which Romeo Digresses About the Owling Mine Deck
I believe in giving credit where credit is due. While Antoine Ruel and Tiago Chan did incredibly well with their Owling Mine decks at Pro Tour Honolulu, I’d like to give a shout out to the man who created the deck months ago: Jay Moldenhauer-Salazar.
Now, I can already hear people saying “That’s not the same deck. He didn’t create it.” I humbly disagree. JMS had as much of a hand in designing Owling Mine as John Rizzo did in creating Friggorid. They both created and wrote first about the basic deck. Others may have come along and added tweaks that turned the decks into Tier 1 decks, but that doesn’t mean that Jay and John weren’t the inventors. That would be like saying that Alexander Graham Bell didn’t invent the telephone because, well, look at cell phones. Oh, and for those who will say “Bell didn’t invent it first; he just got to the Patent Office first,” much of the glory of discovery simply goes to the one who goes public first. You may not like it, but that’s how it is.
Having said that, don’t you dare play that deck at your local tournament this Saturday. I know. “Huh? The deck makes up a quarter of the Top 8 of a Pro Tour, and Romeo says not to play it? Well, there ya go. That’s why he suxors.” While I do “suxor,” it’s not because of this. Here’s why you shouldn’t play it this Saturday… The Owling Mine deck is great because it punishes other control decks, the kind favored by pros. Chan made the semi-finals, according to Aaron Forsythe himself, in part by completely avoiding the most aggressive deck at the tour for seventeen rounds!
You will not — I repeat: you absolutely will not — get that lucky. I promise. It just won’t happen for you. Local weekend tourneys are as cram packed with beatdown decks as a Spring Break party where someone yells “Free beer at our place!” You’ll play Owling Mine and lose. If you don’t believe me, just go try it.
Game 4: At this point, the deck started losing. Not getting swamped. I ended this run at 5-5. I ran through five more versions, playing between five and ten games at a time in an attempt to get this thing working. I typically ended right at .500, like 2-3 or 4-3. Over sixty games, versions of this deck went 29-31. I played more artifact kill, and I played less. I added more beef, and I went the weenie route. I dropped all the burn in favor of one slot of burn, and I went burn heavy.
In the end, no matter what I did, the deck was very middle-of-the-road. I blame Mark Herberholz. By winning Pro Tour You Wish You Could Afford to Visit Here, he showed people the power of the extremely efficient Red and/or Green creatures in the format right now, and people are listening.
Do you notice anything missing from Mr. H’s deck? He’s running exactly zero mana acceleration. That’s right, a Green/X deck with no Birds of Paradise, Llanowar Elves, or Sakura-Tribe Elders. No Kodama’s Reaches or Rampant Growths. He just drops a land and plays a creature. And man, what great creatures.
Look at Kird Ape. Thanks to Stomping Grounds, he can have a 2/3 creature on his first turn. That can lead directly to a 3/3 Scab-Clan Mauler on turn 2. Without acceleration, only Watchwolf can match those stats for a second-turn creature in Standard.
It doesn’t end there, though. Higher up the mana curve (as well as the pocketbook curve), he has Burning-Tree Shaman at the three-mana slot and Giant Solifuge at the four slot with a couple of Rumbling Slums in the sideboard. While the Shaman is the only three-mana creature, he also has Char and Moldervine Cloak. Against most Standard decks right now, there are a whole ton of worse third-turn plays than putting a Moldervine Cloak on a Dryad Sophisticate. Five power coming at you with no way to block it is bad, bad Leroy Brown. Heaven forbid if it’s a 3/3 Mauler that’s wearing the Cloak. That’d make it a 6/6 Trampler on turn three. How you gonna beat that?
One other thing that Mark’s deck did was stick to two colors. By skipping the whole Zoo thing which requires White mana, his mana base was more stable, and he didn’t have to worry about pinging himself to death with more rare lands.
The Price of Tea in China
The problem for us folks From Right Field is that the Pro Tour Honolulu-winning deck is about four-hundred dollars too much for us. The good thing is that it does have a lot of the same elements as the Gruul Wilding precon, though. Dryad Sophisticate’s in both decks. So are Scab-Clan Mauler, Scorched Rusalka, and the Rage Pits. It pretty much ends there, though. Sure, Frenzied Goblin and Moldervine Cloak are nice uncommons from Ravnica (and ones you should have, especially if you’ve been following these decks over the past few months). We should all have Kird Apes, too. They’re uncommons from Ninth Edition. Can we approximate the Herberholz deck, though? Let’s see.
Burning-Tree Shaman in a 3/4 for three mana. The Bloodscale Prowler can be a 4/2 for three mana. In a fight, they kill each other. Don’t think that I’m dismissing the BTS’s great ability. We just have no way to duplicate it.
Giant Solifuge is nearly impossible to get close to. There’s Lightning Elemental, but that guy can be targeted and doesn’t Trample. That’s bad, because Frostling kills him. But it’s good because you can Cloak him or Wildsize him. Finally, the only thing close to Char is Yamabushi’s Flame.
