Welcome to Part 2. If you’ve made it this far, congratulations. Deckbuilding is a hideously complex endeavor, and in Part 1 we managed to wade our way through ten mono-color concoctions, five Aggro and five Control. In Part 2, we’re going to cast our nets wider – much wider. We’ll be looking at lots of different sources for possible deck ideas, ranging across colors, mechanics, expansions, creature types, rarities, and formats, and we’ll also include some sage words of advice, like “owl” and “of Epityr.”
First, here’s what’s underpinning the whole shebang. The concept of a Fundamental Turn in Magic is a relatively new term for a fairly simple idea – the idea that if I always kill you on turn 4, and you always kill me on turn 6, I’m always going to win, because my Fundamental Turn (4) is lower (i.e. happens earlier in the game) than yours (6). You’ll be delighted to learn that I don’t intend to inflict thousands of words on you about this idea, especially as so many theorists can do it better – Mike Flores on these very pages, talking about Extended in the last week, is a prime example.
However, I want to give us an overall framework for deckbuilding that’s related to the Fundamental Turn. I call it the Coverage Turn, because that’s how I use it, but it’s also perfectly serviceable as a Deckbuilding Turn. Here’s how it works. Imagine that your task is to watch a game of Magic and then talk intelligently about what happened afterwards. Scarily, that’s what I’m meant to be doing at Grand Prix and Pro Tour Tournaments. Suppose that you’re busy interviewing Mark Rosewater or Richard Garfield or, let’s say, the Queen of Denmark (does Denmark have a Queen, or was she just an imposter?) when the pairings go up for the round. Clearly, you don’t want to be rude to your interviewee, but you do have a responsibility to get to the match when it matters.
So when exactly is this point, the crucial fulcrum of the game, before which most things are irrelevant, and after which things rely largely on what’s preceded it? Exactly, I have no idea. However, here’s the rule of thumb, which is the one we can use for deckbuilding purposes:
Vintage: Turn 1
Legacy: Turn 2
Extended: Turn 3
Standard: Turn 4
Block Constructed: Turn 4
Draft: Turn 5
Sealed: Turn 6
Theme Decks: Turn 7
You should understand that any rule of thumb allows for the possibility of being superceded by the rule of Egg On Your Face, which dictates that the match is over before you get there. However, here are a few examples of what I mean:
Vintage – You want to be there at the start, because Vintage players have all sorts of powerful options open to them, often costing zero mana, like Moxes. Any time a player can generate mana over and above the basic rule of one per turn, there’s likely to be fireworks. Plus, you can pretty quickly identify what decks people are playing by their early play. “Mountain, your turn” isn’t exactly what I’d expect to hear at the Vintage tables. “Shuffle my $10,000 deck carefully please” is what I’d expect to hear at the Vintage tables.
Legacy – In Legacy, although some of the super mana acceleration has gone, the shape of many games can be formulated by turn 3. I want to be there for turn 2, when the Goblin army starts getting into gear, or the U/G/W Threshold deck gets to name a card off Meddling Mage, or U/W Control gets busy saying “no” to things, even when they don’t have mana open, with the mighty Force of Will.
Extended – In the first couple of turns, although we can often see the shape of a game, the game is unlikely to be effectively over. Boros Deck Wins is going to make some guys, suspend a Rift Bolt maybe. U/W Tron lays 2 land and maybe pushes the boat out for a Signet (ooh). Of course, if you’re Raphael Levy, you’ve made a Boros Swiftblade and are about to hit for 18 courtesy of Brute Force and Gaea’s Might, which is pretty wicked. Or, if you’re NoStick, you’ve probably countered something, and maybe started thinking about getting an Isochron Scepter out there. So to me, turn 3 in Extended is the Coverage Turn.
Standard – Most of the time, four turns is fine. Even aggressive decks tend to make a Savannah Lions turn 1, another guy turn 2, and maybe Lightning Helix something out of the way before turning sideways again turn 3. Control decks like Dralnu du Louvre are busy countering, bouncing or just plain killing early monsters, or now that Planar Chaos is out, waiting patiently to Wrath of God a.k.a. Damnation. From year to year, the speed of Standard in particular varies, so when people talk about a fast format, you might want to be around turn 3 to watch things develop.
Block Constructed – Although the power level across the board has fallen a notch compared to Standard, that means that all types of decks are likely to be at a lower level. We saw earlier in the week that Savannah Lions or Isamaru, Hound Of Konda were missing from an ideal White Weenie build. Then again, someone trying to build White Control would have to do it without Wrath of God. Therefore, I generally regard the speed of Block to be roughly comparable with Standard.
