Hello and welcome back to all things deckical. I’m DJ Abe, and I’ll be spinning a deck from long ago, when Dominaria was young and many things had yet to pass.
Or maybe not. Who knows? After all, this is the Random Card Generator of Happiness and Joy we are talking about. I hoist my purple and orange dice and begin to… wait.
I forgot my opening. Here is the obligatory info:
This week on A Deck a Day, our hero decides that old-fashioned sensibilities will dictate his work. Using old scrying methods such as polyhedral dice, our hero will mine the past for the future. In the old days, our hero wrote such treatises on random factors that were scrying through the dice of old. Today our hero continues that tradition, choosing to focus on the random determination of every expansion set that was classically legal in Classic, before the great Portal opened and the skies darkened with the taint of foul sorceries and evil creatures. Today is the second of the five part treatise.
With that out of the way, allow me to hoist my clear purple ten sider and clear orange ten sider and rolleth awayeth.
Set Number: Rolled 84 (Set Number 42)
Okay, here’s the problem with that. We just have 40 expansion sets. So, the set I rolled is the third set in Time Spiral Block. That’s not what I want. I roll again and this time get….
Set Number: Rolled 46 (Set Number 23)
The set that was rolled was Apocalypse. Now, as to the card, I roll to determine which hundred block the card appears in….
The first hundred…
And now, for the final roll, my dice are rolled again, and this time I roll number 28.
What awesome and amazingly broken card did I pull this time? Apocalypse is so chock-full of goodies that you know I had to pull something great, right? And hopefully something easy to play, right?
In fact, I’m just extending the pain. I haven’t looked yet. I’ve written the entire article so far without knowing what card number 28 out of Apocalypse according to the Wizards spoiler is. I mean, sure, I could look and then keep writing, but it seems so much niftier this way, you know?
Ah well, let’s go ahead and wrap this up. Let’s see, card number 25, 26, 27 and now….
Card Number 28, Apocalypse: Living Airship
Until I looked it up to write it, I had no idea how awful this card is. Don’t get me wrong… a truly awful card would have been funny. Sometimes you can make a good deck out of an awful card. Sometimes you can make a valiant effort out of an awful card.
It could have been a good card, which would have been acceptable. I’m always in the mood to try another Wild Research deck. I haven’t built enough yet. That would have been a challenge, and it would have been funny.
(Of course, you already know the card from the title. Well, shame on you!)
The problem with Living Airship is that it is lame. It’s not a good card and it’s not a bad card either. It’s no one’s favorite card. It doesn’t suggest to me either an obvious or a subtle way to build around it. Know what?
I love it!!!
It’s like the Scarwood Bandits of Magic. For those unaware, Scarwood Bandits is, without a doubt, my absolute favorite card of all time for precisely the reasons outlined above. In fact, I wrote a whole opinion article about it (It’s four years old, and one of my earliest works, but hey, it’s pure me) entitled, appropriately enough, Why Nobody Loves Scarwood Bandits But Me.
In fact, there are more Scarwood Bandits out there than any other type of card. They are the cards relegated to an unknown status. They don’t get play in competitive decks and they never have. They don’t get played in casual decks, and they never have. They aren’t so bad you have to build around them, or so interesting that you want to build with them, or so compelling that you cannot build without them.
All of the Scarwood Bandits of Magic have, to reuse my phrase, fallen through the Cracks of Magic.
So no, I still have no idea what my Living Airship deck will look like. It doesn’t matter. Because it will be built!
But I may need your help. See, I still have no really good idea for the Airship. Instead of flaking out and making some deck with a bunch of flying ships and calling it a theme deck, let’s do something. Yesterday and tomorrow, Living Airship will be a nothing card with nothing to do.
I am relying on you to help me out, though. Post on the forum your ideas. What can we do with Living Airship? Let’s give this card at least one deck of its own. If we send it off, let us at least give it a good shipping-out present.
In fact, extending this roll may be the best, most humane thing we could do for Living Airship, extending its time in the light. This may be the only time in the history of Magic that Living Airship will have its own chance to strut and fret upon the stage. Let’s make sure it’s worth it.
Please help.
Until later,