This leaves us one really awful problem: how do we fix mana? Herberholz does it by running about $120 worth of rare lands that make both Red and Green mana. We can’t do that. Wild Cantor was filling the role of mana fixing and one-drop-Mauler-enabler, it wasn’t doing a very good job of the former. Many of those sixty games has me color hosed. I’m afraid that the answer is Sakura-Tribe Elder.
There’s a very big problem with doing that, though. It does nothing for the offense. While other Gruul decks will be dropping 3/3 Scab-Clan Maulers or 4/2 Prowlers or even 3/4 Burning-Tree Shamans on turn 2, we’d be getting a 1/1 mana fixer. That leaves as bad a taste in my mouth as Kelly Clarkson: Grammy Winner. I don’t think we have a choice, though.
I’m also going to flip the number of Frenzied Goblins and Scorched Rusalkas from what Herberholz had. Yeah, that’s right. I’m saying that I’m smarter than a Pro Tour champion. Shaddup! No, I just think that out budget deck will need more help getting damage through than the Champ did. So, this is our new Gruul Deck.
Gruul Wilding PD, V.9.0
2 Skarrg, the Rage Pits
11 Mountain
10 Forest
4 Frenzied Goblin
3 Kird Ape
4 Scab-Clan Mauler
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Dryad Sophisticate
4 Bloodscale Prowler
3 Viashino Fangtail
1 Streetbreaker Wurm
3 Moldervine Cloak
4 Yamabushi’s Flame
3 Wildsize
Game 1: Black/White decks are very popular right now. Olivier Ruel Hand in Hand deck shows up in the Casual Decks room. However, I got a first-turn Kird Ape that was a 2/3 on the second turn. That was also the turn that Dryad Sophisticate hit. With the Scab-Clan Mauler and Bloodscale Prowler coming down with Bloodthirst, it was over pretty quickly. (1-0)
Game 2: It’s been a while since I saw a Snakes deck. I don’t like it when a deck can tap my guys down and keep them there. What I do like is when I can kill their guy through combat and still get damage through. I’ll take my guy being tapped down for a turn for that. I started with a Dryad Sophisticate. My opponent tried to chump block on turn 3, but the Rage Pits got damage through while killing his/her blocker. Later on I got a 4/2 Prowler with a Moldervine Cloak on it. With the Rage Pits on the board, that pretty much ended the game. (2-0)
Game 3: Ah, a good, old-fashioned Golgari deck. How I yearn for the days of three months ago. Believe it or not, I got a Cloak on a Frenzied Goblin. Yup, there’s nothing like a 4/4 that can make itself unblockable. My opponent got out a Golgari Guildmage to go along with the Golgari Germination. Fortunately, Yamabushi’s Flame removed the Guildmage from the game. When the Fangtail hit, that was all she wrote. (3-0)
Game 4: Oh, well, I knew it couldn’t last. My opponent had a mono-Black deck with a lot of two-for-one cards like Nekrataal and Ravenous Rats. I just couldn’t keep up. (3-1)
Game 5: Against a Blue/White control deck, I came out smokin’. By the time he hit Wrath of God mana, he was at nine. I was smart enough (“for once!”) to have held some creatures. Apparently, he wasn’t holding a second Wrath because he conceded when I dropped two creatures and a Moldervine Cloak. (4-1)
Game 6: Finally, I beat a B/W Orzhov deck. I thought for sure that I’d be Pilloried to death, but a Streetbreaker Wurm wearing a Moldervine Cloak is nasty when the Rage Pits is there to give him +1/+1 and Trample. (5-1)
Game 7: How do you know you started way too slow? An Eternal Dominion deck beat you. (5-2)
Game 8: Sometimes, you don’t keep cards in your hand. My opponent was playing mono-Green. Why should I hold creatures? Green mass removal? That was just silly. I left my opponent at two with a Scab-Clan Mauler – of all things – and a Dryad Sophisticate in hand. I should have played them out when I had them. I r a jenious. Still, not bad after I mulliganed to five cards. (5-3)
Game 9: Sometimes we get these new toys and forget that some of the old ones are still very good. This game I faced a G/B Spirit deck that used Soilshaper to create big bad lands. However, I kept pumping out fatty after fatty, and a Scab-Clan Mauler and Dryad Sophisticate both wearing Cloaks is just ugly. (6-3)
Game 10: I saw StarCityGames.com own Talen Lee available for a game and violated my own rule: I joined his game. I don’t want to give anything away. So, I’ll just say what he said: “There are a ton of really great commons and uncommons in Guildpact.” (6-4)
I ended 6-4, and should have been 7-3 except that I’m stupid. Streetbreaker Wurm turned out not to be all that I thought it would be. It’s a 6/4 for five mana. That means it does meet the “efficient creature” requirement, but I almost always wanted something else. Like cheap burn. I also realized why the Scorched Rusalkas are so good: the counter Pillories of the Sleepless and Faith’s Fetters. Go ahead. Feel all superior. It just struck me as I was losing game after game to Pillory life loss. With all of that in mind, I moved on to:
Gruul Wilding PD, V.10.0
10 Forest
11 Mountain
2 Skarrg, the Rage Pits
3 Bloodscale Prowler
3 Dryad Sophisticate
4 Frenzied Goblin
3 Kird Ape
3 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Scab-Clan Mauler
3 Scorched Rusalka
4 Shock
3 Moldervine Cloak
4 Wildsize
3 Yamabushi’s Flame
Game 1: No Forest = No Win. It doesn’t help when the opponent is running an Orzhov deck, either. I really and truly don’t want Gruul Turf in here, but this deck has to be able to get both colors of mana. Sakura-Tribe Elder only helps if there’s already a Forest on board. I may need to test yet another version. *sigh* (0-1)
Game 2: It’s Orzhov night here in Magic Land. *yawn* Whatever. Bringing back Shock was a great idea. I killed a Blind Hunter as my opponent tried to Lance it. The creature he tried to Haunt was a Rusalka. Those were two very good re-inclusions. (1-1)
Game 3: Too many weenies. Not enough beef. Beef weenies. I’m hungry. I should grab dinner. I’ll be back… (1-2)
Game 4: This time, I got stuck on three lands. The good news is that the Scab-Clan Mauler showed up for the first time in this set of games. I almost won. Except that he blocked my Scab-Clan Mauler with a Hand of Cruelty and then – I kid you not – cast two Ragged Veins on my Mauler. I actually laughed out loud, loud enough to wake the cats. (1-3)
Game 5: Again with the no Green mana thing. This section is over now. (1-4)
Okay, let’s add Gruul Turf and see what happens.