Draft – Unless you’re drafting with very bad players, the chances are that your draft deck will not be of Constructed quality. Yes, you may be playing Benalish Cavalry as a high quality weenie, but you might be playing Blazing Blade Askari too, and last time I checked, he wasn’t awesome. Thallid Shell-Dweller is a pretty good defensive two-drop, and it’s common, but the splendid Timeshifted Wall Of Roots isn’t something that you’re going to see very often. Plus, Constructed decks rely on multiples of a card to achieve consistency and commonality of purpose. Rift Bolt, Fiery Temper, Tribal Flames, and Shivan Meteor all kill things, but 4 Lightning Helix nearly won a Pro Tour (with some help, clearly.) Because people play with sub-optimal monsters (that’s polite for “wouldn’t see my Mum’s Constructed deck ever”) you’re going to have time to develop your board most of the time, and cards that cost six mana, like Jodah’s Avenger, are likely to be really, really good.
Sealed – Let’s count the ways that Sealed decks are poor. Mana issues. Mana issues. Mana issues. That’s three, just for starters. You have to play three colors most of the time, even if one of them’s a small splash. In order to make some kind of serviceable curve to your spells, you choose weaker monsters. In order to get down to three colors in the first place, you have to sacrifice all the good cards you opened in the other two. Turn up turn 6 for a Sealed match, and you’ve probably got a Wind Drake in play, a Kavu Climber just drawing your opponent a card, and a pair of Glory Seekers in the bin. Then comes the good stuff, like Dragons.
Theme (Pre-Constructed) Decks – This is a conversation for another time, but I believe that the four decks Wizards pre-package for each new set are some of the most fun you can have playing the game, and, relevant here, a fantastic tool for deckbuilding. Why? Because… the… games… are… so… slow, that’s why. Like I say, we’ll talk more on a different occasion.
So why does the Coverage / Deckbuilding Turn matter so much, and how does it apply to deckbuilding? At it’s simplest:
If your deck doesn’t do important things by the Deckbuilding Turn, you’re going to be destroyed.
“Important” can mean a lot of things, but I’ll settle for it meaning “things that are important to the success of our deck in this game.” For a Control deck, that means not being snowed under by an opposing horde. For an Aggro deck, it’s getting your opponent to an unhealthily low life total. For a Combo deck, that probably means being very close to assembling the parts, or even pulling the trigger.
Let me show you what I mean, by using a very popular mechanic from the past that has turned up again in Time Spiral – morph. We all know that there’s all sorts of funky things that can happen when a morph goes “un.” Shaper Parasite is a really good one. It basically kills something when it flips up, and frequently kills something as it blocks (an Ashcoat Bear for example) and then gains a point of toughness. This is a beating of a card. In Sealed. Or draft. So suppose we decided to put together a morph deck in, God help us, Standard. Remember, the Standard Deckbuilding Turn is turn 4. Our turn 3 is “play Shaper Parasite face down.” Turn 4 is “turn Shaper Parasite face up.” Makahito Mihara’s Dragonstorm turn 4 is “Lotus Bloom, Rite of Flame, Rite of Flame, Seething Song, Dragonstorm for five, kill you.” Our hypothetical morph deck does a funky little combat trick turn 4, and probably does similar things turns 5 and 6. Dragonstorm is already sideboarding.
So, our number one rule for all the decks we might build:
Does it get to do important things to help it win no later than turn 4?
If it doesn’t, it likely isn’t going to cut it. You’ll notice that this is a rather harsher attitude than “don’t worry if it isn’t good, build it anyway” from Part 1. Well, now the stakes are higher, and we have a much bigger world of decks to look at. If we’re even going to get skin-deep, we need to be our own harshest critics.
So, eyes down, cardlists at the ready, here come our third set of ideas, and they’re all based on:
Mechanics.
When a new set comes out, Wizards will help to shake up the game by making us all evaluate a bunch of new mechanics – that’s to say a group of spells or creatures that share a particular ability. Some of the ones that have been around for donkey’s years are Flying, First Strike, Trample and Protection. Time Spiral made things perilously difficult for the new player to get their heads around the new mechanics, since there were so many. Or, at least, there were so many new “old” mechanics. So there should be plenty of options for possible decks based around particular mechanics. Let’s see.
