We asked around about it, and some nice folks taught us how to play and even gave us some decks so that we could play in the giant ten-person multiplayer games that they would do. I don’t remember what deck my friend got, but I do remember that I had a stack of about 80 cards with all of the red, white, and blue cards that I found lying about in the shop.
After bringing the cards home and teaching my mom and step-dad how to play, it seemed like it was something that we might take part in as a family. They were both pretty big fantasy buffs, so all of the Elves, Goblins, and magic spells interested them. I was competitive and loved that it seemed that I was using the same thinking skills in Magic that I was when playing chess, so I clamped onto the game right away.
A few weeks go by of taking my three-color deck into the shop and getting bashed while having lots of fun, and then one day my mom asks me if I want to play a game.
On her first turn she uses Enlightened Tutor to find a Wild Growth. On her next turn, she cast that Wild Growth onto her Plains and then cast a card I hadn’t seen before called Earthcraft. A couple more turns go by and then she plays another Enchantment, Sacred Mesa. She then taps her Plains that has Wild Growth on it and makes a Pegasus token. “Oh man, a Pegasus, that’s cool! I know you like them!” was what I thought. Then she said, “Watch this,” and tapped her Pegasus to untap the land with the Wild Growth on it, and then make another Pegasus.
She said that she was going to do that a hundred billion times, and if I didn’t have any way to get rid of them, I was dead the next turn.
I had no words. I sat there with my unsleeved deck, Blistering Barrier holding down the fort, while my mom Earthcraft / Sacred Mesa comboed me out.
Apparently she had seen the deck in an old Scrye or Inquest magazine that I had listed in its Killer Decks section, so she went ahead and bought all the cards so that we could play with the deck. She let me take it to the shop the next time I went, and after combo-killing everyone at the table multiple times, I was told that if I ever wanted to come back, I needed to get a new deck to play.
Sadly, I can’t find a full decklist for what the 1996 version of this deck looked like, but just know that Earthcraft is banned in basically everything, so being able to play with four of them in your deck was real nice!
7. Tradewind-Armageddon
When I first started getting “serious” with Magic, I ended up trading all of my expensive Star Wars cards for pieces to build a Five-Color Tradewind Armageddon deck that a resident “pro” was playing at the time. He helped me a lot with learning how to build and play the deck, and I think that it was really the first time that I started to understand Magic more than just a “this is what I got, what do you have, okay, this game is fun!” sort of thing.
Finding decklists for these types of decks from so long ago is very difficult, but I do remember that it had all of these cards in it:
This deck is why I still love the card Tradewind Rider and that it holds a special space in my heart as my favorite card in all of Magic. Bouncing my opponent’s permanents over and over is something that I can always get behind, and when you can Armageddon all of the lands away when you still have Birds of Paradise and Wall of Roots on the battlefield, well, that’s just a very special feeling.
The big takeaways for me from this deck, though, were that playing multiple colors to gain access to powerful effects is something that you can do when base green with an adequate manabase. This is something that I have used time and time again throughout my Magic career, and while I have never really been a master brewer from ground zero, I tend to find the best versions of decks, whether it’s keeping the colors the same or branching out into something else.
The other thing that I learned from this was that creatures with multiple abilities, especially ones that make them difficult to kill inside and outside of combat, are valuable. I never would have thought that Jolrael’s Centaur was ever a playable card, but at the time where I was playing, it was extremely good.
6. Miracle Gro
The first time that I ever made it to the finals of a PTQ was with Alan Comer’s Miracle Gro deck. Now, this was before it changed to Super Grow to take advantage of Mystic Enforcer and Swords to Plowshares, so yes, I do know that there was a superior version of the deck eventually.
I remember testing leading into the PTQ with my roommates. It was old Extended (with dual lands) and it was going to be up in Vancouver, British Columbia. While my partner was solidly on a B/G The Rock-style deck, I had found this Miracle Gro deck and fell in love. The one thing that stood out to me as weak, though, were the copies of Curiosity, which I immediately switched out for Withdraw and they were awesome. Call of the Herd was everywhere, and bouncing creatures was great when you have Winter Orb.
