Hi, all! Sorry I’ve been away for a while; babies showing up earlier than planned tend to throw a monkey wrench into the scheme of things. Aaron Thomas Smith was originally scheduled for a C-section on July 29th, but when my wife’s water broke on July 23rd, my son announced that he was working on his own timetable. He was 7 lbs., 14 oz., 19.5 inches long at birth, healthy and ready to take on the world. His first conquest was his big sis, Anna Marie. At nineteen months, we weren’t sure how she would take having a baby in the house that never left… But she thinks he’s the cat’s meow. “Baby!” gets hugs and kisses from big sis all the time.
Anyway, the Saturday before I went to our bi-weekly OBC tournament armed with a rather rogue deck. I had grown tired of my White Weenie/splash green deck; it performed well, but it wasn’t particularly interesting. Lay a weenie, apply the beats. Occasionally activate Glory at crucial intervals. Snore. It seemed to win more times than lose, but I was looking for something different. Everyone assumed I was playing the deck and had even started to metagame against me. But what should I run?
On July 15th, I posted the following deck:
Blood from the Stone (B/R)
4x Catalyst Stone
4x Recoup
3x Burning Wish
4x Innocent Blood
4x Chainer’s Edict
3x Tainted Pact
4x Browbeat
4x Breaking Point
3x Magnivore
3x Firecat Blitz
4x Shadowblood Ridge
4x Tainted Peak
7x Mountain
9x Swamp
Three days later, our own [author name="blisterguy"]blisterguy[/author] posted this deck:
4 Innocent Blood
4 Chainer’s Edict
4 Burning Wish
4 Diabolic Tutor
3 Recoup
3 Mutilate
3 Mind Sludge
3 Mirari
2 Skeletal Scrying
1 Haunting Echoes
1 Morbid Hunger
4 Tainted Peak
1 Shadowblood Ridge
2 Cabal Coffers
21 Swamp
Sideboard:
1 Recoup
1 Mutilate
1 Mind Sludge
1 Haunting Echoes
1 Rancid Earth
1 Demolish
1 Lightning Surge
1 Tombfire
2 Morbid Hunger
3 Overmaster
2 Decompose
After reading blisterguy article and deck, I realized how close it was in spirit to my Blood from the Stone deck, so I stole his decklist, made some Bennie Mods (TM) and came up with:
Recoup D’Evil v.1.0
4 Innocent Blood
4 Chainer’s Edict
4 Burning Wish
4 Diabolic Tutor
3 Recoup
3 Mutilate
3 Mind Sludge
3 Catalyst Stone
2 Rancid Earth
1 Mirari
1 Haunting Echoes
1 Morbid Hunger
4 Tainted Peak
1 Shadowblood Ridge
2 Cabal Coffers
20 Swamp
Sideboard:
4 Mesmeric Fiend
3 Skull Fracture
1 Recoup
1 Mutilate
1 Mind Sludge
1 Haunting Echoes
1 Rancid Earth
1 Demolish
1 Book Burning
1 Decompose
Basically, I tried to tune the deck towards focusing more on the Recoup engine – and obviously, the Catalyst Stones are critical there. I only wanted to run one Mirari because drawing more than one sucks – and really, it seems with the Tutor/Recoup engine you should be able to fetch one at your leisure when you’ve got the mana for it.
Shot the deck idea to GP and his first words (after laughing at me) were”How do we win?” Silly rabbit! Control decks first Not Lose, then they win with whatever is handy. I kinda thought recursive and forked Book Burning would be the path to victory, either by decking (especially post-Echoes) or damage, with the courtesy of letting my opponent decide his own demise.
Looking over the deck and mulling over how it should function in theory, it felt like Flores Black (a.k.a. Yawgmoth’s Will-fueled monoblack, silver-bullet utility). Monoblack seemed to be tearing up the OBC circuit lately, but splashing red for some recursion seemed like a positive step.
Anyway, I ended up going 0-3 in the Swiss. Pretty horrible, right? The one thing that stood out, though, was that when I lost a game it was by the skin of my teeth; I was often one turn away from winning or taking control of the game. And when I won a game (and most of my matches went to three games), I usually crushed my opponent. This told me two things. First, that the deck had the raw power to compete – and second, the deck was badly untuned. Not surprising considering I’d just built the deck a few days before and hadn’t had the time to put in any playtesting. The sideboard in particular was horrible.