1. Flash – ah-ah, Savior of the Universe. If people were forced, under pain of disqualification, to sing that line from Flash Gordon every time Teferi, Mage Of Zhalfir came into play, I guarantee the metagame would change overnight. Plus, there’d be murder. Meantime, back at the deckbuilding ranch, it should be clear that Flash is a really nice ability, because it cheats on one of the fundamental rules of Magic. Creatures get played on your own turn, and during your main phase. Teferi is just one outstanding example of a card that is almost infinitely better played as an instant. If you’re not sure why, try to visualize what deck Teferi would go in, or indeed is in currently. Any monster that costs five mana, especially with a UUU requirement, is likely to sit in a Control deck. Control decks really don’t like to tap out on their own turn, and with Teferi, they don’t have to. Cast it at the end of your opponent’s turn, and then proceed to dominate the game from there. Of course, Teferi has a lot of other retarded interactions and abilities going for it, but if you got rid of the whole Flash thing, Teferi would look a whole lot worse.
What other monsters have Flash that we could abuse? Well, Bogardan Hellkite turns out to be pretty amazing, and almost certainly has a home somewhere in Block, even if it turns out to be in the best Dragonstorm deck that block can manage (more on this later). Draining Whelk is kind of obliged to have flash, since it’s really a Counterspell with body attached. Mystic Snake was a Standard staple first time around, and in Block there’s little to suppose it won’t be viable again. Scryb Ranger is a key component of Scryb & Force (in an amazing card-with-deckname bit of synergy) and Whitemane Lion is a fantastic Limited card that probably steps up a level. The one that seems really interesting is Dust Elemental. In an environment that isn’t friendly to multiple creatures, turning your early creature rush into one big beating machine doesn’t seem the worst, since you then have your first wave as your second wave post-Wrath. The spread of the colors makes it unlikely that we’ll have a full-on Flash deck, but this is certainly a mechanic you should look to for options.
2. Trample – Krosan Cloudscraper is pretty poor, and was pretty poor before they printed Shivan Meteor to kill it. It doesn’t matter how big a monster is, if it doesn’t have trample it’s missing a crucial weapon. “Attack with my 12/12.” “Block with my Revered Dead. Regenerate. My turn?” That isn’t what you want. In Part 1, we talked about Spectral Force, not least because an 8/8 trampler for five mana is a good two fewer than it should really cost. When you consider that Scryb Ranger gets to help out with all sorts of mana shenanigans and also gets round the apparent drawback of the Spectral game-winner… this is an outstanding monster in every way. To be fair, there are plenty of decent tramplers. It’s the cost that’s crucial in pushing the Force over the edge. Also in Green, Groundbreaker is a lot of damage for a little outlay, Craw Giant is big but clunky, Havenwood Wurm is very expensive (Flash notwithstanding), and Kavu Predator has a lot of fun interactions, not least with Fiery Justice. “Tap 3 mana, cast Fiery Justice, kill your 2/2, kill your 2/1, deal you 2. You gain 5 life. Kavu Predator gets 5 counters, hit you with a 7/7 trampler.” If you want to get silly about it, you can do that turn 2 with Simian Spirit Guides. We also talked about both Red and White versions of Akroma, and Black gets Liege of the Pit, which also gets to unmorph as early as turn 4. This doesn’t seem terrible.
3. Madness – Thanks to the existence of Wild Mongrel, madness came to pretty much define a period of Magic. If I know that, you can be sure that Wizards know that too, and the likelihood of us being offered similar goodies to The Best Weenie Ever Printed is remote. What is worth bearing in mind, however, is that some average spells can become at the very least decent when combined with the discount cost you get for playing them with madness. Fiery Temper, as an example, becomes Lightning Bolt post-madness. Dark Withering is so infinitely better than Dark Banishing, or even Terror, it’s untrue. The thing is, there’s plenty of removal around, and what made madness good in the past was monsters. Basking Rootwalla, Arrogant Wurm… oh wait – we get Arrogant Wurm, or Reckless Wurm as it’s now called. There aren’t really enough cards here to make a “madness-themed” deck, but any time you can get spells cheaper than they should be, that’s an indicator of possible Constructed quality.
