Happy Thursday to you all! Welcome back to another article in both The Kitchen Table and Building Your First Five. This week I am on vacation and unable to check my Internet. As such, I will unfortunately be unable to check and see your comments, or respond to them. I find this most unfortunate. I try to respond to virtually all comments left in response to my articles, but this week I will be unable to do so. I will still read them when I get back however, so don’t take this as an excuse to take the week off!
As you read this, I will be traveling somewhere in my home state of West Virginia. Ah, the hills, the forests, the landscape, the people — it’s one of my favorite places. It’s no longer home in a physical sense, but it will always be home to me. I haven’t visited good ol’ WV since I left six years ago, except once to go to my eldest sister’s wedding. As such, this gives me an opportunity to go to places I always wanted to go, or to revisit places that I want to see again before I die.
Here’s to my home! West Virginia!
The digression ceases now.
Last week I rebooted an aging article series of mine called Building Your First Five. In that series, begun over four and a half years ago, I explained the path to building a Five Color deck. Through eventually nine articles and eight volumes, I investigated everything from ante to mulligans to building the best manabase you can.
Unfortunately, as time went on, that series becomes more and more outdated. Although a lot of it is still good advice, enough has changed over time that I decided to redo the series. Since a lot of cards have been added to Magic since the previous printing, I decided to build two all new decks. That way you can still see the creative process from beginning to end, using both old and new cards.
In order to use the old articles to demonstrate the format and to keep the good information out there, I pasted the first article into last week’s article, and then snipped out some of the pieces. I then gave commentary on what had changed or explored things more fully in comments.
Today I will be continuing the same. However, since today is the first article where the deck building process is fleshed out, my two new decks will wholly replace the three old decks. As a result, this article will have a lot more new than old.
Without further ado, let’s take a look at the old article. The previous article will be written in normal type, and comments are in bold, beginning now:
Begin the Original Article (Comments are in bold)
In my last article, we discussed building Five decks and the theory behind them. It’s just not the same thing as plopping down 36 spells and 24 lands and calling it a day in Standard: There is a lot more thought and care involved, if you want your deck to have a shot at winning.
(Snip of a lot of intro stuff and some ante talk). Remember that this series investigates one of two ways to build a deck. This way is the Planned Design way. You could just toss some fun cards into Kitchen Sink 250 and be fine for your casual gaming. This series is for creating a sleeker design.
The goal of this segment of the series is to construct a basic skeleton or framework for the deck you have chosen. We do not want to fill it up with tutors, or removal, or mana, or whatever. All we want is the tasty nugget.
Figuring out the skeleton, however, may be a little bit harder than it appears at first. We may take the Sliver deck and say, “Hmmm, looks like we need Slivers. That’s about it for our foundation.”
One of my previous three decks created in the first series was a Sliver 250. I may occasionally leave comments like the above in, because they are good examples.
I decided to create two decks. One deck will be an attempt to build a deck from a Subtype on the Framework. I decided to build a Temporal deck. This is a decktype that combines No-Holds-Barred Aggro with Resource Denial. For this deck, I am going to use mana denial cards to supplement my aggressive strategy.
The second deck I wanted to create from an existing deck type. After reading and rereading the first article, I decided to take the deck Invincible Counter Troll (ICT) and make it a Five Color deck. Not only does that seem fun, but it pokes a bit of fun and nostalgia at my own Beyond Dominia past (yes, I was one of the people on BDominia years ago. I wasn’t Darren Di Battista or Oscar Tan or Stephen Menendian, but I was on that forum as an active participant. I’m no guru, but I am a Vintage enthusiast and I played in some of the Tournament of Champions with various deck builds. I remember Rakso (Oscar Tan) once publicly chiding me for using Impulse in a non-combo deck, but I got the last laugh when he started experimenting with them in his Keeper after Fact or Fiction was restricted. Ah, the memories. I will now end this parenthetical before it gets too big.)
So let’s tear into some theory, okay?
The basic premise behind the deck needs to be flushed out. You probably already have an idea of what you want your deck to look like. If you have, say, a wall deck, then you know what walls to include; if you have a Fluctuator deck, then you have a clue of what cards to throw in. And so forth. Remember that you have had an idea supposedly floating in your head for a week or so; you must have some ideas, then, of what to include.
