Welcome back to another edition of Thank God It’s FNM! I will be playing a midnight Prerelease for Dragon’s Maze tonight, and I am very excited. Just a few days ago, Wizards released the entire Dragon’s Maze spoiler, and the set looks pretty sweet from a Limited standpoint. Honestly, though, this set is pretty disappointing to me for Constructed. While there are a few sweet cards that stick out, I think that the set as a whole will not have a very big impact on Standard. I’ve been wrong before, though, so we’ll see.
Due to a small bug that was running around on Magic Online, I was left unable to play any games this week, but it worked out perfectly nonetheless. For this week, I want to go over a few specific spoilers and come up with some cool ideas for them. There won’t be a whole lot of decklists in this article, as I’m the kind of person who likes to pose general ideas rather than posting decklists. It forces the reader to do some of the thinking, which hopefully in turn will make you better deckbuilders. Or maybe I’m just lazy; who knows? Anyway, let’s get right into the spoilers!
Advent of the Wurm
The idea I have for this card is less of an FNM deck and more of a competitive deck I’ve been working on. I’m going to give you a little background on how the deck I’m about to show you came to be in my head. As most of you know, U/W/R Flash has been a pretty good deck in Standard for a while, but recently Jeff Hoogland took to the tournament scene with a RUG version of Flash that you can see here. From my standpoint, the spells in this deck were generally worse, mostly because of the lack of Sphinx’s Revelation, but the creatures were very good. More specifically, Wolfir Avenger is an amazing card. It has the ability to be aggressive and also blocks very well.
Recently, I was theorycrafting different versions of both of these decks but was unhappy with the lists. Then my friend Anthony had a genius idea! Why not take the parts I liked from both decks (Supreme Verdict and Sphinx’s Revelation from U/W/R and Wolfir Avenger from RUG) and play Bant Flash. We both started throwing around lists, and after a little bit of testing with local split-deck Commander specialist Sam Bucek, I settled on this list:
Creatures (17)
Lands (24)
Spells (19)
The numbers definitely need some work, but overall I’ve been pretty happy with the deck even though I’ve been losing a fair amount. Most of the losing has come from me being dumb or the numbers of cards being wrong. The deck itself, especially in its current form, feels very powerful. I tested Skylasher, but I think it’s more of a sideboard card than anything else.
Something I’m still considering is making the deck more spell heavy and going up to four Snapcaster Mages. That would mean more Supreme Verdicts, more Advent of the Wurms, and the like. Voice of Resurgence has been very good, and this deck can actually afford to cast its own Supreme Verdicts very well. Half of your creatures either generate value or are good against Supreme Verdict, so it is easy to start extending early even if you may have to pull the trigger on a Supreme Verdict a few turns down the road.
Another thing I’m on the fence about is a single Gavony Township in place of a Glacial Fortress. In testing I wasn’t the biggest fan, but I’m willing to give it another try. Advent of the Wurm is probably better than Yeva, Nature’s Herald as well. Yeva, Nature’s Herald only gives flash to your Voice of Resurgences, and it has a smaller body and no trample. It is more resilient versus Azorius Charm and Unsummon, but Advent of the Wurm can be Snapcaster Maged.
Lastly, Restoration Angel may seem weak in this deck, but I’ve been very happy with it. While there is almost no value to be gained from the Blink, having a flash flyer that can also make another blocker is very important a lot of the time. Overall, this deck is a lot of fun, and I recommend giving it a try. I’d love any input you guys have.
Blast of Genius
My ideas for this card are pretty simple. We cast this twice, discard random cards that cost a lot of mana, and kill our opponent. Some cards we can use off the top of my head are Catch // Release, Breaking // Entering, and Blasphemous Act. Remember that split cards add together the total cost of the two to determine converted mana cost. Catch // Release gives you another way to win the game, and Blasphemous Act helps you play defense. Pretty simple idea overall, and it will probably utilize a similar shell to the U/R Boros Reckoner deck that I played not too long ago.
Nivix Cyclops
A couple months ago, a U/R Delver deck was popping up around the Standard scene, but little came of it. I think this guy could help that deck immensely. Maximize spells, cast Artful Dodge, play a few counterspells, and voila—we have a deck. Guttersnipe also seems like a reasonable fit in this deck since it does a similar thing as Nivix Cyclops. Redundancy breeds consistency, I guess.