4. Flying and Shadow – I’m going to approach these together, since their effect is the same. Evasion has always been good in any format where the Red Zone is important. In other words, if combat is where the game is decided, then evasion is good times. This is a good time to be careful, because, whereas an ability like Flash is essentially useful all the time, combat abilities like Trample or Flying or Shadow only have value if there are blockers attempting to get in the way. The significance of this is that our abilities come at a cost in terms of mana. Think of it like this. A good 2/2 monster would cost us two mana, and at the moment gets us nice abilities too, like Flanking. A 2/2 flyer is likely to cost us three mana, and that one mana difference equates to a whole turn lost before the air assault comes online. Block is strange in this regard, since it’s the weakest of the Constructed formats, and as such is closest to Limited in terms of the usefulness of monsters. For now, we’ll remain optimistic and see what evasion has to offer for our “skies” deck:
Blue – Errant Ephemeron is an outstanding Limited card, and Suspend is good anti-Wrath technology. Riftwing Cloudskate is tempo and evasion in one, again with Suspend potential. I like Gossamer Phantasm, since it’s toughness and apparent drawback are largely irrelevant, and a two-power flyer for two mana is just what we could do with. Spiketail Drakeling can be seen as a mini-Mana Leak with wings and Sprite Noble helps up both toughness, and possibly power. At the upper end of things, Serra Sphinx is your archetypal 4/4 flyer for five, and Draining Whelk is a card that keeps cropping up here under different headings. Then we look to shadow, and find Drifter Il-Dal and Looter Il-Kor. I’m sure you can see that the Drifter has a very problematic upkeep, not because we can’t pay it, but because it essentially adds a turn to everything we do. Skies decks don’t want to lose a turn, every turn. On the other hand, although the Looter is only a 1/1 for two, it does have the advantage of chomping through our deck in search of goodness.
White – The classic Shadow monster is back, in the shape of top man Soltari Priest. For two mana, a 2/1 protection from Red was a fantastic card back in the day, and still doesn’t look shabby. Zealot Il-Vec falls victim to our Deckbuilding Turn rule – it just won’t be quick enough to do what it does meaningfully. By and large, White’s flyers are a little less exciting than Blue’s for our purposes, although there are some standout options, like Serra Avenger. If you don’t know about it, click, read, and then note it down as a possible for our skies deck. Stonecloaker has three power for three mana, plus it has flash, and the comes into play ability is ideal for when your opponent decides to blow your best monster out of the water (or sky, as it happens.) Aven Riftwatcher is a pretty decent flyer, and very good against decks that want to be aggressive against us. This also combines very tidily with Stonecloaker or Whitemane Lion. Please don’t be drawn in by cards like Castle Raptors. Remember the rule, and see that five mana is just too much for a card like this in Constructed. What may be legitimate is to pay 53 million mana for Akroma, Angel Of Wrath. What we may discover is that the deck needs a finisher above and beyond the reach of a Serra Sphinx or Avenger. Like James Bond, Akroma is really hard to kill.
It’s pretty apparent that there are plenty of good flyers at our disposal. In fact, in spite of myself, I’m actually quite interested in the possibilities. This might turn out to be a genuine Block deck. If it’s going to be, it needs to jump through some more hoops first. What won’t it like? It won’t like cheap efficient monsters that don’t bother flying but just bother turning sideways, like White Weenie. Benalish Cavalry costs less than Spiketail Drakeling, and puts it in the bin in a face-off. Sulfurous Blast is likely to destroy our entire early army, and Damnation is going to hurt us no matter what size our flying men are. Solutions? Counterspells seem pretty good, especially as in these colors we can even run the White Force Spike, Mana Tithe, along with Draining Whelk at the top end, and Cancel plus Drakeling in between. Of course, we could go down a slightly different route, and pair Blue with Green, at which point we gain Uktabi Drake, Giant Dustwasp, and Mystic Snake. Hell, Suspend Search For Tomorrow and play all three colors.
Overall – with a good mix of flyers, including some serious heavyweights, coupled with access to tempo cards, card drawing, and counterspells, an evasion beatdown deck looks like it could, at the very least, give all our Part 1 decks a run for their money.
5. Storm – Pound for pound, this is quite simply the best mechanic in Magic right now, because not only does it cheat, but you get to decide how much. If you know that TEPS stands for The Extended Perfect Storm, then you know that the mechanic features heavily in a format vastly superior in power levels to Time Spiral Block Constructed. If you know that Mind’s Desire is a Storm spell, if you know that Brain Freeze is a Storm spell, if you know that Tendrils Of Agony is a Storm spell, if you know that Wing Shards, Volcanic Awakening (for Two-Headed Giant), Grapeshot, Empty The Warrens, and Dragonstorm are all Storm spells, then you know that Storm is the mother, father, and half-breed cousin of all mechanics we get to play with. Those last three cards are all available in Block, so the fun bit is seeing what abuse we can make of them.