I ended up taking the deck to the finals and conceded to Jeff Fung, since I wasn’t able to go to Japan, which was where the PT was being held. I played against a large range of different decks, but the main ones that I remember were against Sligh and locking them out with Winter Orb and Chill.
The very next PTQ, a friend ended up taking my same list and winning the whole thing. Blue draw spells are great!
Creatures (15)
Lands (4)
Spells (41)
- 4 Brainstorm
- 4 Force of Will
- 4 Winter Orb
- 6 Island
- 4 Sleight of Hand
- 4 Gush
- 4 Land Grant
- 4 Daze
- 2 Foil
- 3 Withdraw
- 2 Opt
Sideboard
I’m pretty sure that this is close to the list that I did play. I believe that switching to Withdraw ended up being a consensus thing that most people did before the move to Super Gro, but I don’t claim being the originator of that. I just remember swapping them in for Curiosity before that PTQ.
5. Trix
I did play around with the original Necro-Donate deck named Trix before Necropotence and Demonic Consultation were banned in Extended, but after that I absolutely fell in love with the U/R Donate Illusions deck that Kai Budde won PT New Orleans in 2001 with.
Lands (8)
Spells (52)
- 2 Brainstorm
- 4 Counterspell
- 4 Force of Will
- 4 Accumulated Knowledge
- 14 Island
- 1 Impulse
- 1 Capsize
- 3 Intuition
- 4 Merchant Scroll
- 4 Donate
- 4 Illusions of Grandeur
- 4 Sapphire Medallion
- 3 Fire
Sideboard
Sapphire Medallion along with Intuition and Accumulated Knowledge: the lullabies that sing me off to sleep are made of them. Drawing all the cards and countering all the spells tacked onto a combo finish is a little something that is right up CVM and his beard’s alley, and we even have everyone’s favorite Shapeshifter in the sideboard.
It’s pretty insane just how hard it is for people to beat you when part of your combo reads “Gain 20 life.” This combo deck was basically the first version of Omni-Tell (foreshadowing…).
I won many local tourneys with this deck back in my day of stomping around the Tacoma Magic scene and still to this day have the copies of Force of Will that I found in a shop’s “uncommon” box and priced as such when I first went out and bought the pieces to build this deck.
4. Jushi Blue
Back in 2005, I placed in the Top 8 of the Washington State and Provincal Championships for the second year in a row. Sadly I was dispatched in the Top 8 by none other than Mike, the friend I mentioned at the beginning of this article passing away over the weekend.
The deck that I played was a thing of beauty though. Originally designed by Michael Flores, the Mono-Blue Control deck, dubbed Jushi Blue, was a delight to play and really taught me a lot of what I employ now in Magic.
Awesome threats require you to just jam them in your deck and ram them onto the battlefield.
Creatures (10)
Lands (15)
Spells (35)
Keiga, the Tide Star and Meloku, the Clouded Mirror were some real-deal heavy hitters in Kamigawa Standard, and this deck made great use of them. Counter all of your stuff, draw some cards with Jushi Apprentice, and then bam! Haymaker after haymaker coming your way.
I love this style of deck, but unfortunately we’ll never see this much awesome countermagic in any one format ever again.
3. Junk Reanimator
My first Standard Open win came in the hands of an Abzan Reanimator deck that Brian Braun-Duin and I had been working on endlessly since before Dragon’s Maze came out. We had a lot of high finishes in Opens and PTQ Top 8s, but finally breaking through and winning the whole thing was an awesome feeling.