Write them down.
Write down the cards that you would lose without: As a simple example, a Fluctuator deck without Fluctuators, for example, would be very poor. These cards are what your deck is built on. Don’t include tutors, card search and so forth. Just the cards you need.
(To continue the Fluctuator example: Suppose that you are wondering what to put in. You might decide that you absolutely need Fluctuator, sure, but Astral Slide and Lightning Rift might also be deemed absolute essentials. On the other hand, you aren’t going to worry about removal or things, even those that cycle, until later.)
Some ideas, however, are more specific than others. If you have had a “beatdown” deck in your mind, you will now need to narrow it down: What sort of beatdown do you want to play? You need to focus.
You may also need to choose a color.
Because only eighteen (It’s now twenty) cards are required in each color, most decks will want to focus on one or two colors. Beatdown, for example, may focus on Green and Red, with only (twenty) cards in each of Blue, White, and Black. Control, on the other hand, may focus on Blue and Black, or Blue and White. Maybe you want to play a CounterBurn deck – Blue and Red is your focus, obviously. If your deck idea needs focus, do so now, before we move on.
Okay, let me give you a little help here that I apparently did not give when I first write the article. Barring a very unusual deck and an amazingly powerful manabase, you are not looking to reduce Green. The single greatest weakness of a 250-card deck with all five colors is mana. Getting the right number and amount of mana is tough, and there is but one color that can truly help with that. Sure, with Fellwar Stones and Land Taxes and Tolaria West you might get some non-Green help, but at the end of the day, your deck is going to want to play a lot of Green cards.
One thing you will need to decide is how much Green your deck is going to have. A deck that uses Green just for mana production and the few power Green cards is fine. Some decks, however, are going to want a whole bunch more Green. If you want to take Spike Girls to a Five Color deck, for example, then the deck is going to have even more Green.
A lot of good Green cards often get tossed into decks later because since you are playing Green anyway, you might as well toss in Green artifact and enchantment removal instead of White. You might as well toss in cheap Green defensive creatures like Wall of Blossoms since you want Green early anyway. You might as well toss in Green card drawing like Harmonize. This is how Green sections grow in Five Color decks.
The point of this section is to help you figure out the colors you want to reduce in your deck, and but I felt I should tell you that you are likely not cutting Green down to 20 cards.
Part of your focus may be determined by what cards you have access to. Suppose you have a playset of Savannah Lions sitting at home with no format to play them in – here, they fit snugly in a 3-2-1 Contract deck. The same is true with an extra set of Winter Orbs or extra Fledgling Dragons or whatever. Your cards will dictate, in part, what your decks will look like. However, for your foundation, there is not a lot of maneuvering room. You need the key cards, and that is about it.
Some skeletons are going to be bigger than others. In my original article, the Sliver 250 used the basic slivers and some clever cards from Onslaught, like Patriarch’s Bidding, to use 62 cards in my deck. That was a pretty impressive skeleton. The Living Death deck had just 35 cards and the control deck ran just 38 in the skeleton. Those were obviously smaller skeletons. This isn’t the time to add card drawing, extra creatures, removal, tutor effects, land search, and so forth (unless they are part of the basic idea of a deck. Obviously Wrath.dec will want some removal, for example.)
Now that we are done with the skeleton discussion, let’s actually build the skeletons for our two sample decks. Because this next section will be all new, I am going to stop writing in bold for the new section. It annoys me if too much of the article is bolded.
Temporal 250
The concept of the Temporal 250 is simple enough at first glance. The deck wants to drop a few creatures, then play tempo cards that give the previous creatures enough time to do their job and win the game. That means that there are two major skeletal elements.
The first major skeletal element is going to be the best of the best — the absolute must-plays for the deck creature wise. What are the tip-top aggro creatures that the deck cannot do without? Once I have figured that out, I will have my skeletal creatures.
Then I need to add the best of the best in tempo. Grabbing those for my deck will complete the second major skeletal element. I’m not going to add many of these cards, just the cream of the crop.