There are two basic ways we can help up the Storm count. First, we can make lots of mana, save up cards in hand to cast in an orgy of hand-emptying, and then Warrens for ideally 8-10. Once you combine this with carefully timed Suspend spells, this could easily go higher. Turn 1 suspend Lotus Bloom, turn 2 suspend Search For Tomorrow, turn 3 suspend a pair of Rift Bolts, and then turn 4 you have 8 mana available plus 4 already on the Storm count (Empty would be the fifth.) Another couple of spells and that’s 14 Goblins. Come to that, with eight mana that’s enough for double Empty action. That’s the best part of 20 little men, minimum. Having said that, at 8 mana off a single Lotus Bloom and single Search For Tomorrow, maybe the idea of getting all the way to nine mana isn’t unrealistic for a Dragonstorm deck. Prismatic Lens could help here to accelerate, and we have the kill mechanism intact from Standard in the form of Bogardan Hellkite. I’ll leave it to someone better qualified to work out whether Dragonstorm or Empty decks are Tier 1 or not, but I’m sure you can see that 20 1/1 monsters turn 4 is a pretty entertaining way to threaten your opponent’s life total. I don’t think they Timeshifted Engineered Plague…
Wow, it turns out that looking at things from a mechanic point of view can be pretty, to paraphrase Ted Knutson, spicy. There are some other possibilities too, courtesy of Buyback. This is an ability that I think of as “Rinse, Repeat,” because no sooner have you done it once, then it’s time to do it again and again and again. Sometimes it doesn’t matter all that much whether the thing you’re doing is all that good. Like Andy in The Shawshank Redemption, you too can discover that a little hammer can go a long way if you’re prepared to wait 20 years. Interestingly, 20 years is rather less than it would have taken Tiago Chan to beat Gabriel Nassif in the Top 8 of last year’s World Championship, because Nassif was busy doing some “rinse, repeat” of his own, this time utilizing the Forecast ability with Proclamation Of Rebirth and Martyr Of Sands. The key to these abilities is that they don’t “spend” the card to do the effect. That sweaty bit of valuable cardboard stays right in your hand where it can do the most damage, turn after turn. That’s just one of the reasons that Aggro decks either really want you to die quickly, or urgently need a Plan B in the form of card-drawing.
Alright, that’s at least some of the 463 mechanics available to us, and some possible applications. From here on in, I’m going to give you a bunch of possible decks, with a few gentle hints, and then leave you, in your deckbuilding millions, to pursue deck tech to its logical conclusion where G/W creatureless lifegain is the only deck worth playing come Yokohama. (That’s quite unlikely, by the by.)
6. Summon Types – By my reckoning, there are approximately three summon types we could look at seriously.
Thallids – Thelon Of Havenwood and Thelonite Hermit are the two cards that give us the best possibility of doing something foolishly good, especially as this is exactly the kind of deck that could do with Gaea’s Anthem. There are 12 creatures with type – Fungus (I hope you appreciate that I didn’t do the rubbish joke here), but the difficulty is with the old chestnut the Deckbuilding Turn. What brokenness can we achieve turn 4, or what carnage can we wreak on our opponent’s plans? Not an awful lot, it turns out.
Rebels – 53 years ago, when Mercadian Masques came out, an entire Pro Tour Top 8 was waged by Rebel decks. Except for the guy who turned up with the only deck in the building that could beat Rebels. He beat three Rebel decks, and became the Champion. Bear in mind that this was a time when there was a Rebel “chain” in place, where Lieutenant, Captain, Commander, Private, Orderly, and for all I know Chaplain Rebels got to go and get their mates, straight into play, at instant speed – and you know how good the whole instant speed thing is, right? This time around there are 15 Rebels spread across White and Black. Blightspeaker and Amrou Scout get to search others out, and they’re all cheap enough to be viable. Some of them feature in possible White Weenie decks, like Knight Of The Holy Nimbus or even Aven Riftwatcher, but although it’s nice to go and search up cards from your library, leaving your hand intact, you really want the things you’re getting to put huge pressure on your opponent. I don’t think Rebels do this.