Flash forward a few weeks. With a baby in the mix, my limited playtime dwindles even further. I pretty much scrap the idea of trying to work on Recoup D’Evil, just because I don’t have the time it looks like I will need to make this deck work. My phone rings and it’s Kevin Davis – a local player who asks me about the deck.
“Have you given up on it?”
“Yeah, pretty much,” I say.
“Don’t,” he replies, and tells me that he and Chris McDaniel (a.k.a.”Star Wars Kid“) have been playtesting a version of the deck that has been doing pretty well in testing. They’re running Magnivores, for starters. My mind races. “Do you have a Zombify in the board?” “Of course!” Hmm.
Magnivore. My mind flashes back to where I’ve seen a deck with Magnivore…
2002 US Nationals: When Sorceries Attack!
played by Brian Davis, designed by Adrian Sullivan and Brian Kowal
Main Deck
3 Mountain
1 Shadowblood Ridge
12 Swamp
4 Tainted Peak
4 Urborg Volcano
1 Addle
4 Chainer’s Edict
2 Diabolic Tutor
2 Disrupting Scepter
4 Duress
3 Engineered Plague
1 Ensnaring Bridge
2 Haunting Echoes
4 Innocent Blood
2 Millstone
4 Overmaster
3 Recoup
1 Soul Burn
Sideboard:
3 Addle
1 Ensnaring Bridge
1 Haunting Echoes
2 Magnivore
1 Persecute
1 Pyre Zombie
3 Pyroclasm
3 Soul Burn
Another Recoup deck… I’m not sure how Brian did with the deck, but anything Adrian Sullivan cranks out gets my attention. By the way, whatever happened to The Corrupter, anyway? I haven’t read anything from that creative deckbuilder in eons. If anyone knows how to get in touch with him, I’d love to see what he thinks about Recoup D’Evil in OBC…
Observation On The Deck:
What Worked:
Recoup + Catalyst Stone was simply amazing. Add Mirari to the mix and things get silly. Rancid Earth is so good I was kicking myself for not running three in the main deck with the fourth in the board to Wish for. Skull Fracture out of the board was surprisingly effective.
What Didn’t Work:
Sludge, Mutilate, Coffers… These three just did not work with the”tainted” land base. Too many non-swamps seemed to muck up the works, making these monoblack powerhouse cards much less impressive. And I never did get a chance to kill anyone with Book Burning – my opponents would concede before it got to that point. Sigh. Oh and one other thing – Krosan Reclamation was a bit annoying.
Anyway, I decided that I liked the idea of running Magnivore for the kill, and Wishing out Zombify to keep it coming back if necessary. So here’s the next version of the deck I’m going to try out this weekend:
Recoup D’Evil v.2.0
4 Firebolt
4 Innocent Blood
4 Chainer’s Edict
4 Burning Wish
3 Diabolic Tutor
3 Recoup
3 Catalyst Stone
3 Rancid Earth
4 Shambling Swarm
2 Magnivore
1 Mirari
4 Tainted Peak
4 Shadowblood Ridge
2 Mountain
15 Swamp
Sideboard:
1 Rancid Earth
1 Recoup
1 Zombify
1 Decompose
1 Haunting Echoes
1 Mind Sludge
1 Mutilate
1 Demolish
4 Skull Fracture
3 Slithery Stalker
Some notes:
Adding Firebolts give the deck some needed early removal, and obviously they work well with Catalyst Stone. Going up to three maindeck Rancid Earths give the deck a whopping seven ways to nuke a land on turn 3, which can be amazing in this format. I’m going to try the Swarms over the Mutilates; especially with a Zombify in the board, they can really keep your opponent’s creature swarm in check. For the board, most everything is pretty well self-explanatory except for Demolish (extra land kill and a way to nuke opposing Mirarae, if necessary) and the Skull Fractures. This cheap discard spell is particularly easy to break open with Mirari, and with a reasonable flashback already built in, it’s good filler against any deck where you may have some maindeck stuff that’s not so good. Most decks don’t keep a very full hand, so Fracture can often hit one of the two good spells they’ve been holding in reserve.
Anyway, that’s my Recoup deck. I’ll have given it another whirl this weekend, and will be particularly interested to see if any Recoup decks surface at Worlds this week. Go USA!!!