Obzedat’s Aid
This is certainly the spoiler I’m most looking forward to playing with. Every time I look at this card, I just think of Faithless Looting; Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker; and Omniscience. While it is certainly not as good at reanimating creatures as Unburial Rites is, it reanimates other permanents pretty well. At some point if I can make it work, you will likely see an article about a deck involving Obzedat’s Aid, Faithless Looting, Forbidden Alchemy, and Omniscience from me. I really like all the cool things that this card can do, and I can’t wait to try it out.
Breaking // Entering
Realistically, I only care about the Breaking side of this card. The first "real" deck I played when I started playing Magic was Turbo Fog, and I still miss that deck. I did pretty well with the deck considering how long I had been playing it, and the deck created some awesome stories. I made a guy cry when he cracked his Misty Rainforest on turn 1, played a Llanowar Elves, and then got quadruple Archive Trapped out of the remaining 52 cards in his library.
During my first States about two months after learning to play the game, I was X-1-1 before playing against the deck’s two unwinnable matchups, Hedron Crab Self-Mill and Pyromancer Ascension’s Combo, to finish X-3-1 (I believe it was 4-3-1). At this event, there was a Yu-Gi-Oh! Prerelease going on for a new set next door.
I was playing against White Weenie in round 5—a basically unlosable matchup. After winning game 1, my opponent remarked that if I beat him he would quit Magic. I assumed he was referring to my age. Anyway, I triple Archive Trapped him on turn 1, then cast a Howling Mine, and won very easily. He slammed his hand on the table and walked over to the Yu-Gi-Oh! Prerelease. From the looks of it, he was buying some packs. His friend just picked up his stuff and ran after him in confusion.
To get to the point, I love milling my opponents. While we no longer have Archive Trap, we do have some good mana to mill ratio. We got Mind Sculpt in M13, and now we have Breaking. While these cards are no Glimpse the Unthinkable, they still mill a decent amount of cards. Snapcaster Mage can flash both of them back, and Psychic Strike is a sweet counterspell that aids the plan. Another cool card from Gatecrash that this deck may want is Pilfered Plans. I’m not sure a Divination that mills two is what this deck really wants, but I guess it can’t hurt to make our Snapcaster Mages as good as they possibly can be.
We could also splash a color to have some game against aggro. Splashing green gives us access to a whole bunch of Fog effects, while splashing white gives us Supreme Verdict, Sphinx’s Revelation, and other Fog effects like Safe Passage and the new Riot Control. The problem is that the deck lacks a good Howling Mine effect. Otherworld Atlas is just too slow, but Sphinx’s Revelation could at least go a little way towards solving that. Before I get yelled at, I know that there is already a "Turbo Fog" deck in Standard that Todd Anderson talked about recently, but that deck is just not exciting and only actually has one card to really mill their opponent a lot of the time.
Rot Farm Skeleton
I’m not really sure what I want to do with this card other than something involving Splinterfright. I recall that soon after Return to Ravnica came out, Adam Prosak played a Value Jund deck that had Liliana of the Veil, Veilborn Ghoul, Lotleth Troll, Faithless Looting, and Grisly Salvage. This card could have a home in that deck as a way to get more value. It might even be right to move towards more Swamps and play Mutilate. Just a cool idea that popped into my head.
For now, those are all the ideas I have involving cards from Dragon’s Maze. Some of the other new cards are pretty cool, but I have no idea where they will fit into Standard just yet. As I said, I don’t think that Dragon’s Maze will shake up Standard that much, but it will definitely spice up some existing archetypes and maybe create some new ones. Only time will tell.
If you are playing in a Prerelease this weekend, good luck to you. I’ll be at SCG Open Series: Somerset next weekend. If you want to stop by and say hi, just look for the kid in a weird looking Perry the Platypus hat. As usual, email me or post in the comments any decklists you have or even just ideas. I’d love to chat about whatever you have. At this point, I would stick to decklists involving Dragon’s Maze, but if you want to show me a list you have without Dragon’s Maze, I’ll still take a look.
I’m not exactly sure what I want to do for the next few weeks while I wait for Magic Online to get Dragon’s Maze, but I’ll figure something out. I may just do another article filled with sweet ideas. Anyway, thanks for reading, and thank god it’s FNM!
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