SCG Daily —The Real First Christmas Back Home, December 2006

This week started with the story of the decks that I made for me, my brother Jonathan, and our friend Jason for Christmas 2005. We didn’t get to play them until Memorial Day 2006 because my brother didn’t get to come back home for the holidays in 2005. This year, Jonathan’s home. For good. He’s out of the Navy, going to school, and being supported by his wife. What a life!

The three of us, along with my wife Luanne and Jonathan’s wife Keila, met up at Jonathan and Keila’s home last Saturday for some games and television. While the ladies were still awake, we played some non-Magic card games while watching basketball and then Christmas Vacation. We started off with Family Guy Uno. It’s like regular Uno, but there’s a special card called World Domination. If you know Family Guy, you know who that’s all about. After we finished with that, we played another card game called Fluxx. If you’ve never played Fluxx, spend the ten or twelve bucks, and get it. It’s easy to learn because there’s only one set rule. The rest change as you play cards, and the cards have the new rules on them. It’s blast to play. Plus, you don’t have to be a game geek to play it. Let’s put it this way, anytime you can win because you have both Milk and Cookies on the board, you know you have a fun game. [Agreed. Fluxx is superb. – Craig.]

The ladies got tired of shuffling decks before we guys did. (Isn’t that always how it happens?) That’s when I unveiled the Decks of Christmas 2006.

As I’ve mentioned before, Jason adores Green. Really, he loves any combination of colors as long as there’s Green in there. Jonathan is the Johnny Cash of the group, the Man in Black. Me, I just fill in the holes. Call me Carl Spackler. As I said, my brother missed a lot of blocks over the six-and-three-quarters years he was overseas. When he left, Mercadian Masques has just been released. When he got back for good, Dissension was just about to become Constructed-tournament legal. I wanted to make sure that he saw a lot of cards that he’d missed, focusing on one very, very cool one in particular: Call to the Grave. This Christmas, I gave Jonathan this lovely pile of cards, a deck that I named:

Can You Hear Me Now?

Chris Romeo

Test deck on 12-24-2006

Casual

Creatures (43)

Lands (54)

Spells (40)

The name of the deck was inspired by Call to the Grave. Get it now? From that cell phone commercial? Anyway, as you can see, I’ve gotten away from the four-of everything design. I wanted the guys to see a greater variety of cards that they’d missed. Man, is there variety here.

Obviously, Call to the Grave can be huge. Almost all of my brother’s creatures are Zombies. So the other decks had to be able to get rid of the CttG, or they’d quickly lose a war of attrition. Of course, his deck also had Dowsing Shaman and Elven Cache to bring that back. Ugh. While he was getting to the Call, though, he could still kill off a few creatures the old fashioned way, like with cards such as Brainspoil. In addition, Brainspoil allowed him to Transmute for the Call to the Grave.

A li’l mini-combo that I just drool for in here is Shambling Shell and Noxious Ghoul. Essentially, when the Ghoul is on board, Jonathan can give all creatures -1/-1 whenever he wants. Just Dredge back the Shell, and recast it. Or cast pretty much any other creature in the deck. Only a very few of his creatures (Twigwalker, Dowsing Shaman, Necratog, and Slithery Stalker) are not Zombies. Double ugh.

Another thing to notice is that all of his creatures (except for the Dross Crocodile) have an ability, even if it’s as seemingly insignificant as the Carrion Wurm’s offering. So, why the D-Croc? Because it’s so efficient. Black creatures don’t usually get that kind of power-to-mana ratio without some serious drawback. I guess you could call its toughness the drawback if you’re so inclined. All in all, this is one of my favorite decks that I’ve made for a Christmas gift.

Jason is Mr. Green Genes. A lot of the cards in his deck weren’t ones from sets that he’d missed. He knew of the sets and had played some of the cards. He just wasn’t familiar with the entire set. His deck was a combination of some of his old favorites (e.g. Llanowar Elite, Quirion Trailblazer) and ones that he just hadn’t seen yet (e.g. Assault Zeppelid, Orochi Hatchery). For him, this year, I stayed in the holiday spirit by giving him some ivy. To be exact, I gave him:

Poison Ivy

Chris Romeo

Test deck on 12-24-2006

Casual

Creatures (39)

Lands (54)

Spells (44)

Jason rarely teams Blue with Green on his own. Given the release of Dissension this year, I figured I’d do that for him. Granted, only one spell (Assault Zeppelid) is an actual Simic spell, but the deck does have several great foils for Jonathan’s Call to the Grave deck. First and foremost, Jason could make so many Snake tokens from the Orochi Hatchery that the CttG became meaningless. Noxious Ghoul would still hurt him (a lot), but the Call to the Grave wouldn’t mean much to Jason when he had a Hatchery on board. Jason could just sac one of the many Snake tokens during his upkeep. He also had several ways to rid himself of the Call. Jonathan’s deck, of course, had ways to bring those back from the ‘yard, but Jason could keep destroying them with his Nullmage Advocate. Moreover, Jason could Syncopate the Call, and it wasn’t coming back.

That’s all just reactive stuff, though. Poison Ivy is plenty proactive, too. Big, huge creatures, lotsa tokens, and he could give things flying. Normally, Jonathan’s deck, being the Black one, has the fliers, but I wanted to switch that up this year for fun. I’m just crazy like that.

Then, there’s Maude. I mean, there’s me. For myself, I created a deck that I call:

An Army of One-Ones

Chris Romeo

Test deck on 12-24-2006

Casual

Creatures (47)

Lands (54)

Spells (36)

As you can see, there’s not a whole lot to my deck. Like I said, I usually expect just to hold the ground and help the game go long so that the other guys can have as much fun as possible. Mobilization was a great first step in that direction. Of course, I needed to make sure that Noxious Ghoul stayed off the board. Since I had Red, I could do that. Jonathan wouldn’t have any of that, though, and he kept bringing it back to life. Bastard.

Not that I didn’t think that my deck could win. I could wipe out everything on the ground with Fault Line and come back swinging with Soldier tokens the next turn. I had more fliers than the other two decks combined. Those came in handy, but they were easily dealt with. Noxious Ghoul and Friends could even kill off the Voice of Grace. My deck can be aggressive. It’s just wasn’t designed to be.

I was going to tell you which of us was left standing, but, in the end, it doesn’t matter who won. The decks were very evenly matched, almost too much so. There was some pushing and shoving with no one really making any inroads for a long time. The one game we played lasted about two and a half hours. Now that, my friends, is some good times.

Thanks for stopping by. Tomorrow, a final bit of Christmas cheer.

Chris Romeo
FromRightField-at-Comcast-dot-net