Gruul Wilding PD, V.10.1
9 Forest
10 Mountain
2 Skarrg, the Rage Pits
2 Gruul Turf
3 Bloodscale Prowler
3 Dryad Sophisticate
4 Frenzied Goblin
3 Kird Ape
3 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Scab-Clan Mauler
3 Scorched Rusalka
4 Shock
3 Moldervine Cloak
4 Wildsize
3 Yamabushi’s Flame
Game 1: Well, Scorched Rusalka did its job against this Orzhov deck. Pillory of the Sleepless never hurt, even though my opponent got two of them. I also foiled a Faith’s Fetters cast on a Dryad Sophisticate. Beyond that, there wasn’t much defense, and the Frenzied Goblin and Company wrecked the opposition. (1-0)
Game 2: How did I avoid the Jitte so far? Does it even matter? Jitte + Anything > What I Have. (1-1)
Game 3: So close and yet so far. Another Orzhov deck, and more Pillories. When the game ended, he was at two. I was at one, so the Pillory killed me during my upkeep. I had already killed two of them thanks to a Rusalka (saccing itself) and a Shock killing my own Dryad Sophisticate. Any burn or a Wildsize in the last three turns, and I would have won. And if wishes were horses, this beggar would ride. (1-2)
Game 4: One fantastic thing about the Owling Mine deck is that it’s relatively cheap to build. Most of the cards are commons or uncommons. The rares like Howling Mine and Kami of the Crescent Moon are cheap. The downside, as I pointed out last week, is that it rolls over to fast beats. That’s the theory anyway. My Gruul deck started just slow enough to let the Owling Mine deck win. It also helped that I had no first-turn creature while he went first and bounced my first land with Eye of Nowhere. (1-3)
Game 5: White Weenie with Jitte. (1-4)
In Conclusion
That’s it. Game over, man. I can’t keep doing this. It has become painfully obvious that we can’t simply modify the Gruul precon as a weenie beatdown deck and make it competitive. Heck, I can’t even break even in the Casual Room. Clearly, if a true Gruul deck is to be competitive, it has to have way too many rares, and those rares are expensive: Stomping Grounds; Burning-Tree Shaman; Giant Solifuge; Rumbling Slum; and even Karplusan Forest. In fact, if you look back at some of the close losses, or ones in which I was color hosed, the addition of those Karplusan Forests may have made the difference. I’ve said it before, and I will continue to say it. If you like a certain color pair, get that pair’s rare Ninth Edition pain lands.
Budget Gruul also appears unworkable because the Orzhov guild is so strong. Pillory of the Sleepless is just st00pid. It completely neutralizes a creature while also hurting you. Heaven forbid that creature is wearing the Moldervine Cloak. Unless you can sac it or kill it yourself, you’re not getting that Cloak back. Blind Hunter is just silly. So are Shrieking Grotesque, and even Cry of Contrition.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t a bunch of great cards for Green and/or Red in Guildpact. Wildsize is my new favorite common non-creature spell. I should have kept track of the times that that trick won me a game, or kept me in one that I would have otherwise lost long enough to win. Scab-Clan Mauler is awesome. The Scorched Rusalka is a fantastic one-drop and belongs alongside the Frenzied Goblin.
The point of this wasn’t to come up with a G/R deck, though. I know we could do that. The point was to come up with a G/R deck based around the Gruul Wilding precon deck. As BoxyBrown said in the forums on the last article, I bought twenty-five dollars worth of cards and used about four dollars worth. “I don’t get it.” Obviously, the precon wasn’t up to snuff. Sometimes we learn most from our failures. Hopefully, we learned that we don’t get much from the Gruul precon. Sad, but true.
Next week, I… don’t know what I’m doing yet.