I’m not so sure when it happened.
Ok, I’m sure. It happened back in Scourge. We were given this weird land, Temple of the False God. At first people looked at it and said”awful,” or made a face. An extra mana from a land with the drawback of producing nothing? How awful! How useless! How … Oh yeah, it showed up in tons of decks in Onslaught Block and Standard almost immediately.
Oops.
Then came 8th edition with the return of the Urza lands. I think we all collectively ignored them. What deck could hope to compete with Odyssey Block powered Standard and run the mighty Urza-tron? It’s like Voltron, only instead of kicking ass, it makes a lot of mana. Yeah. So it sort of kicks ass by extension. So we ignored it and then Mirrodin Standard came out…
And everything changed. Everything. Not that you need me to tell you.
A couple weeks back I was putting together Astral Slide – a fine deck in it’s own right – and I was considering running Temple of the False God. Oh yes. The Temple of the Four Land Mana Screw. The Temple of the Beating Myself In the Face When Playing Land Destruction. It’s like I played a land and it says nothing on the card! Hoboy! Beatings! So instead, I put in the Cloudposts. It changed my world. It opened my eyes.
It let me cycle a Decree for fifteen power in tiny White men during the end step of a U/W control player’s turn. I was in love. And like all loves, a person just ends up looking for the better and better high. Maybe I mean drugs. I probably mean drugs. So when I glanced at that infamous Kai/Roland Bode article I was sorely tempted. Why bother with Cloudpost when you can have the mighty Urzatron? This is the original Roland Bode deck, which I did post last week as an example of why Extraplanar Lens wasn’t quite the hottest as you will.
4 Eternal Dragon
4 Weathered Wayfarer
4 Akroma’s Vengeance
4 Decree of Justice
4 Mindslaver
4 Oblivion Stone
4 Renewed Faith
2 Wing Shards
4 Wrath of God
10 Plains
4 Secluded Steppe
4 Urza’s Mine
4 Urza’s Power Plant
4 Urza’s Tower
This deck is great fun. It has twelve wrath effects, which you can see quite clearly and then a bunch of other stuff I really don’t care about. There are few things in Magic as fun as pseudo-disk effects. Blowing up the world over and over again never gets old, I never get tired of blowing up my opponent’s well-developed board. The deck does have a slight problem when it comes to killing Troll Ascetic, but otherwise it’s quite fine when it comes to blowing up your opponent’s men.
I didn’t actually play or test this deck, though. I considered it for a while, but didn’t go over until Josh Claytor swore up and down that his version of MWC was quite good. This is Josh’s decklist, I’m giving him full credit just as he gives Roland Bode full credit.
10 Plains
4 Flooded Strand
4 Mine
4 Tower
4 Power Plant
4 Weathered Wayfarer
4 Eternal Dragon
4 Decree of Justice
4 Wrath of God
4 Oblivion Stone
4 Akroma’s Vengeance
3 Wing Shards
3 Mindslaver
4 Renewed Faith
Sideboard
1 Island
4 Stifle
2 Sacred Ground
3 Circle of Protection Red
1 Wing Shards
2 Scrabbling Claws
2 Karma
I ran this recently and found it a lot of fun. There are some very positive elements within the deck.
First, as I said, it sweeps the board whenever it feels like it. Twelve board clearers are great against Affinity, and good against almost everything else. Oblivion Stone is better in situations where Akroma’s Vengeance is worse – you can keep your Circle of Protection: Red, Sacred Ground or Angel token on the table while still sweeping things away. It also leaves you an option to clear away another White control deck’s Soldier tokens during your end step, which is a nice bonus. Wrath of God is often sideboarded out for cards that are stronger in specific match-ups, but that’s not always true.
Second, Mindslaver is ridiculous. While it can be somewhat frustrating due to it’s six-mana casting cost, if you get to resolve it and activate, it tends to be ridiculously fun. It looks like your Ravenous Baloths are going to commit seppuku, your Phyrexian Plaguelord is going to give himself a good talking to, your fetchlands aren’t finding much, and why are you hammering yourself? You’d be surprised how much this card reminds you of grabbing a person’s hands and making them hit themselves. Stop hitting yourself! Their reaction is about the same too. I know there has been a fair bit written about this card, but it’s simply not enough. You owe it to yourself to buy a few of these babies and try them out. Now. Buy them now.
Third, the Urzatron represents the strongest of the extra mana lands in the late-game. Occasionally you will find yourself with three towers and two mines on the table, hungering for the power plant. This is probably just as bad as not drawing your Cloudposts or the infamous four land mana screw, though perhaps they’re a little better. The Urzatron is a lot of non-basic lands, which makes you especially vulnerable to Dwarven Blastminer or Blood Moon, but to be honest the cards are rarely worse than Plains in Mono-White control. It’s true that you do tend to want four symbols worth of White mana in the late game, but generally you’ll manage as long as you get two White. Which you usually will. When you get an early Urzatron (that’s the combined three or more) things get utterly ridiculous. Remember making four angel tokens on turn six with Wake? Yeah, it’s back. Oh baby.