Creatures (26)
- 3 Acidic Slime
- 4 Arbor Elf
- 3 Fiend Hunter
- 4 Avacyn's Pilgrim
- 4 Restoration Angel
- 3 Thragtusk
- 3 Angel of Serenity
- 2 Sin Collector
Lands (23)
Spells (11)
I even had to battle through Max Tietz in the Top 8, where I won on a mulligan to four, and then Owen Turtenwald in the finals.
To be fair, my four cards were Overgrown Tomb, Arbor Elf, Forest, and Grisly Salvage, and Max kept a hand with no red mana.
Working on a deck as much as we did with that Abzan Reanimator deck really paved the way for my return to the competitive Magic scene after I moved to Roanoke. Having taken a year off playing and not really being sure what I wanted to do, making it out to Roanoke and getting a job at StarCityGames.com that allowed me to travel and play Magic as much as I did was a godsend, and I really can’t thank everyone there enough.
As for the deck, Brian and I made a lot of innovations that defined the deck itself, and ultimately the format. Going hard on Acidic Slime shaped Standard for some time to come, and having access to Deathrite Shaman and Garruk Relentless for the mirror and against troublesome creatures like Olivia Voldaren was key in winning that tournament.
It’s also nice to note that this was the first tournament in a string of set-release-weekend finishes that I did very well at.
2. Omni-Tell
Going from “feeling lost in a format because of Treasure Cruise” to “finding a home and never wanting to leave the moment that it was banned” with Yuuya Watanabe’s build of Omni-Tell was a great feeling.
Ever since Deathrite Shaman and Abrupt Decay were printed, I never really felt as at home in Legacy a I had before I took a year off. When I found the Omni-Tell deck, that all changed. Never had I ever felt so far ahead in every game that I played with a deck than I did with Omni-Tell.
Creatures (2)
Lands (13)
Spells (45)
Dig Through Time 100% needed to be banned in Legacy, and this was the deck that showcased it the best. It did show in as a few copies in different Delver strategies and in Miracles, but OmniTell was really the only pure Dig Through Time deck.
That’s right: it wasn’t a Show and Tell deck, and that was the big difference between the success that I had with it (and the people that I shared the information with who were willing to listen) and what I saw most people doing. OmniTell was 100% a Dig Through Time deck that just happened to kill with Show and Tell, and once I figured that out, it was all downhill into some nice checks and high-profile finishes.
1. Jund Monsters
To the surprise of absolutely nobody, Jund Monster is the number one deck that I’ve played. I had the most success with it out of any of the other decks, and really felt like I had something special being able to take a list and change a few cards week in and week out and continually perform well with it. I knew that deck and its different iterations better than I knew most people.
Creatures (26)
- 2 Scavenging Ooze
- 4 Ghor-Clan Rampager
- 4 Elvish Mystic
- 4 Polukranos, World Eater
- 4 Sylvan Caryatid
- 4 Stormbreath Dragon
- 4 Goblin Rabblemaster
Planeswalkers (7)
Lands (23)
Spells (4)
The version that I want to showcase is the list that I finally ended up winning an Open with and getting to shave my mythical beard. We just jammed some Goblin Rabblemasters into the deck and rode the rabble all the way to the finals and the trophy.
I had plenty of Top 8, Top 4, and finals finishes with other versions of the deck, but once Magic 2015 came out and I wasn’t sure exactly where to go with the deck, I took an idea and ran with it and won the event. In fact, that Open was during an Invitational weekend where I didn’t make Day 2.
I actually designed and figured out the numbers for this deck on one of the tables in the event hall. It already had a bunch of writing on it and I didn’t have any paper and an idea popped right into my head, so I started writing it down and ended up playing the exact same 75 the next day and winning the whole thing.
Sometimes you gotta just do you.
With twenty years of Magic already in my pocket, what’s next? Well, more Magic, of course. I love writing and producing content for everyone. Streaming is great and I couldn’t ask for a better casting partner in Andrew Boswell. Now all that’s left is for me to find a way to get back out there playing on the SCG Tour®.
Until that happens, I’ll see you all at #SCGATL this weekend!