Slivers – It should be fairly apparent that slivers are the absolute embodiment, literally, of synergy. Every sliver grants it abilities to the rest, and once critical mass has been achieved, these guys are entirely unstoppable – in Limited. We saw an indicator of what could be achieved by a Block sliver deck at Pro Tour: Geneva, when various Pros heavily drafted Red/Green or Blue/White versions and got “the nuts.” My problem with any sliver deck is the same problem that there’s always been with relying on interactions between monsters – what happens when they’re not all there? Sinew Sliver stands alone as a perfectly fine 2/2 for two. Given that there are 39 slivers in the pool for Block, it should certainly be possible to concoct something that is at least competitive. Here more than ever, our Deckbuilding Turn rule is crucial, as slivers are almost all overcosted for what they do alone. A 2/4 for four mana with no ability is not Constructed quality, and maybe Watcher Sliver is your turn 4 play. That’s definitely not enough. A 4/2 for four mana with no ability is not Constructed quality, and maybe Bonesplitter Sliver is your turn 4 play. That’s definitely not enough either. However, if you can find a way to generate bonus mana – like Gemhide Sliver for example – and a way to circumvent boardsweepers (er… Frenetic Sliver?), then maybe there’s a sliver deck out there somewhere. Over to you in the forums, methinks.
7. Good Stuff – Green is the color of mana fixing, and if Green has enough fixing then the Good Stuff deck becomes viable, also known as Five Color Green. The big downside is that you need to get all that messy mana to work for you before you can start casting multiple sets of, let’s say, triple color Dragons. If you’re thinking about Coalition Victory and Scion Of The Ur-Dragon, good luck.
And indeed, good luck seems to be a most apt comment for the Block as a whole. With 572 cards available to us, if we were going to try and work it out all by ourselves, we’d be here for some considerable time. Thankfully, there are a vast number of shortcuts to help us narrow the search. I’m going to close with a few of them:
Ask yourself, why am I the only person in the world who is playing with four copies of Thallid in my deck?
Ask yourself, what would Frank Karsten do?
Even better, ask yourself, what is Frank Karsten doing? (I freely admit that finding out this information a few days before Yokohama may require some heavy lifting and a blunt instrument.)
What is the Magic Online metagame? By the time Yokohama rolls around, we’ll be right at the end of the development of this format. If you don’t want to go the whole hog and spoil it all by looking at the winning decks from Premier Events (because they are likely to be seriously tuned affairs with little room for discussion or creativity) then just spend some time in the casual room, looking at all the wacky concoctions that people come up with. Like Edison, maybe you’re the one who doesn’t just find out how not to make a lightbulb a thousand times over, but finds out how to make one too.
Read the columns right here! You’d never have thought of that, would you?
Use Your Ears – players love to talk. Wessel Oomens talked about playing Akroma with just one Plains in the deck in Geneva. Given the WWW nature of the Angel, that seemed improbable, but of course he had multiple other ways to generate the mana, like Prismatic Lens, Calciform Pools and multiple ways to search for that lone Plains. I’m not suggesting that Akroma and one Plains is the way forward, but maybe it helps you solve a little piece of the mana puzzle that’s plaguing your Coalition Victory deck.
Be like The Eagles, and “Take It To The Limit.” When you’re getting battered by double Sinew Sliver, double Watcher Sliver, because there are four enormously tough monsters on the table, try imagining quads of both. Multiples have always been good, and a lot of decks try to create “virtual” copies of a card. You often hear about “Wraths 5 thru 8” and that’s where cards that fetch you exactly what you want when you want it (like Mystical Teachings in the Dralnu du Louvre deck) are extremely powerful. Once you have taken a particular idea to the limit, why not take it to the limit one more time?
And finally, never be ashamed to be wrong. Depending on your harshness, I have made incorrect evaluations about a vast number of cards in these two articles. Am I ashamed? No. Do I wish I knew more? Yes. Am I learning all the time from people better than me? Yes. And that last bit is the key. Never mind “if you don’t try you can’t win.” I prefer “if you don’t try you can’t fail,” and that’s just cowardice.
So, in the space of a week we’ve explored some blasting-off points for Block. For some, I’ve oversimplified things. Others of you will have your head spinning with the umpteen propositions I’ve made. And all of you are, I trust, wise enough to see that we’ve barely started on the wonderful possibilities.
I guaranteed in Part 1 that I would give you a partial decklist of a Top 8 deck for Pro Tour: Yokohama. Here it is:
Finally, I hope that some of you who have never taken that most fearsome of items – the blank piece of paper – and attempted to create something unique that can stand up to the best, will have the courage to start Deckbuilding, not at the Speed of Sight (which is very, very fast) but at the Speed of Thought, which, it turns out, is very, very slow.
As ever, thanks for reading!
R.