In the late game they become completely insane. I happily made ten angel tokens one game and attacked for forty in the air a turn or two later. The Urzatron really does power up.
The versions I ended up running swapped out the Karmas for March of the Machines and two Plains for two Secluded Steppes. I’ll talk about the lands in general in a bit.
My experiences with the deck are as such …
W/x Control Decks :
There’s a lot of variety here and clearly the difference between the decks can be quite high. White/Green and Slide decks are pretty much easy prey for you – they simply lack the resources to deal with Mindslaver and will often find themselves struggling to win the game after a resolved and activated Slaver time and time again. Mindslaver often lets you clear out all their win conditions, cast their cycling spells, sack Baloths, and so on and so forth. That’s all very good.
White/Black is more difficult due to their hand attack strategies. Cabal Interrogator can be a big problem; your basic hope is to power out an early Dragon and land some blows on your opponent. Persecute isn’t necessarily a wrecking ball – it’s rare that you’ll have too many White cards in hand. (Weird, that, but consider how you cycle cards and the number of artifacts / lands in the deck). Most of your White cards cycle anyway, so it’s not a huge deal. I find the deck often ends up burning up early cyclers and leaving itself with several artifacts in hand. Plus, if they have Persecute, you can make them target themselves with it. Can you tell I love Mindslaver yet? If you expect a lot of White / Black control in your area, you’ll definitely want to maintain some Karmas and/or Ivory Masks in your sideboard.
White / Blue, the flagship White X control deck, can be quite tricky or quite easy. It depends heavily on how early your Urzatron comes online – If it does, by God, they have four pieces of effective counter magic as Mana Leak goes completely limp. Look at me, I’m based on you not having mana open? What’s that, you can produce ten mana with five lands? Ouch! Resolving a Mindslaver will often end the game, and Weathered Wayfarer is of course ridiculous when he’s searched out the full Urzatron and given you all four Towers, too.
Stifle is primarily in the sideboard for decks that run Decree. You aren’t overwhelmingly frightened of Decree tokens, as noted above, but they can be your opponent’s easier path to victory. Scrabbling Claws can be brought in, although generally the Urza lands give you earlier access to recurring dragons. Twelve mana isn’t actually that much if you have the Urza lands out and about. (A set of three does, after all, produce seven mana.)
On the most part these are positive match-ups, but highly draw dependent. By draw dependent, I am of course referring to the Urza lands working with you. Triple mine draws are the suck.
Red Decks :
While you feel pretty pleasant about sitting down against a White-based control deck, Red decks tend to go from problematic to … well, more problematic. Red shifts through essentially four different variants, though they share many commons elements. There’s pure Red (or R/G aggro), Ponza, Goblins and Goblin-Bidding.
Your worst match up is Goblin-Bidding. Your problems with Bidding stem mostly from Goblin Sharpshooter, but also with Siege-Gang Commander and so on. It’s possible to win games, but you are at your worst when sitting down against an effective Goblin-Bidding list.
Boarding in Scrabbling Claws helps, vaguely, but it doesn’t necessarily negate the power of Patriarch’s Bidding. You mainly board in Circle of Protection: Red and pray you get a very strong draw. You should likely take Mindslaver out, although with luck it can allow you to misfire their Biddings and/or sack all their men to kill themselves, so maybe not. That depends on the speed of the Goblin-Bidding deck and whether or not you think they’re going to bring in Shatters or Naturalizes. In the current build you would likely want to take the Wayfarer out, anyway, as he doesn’t last long.
As for Goblins prime, the problems remain much the same, barring the loss of Bidding. If you’re facing down a ton of Goblins, you may want to go for the maindeck Story Circles that some swear by, but bear in mind that such a trade off does require some deck restructuring. The deck has the nasty habit of generating less than three White mana per untap from time to time, until you get Dragon recursion going, which burns up WW per turn as well. Story Circle is a very clunky answer compared to Circle of Protection: Red and I feel pretty unwell about it in a lot of cases. Perhaps the deck should be running Exalted or Blinding Angel instead, I’m not yet sure.
The very fast Red decks have huge difficulty with Circle of Protection: Red, as they simply don’t put as many men on the table and can’t overwhelm your ability to feed mana to the Circle. Land Destruction is obviously very good if they have access to Blastminer, but generally gets shut down by Sacred Ground. Circle of Protection: Red is no weaker against land destruction, as they generally lack a large number of threats and the CoP keeps what they do have down.
R/G aggro is extremely weak against you. Any deck that can’t deal out a ton of damage in the early game and relies on creatures is going to be very frustrated by your nigh endless supply of Wraths. R/G land destruction is good though, if they get the early answer to Sacred Ground, but you have a ton of land and there’s no difficulty cutting down their men.
Affinity :
The Aggro-Control versions of Affinity are very unsound against you. Though they can get a nuts aggro draw and swarm you with fast men, they’re forced to waste their few counters trying to deal with your early pieces of removal, which eventually lead into the big bad Vengeance sweeping their board. Oblivion Stone isn’t any near as good as Vengeance, but they don’t really want that resolving either, as when it does sweep the board, it tends to slow them down a great deal. The longer the game goes, the better you are.
Against control versions of Affinity that don’t get a fast start, you have two main-branches towards victory. The first one is to simply wear them down – They have ten counters, and Mana Leak doesn’t do anything against you once the Urzatron is powered up. You have four Oblivion Stones, four Akroma’s Vengeances, and three Mindslaver, all of which will generally either stall them a great deal, or flat out win the game. Mindslaver acts as either a Mind Twist or a Mana Short, both of which are quite nice. It also lets you break all their spell bombs and generally piss away their board position, so they can’t really have that resolve anymore than they can have Vengeance resolve.
Wrath of God and Wing Shards are both relatively decent in this match-up, though not exactly”great.”
The second route is to simply unleash a massive Decree of Justice through the Urza-tron. Generally, if you do assemble the mighty Tron (Greetings, programs!), your Decrees will pump out at least ten soldiers which is not exactly a slow clock for the Affinity player to worry about. I have heard Affinity players discussing Slice and Dice in the sideboard, but there are reasons why you shouldn’t be too worried about that.
The match-up is generally good. The version of the deck I was running was also equipped with March of the Machines in the sideboard, which is another”I win” card. Obviously this can all sound very positive, but one should never count out Affinity’s nuts draws. You sometimes just can’t beat those.
This should give you a decent idea how the deck works, though personally, I have the belief it should be changed a little. If I were to run Mono-White control tomorrow, I would probably bring out something like this:
10 Plains
4 Secluded Steppe
4 Urza’s Mine
4 Urza’s Tower
4 Urza’s Power Plant
4 Solemn Simulacrum
4 Eternal Dragon
4 Decree of Justice
4 Wrath of God
4 Oblivion Stone
4 Akroma’s Vengeance
3 Wing Shards
3 Mindslaver
4 Renewed Faith
Sideboard
1 Mindslaver
4 Weathered Wayfarer
2 Sacred Ground
3 Circle of Protection Red
1 Wing Shards
2 Scrabbling Claws
2 Karma
I didn’t like running Weathered Wayfarer in the maindeck, though it’s generally a format concern. Solemn Simulacrum is solid against aggro decks and solid against control, while Wayfarer is generally utterly ridiculous against control decks, but utterly ridiculously bad against aggro decks, rarely being activated more than once. Aggro decks often miss land drops and you well, you never ever do. I’ve ended games with eighteen-plus lands, with Dragons generally pulling out the whole deck’s worth of Plains or so.
If you expected no Aggro at all, you could get away with swapping the Wing Shards out for the Weathered Wayfarer, of course. The reason I’ve gone over to use the Simulacrum is simply that I play against far, far too much Aggro lately to really want the maindeck Wayfarers. The Mindslaver and Wayfarers in the board are not quite as strong as Stifle versus Decree-heavy decks, but generally they will be good enough.
The Flooded Strands proved to be a massive nuisance, since on the most part in control match-ups I’d empty my library of Plains and then end up drawing Strands in the late game, which is an essentially dead draw. Speaking of the Eternal Dragons, unlike other decks where multiple Eternal Dragons are often redundant, MWC’s Urzatron often does let you power out multiple Dragons per main phase. So there definitely should be the full four in the deck, and not two as I’ve seen in some builds.
So, in conclusion, I really like this deck. I’ve been advised repeatedly never to run it in the face of a field that has 25% Goblins or more, so I’d keep that in mind if you take a liking to it. The deck is, regardless, really enjoyable to play and quite solid in every non-Goblin match up. It often ends up playing like a”true” control deck, with you winning through extremely slow win conditions that seemingly take forever, but on the other hand sometimes you just drop Mindslaver, screw your opponent entirely, and win the game right there.
I’m going to discuss it a bit more with Claytor, and hopefully we can find a solution to the irritating Goblin match-up problems. Goblins are, of course, not exactly the most common deck in the format right now where I play, though I’m not sure about where you play.
Taeme everywhere he wants you to know who he is.