Let’s go ahead and begin with the creatures.
The Aggro portion of the deck wants the best creatures, and there are some dandies. In my opinion, the best of the best creatures are those one-drops that are ten turn clocks. Therefore, I am looking at one-drops with two power.
Some two-power one-drops are very poor. We aren’t looking at crazy creatures like Goblin Cadets or Mtenda Lion. The Lion’s damage can be prevented and the Cadets too often switch sides.
As you can see, I just want the best of the best, but what are those?
In Blue, there are, at best, two choices. Drifter il-Dal and Spindrift Draft are the only two real choices. The problem is that these two creatures each have an upkeep. That upkeep slows the deck down and essentially tempos yourself, not your opponent. There are enough solid choices that you are not forced to play bad upkeep creatures.
In White, we have several choices. Savannah Lions are an obvious selection. With no disadvantage, the 2/1 attackers are solid. They’ve been lynchpins in aggro strategies for years. Isamaru, Hound of Konda is another fine choice. Some players fear getting a second if they have one out. As a result of that fear, they play fewer Hounds. I think you are fine with four, however, and that’s how many I’d recommend.
Green brings several options. Take, for example, Wild Dogs. They cycle if you get behind in the life race, and they should feasibly be a good first turn drop. Slap them down, attack on the second turn, deal two damage, and you are ahead in the race, hopefully to ever look back. That’s how Ghazban Ogre works. However, these creature are vulnerable to burn to your head. Play a Ghazban Ogre, then your opponent plays Lightning Bolt, takes the Ogre, and there’s been a major switch. A lot of decks run burn to fill up their Red suite, so that scenario is not unlikely.
That leaves two options, to my mind at least. Jungle Lion, the darling of Portal sets, is available for use. Who cares if you can’t block? The other choice is the unheralded Skyshroud Elite. Non-basic lands are amazingly common in this format, to help people smooth their manabases. Fully tricked-out decks often include Fetches and duals and that’s it. Skyshroud Elite loves these players. Less tricked-out players rely on non-basics like taplands, the lairs, and Ravnica Karoo lands. That makes the Skyshroud Elite a solid clock and a big body. The 2/3 creature can kill any one-drop and survive, barring an Elite or a Kird Ape with Forest.
In Red, we have a lot of bad choices, from the aforementioned Cadets through Flailing Soldier. The two goods creatures are, in my opinion, Jackal Pup and Kird Ape. The Ape is best in an environment with heavy Green or heavy dual lands. Since you’ll almost always have heavy Green, and many duals get played in these decks, the Ape is strong. The Jackal Pup is no Elite, Jungle Lion, Savannah Lion or Isamaru. It is better than most other options, however, and I like it.
Black brings fast creatures with painful disadvantages. The other obvious selections are suicide favorites Carnophage and Sarcomancy. Does your deck want these cards? A dead Sarcomancy token can deal a lot of damage over the course of the game, while Carnophage only deals you one when you want to strike with it. As such, let’s run Carnophage right now, but leave off Sarcomancy for later if needed.
In artifacts and gold cards, no creature makes the two-power, one-mana cut — not even Straw Golem.
The next step is to add the essential tempo cards, and I think there are two choices here. Winter Orb is cheap, can be played for any color of mana, and can be played whenever you have need without disrupting your plan too much. It’s a great choice to slap it down after your opponent taps out for a creature or card. Play it and you can get some serious tempo advantage. Opponents can get around it with several artifact sources of mana, so be prepared. After all, they always have one land mana available from what they untap plus any land they may play.
Armageddon is the other obvious choice. The ‘Geddon is probably the most expensive spell in the deck. You can’t play them in Extended or Standard, so you might as well dust off your trusty Armageddons and run them here. It’s a perfect adjunct for aggro strategies since the game was made. Drop fast creatures, Geddon and gain several turns if they have land in hand, or gain even more if they do not. By the time they stabilize, their life is in a precarious position. Your cards are cheap, so keeping a land or two back is a great way to start again — which you can do admirably with all of the cheap creatures we just put in.
Therefore, the initial skeleton is this:
Temporal 250 Skeleton
4 Savannah Lions
4 Isamaru, Hound of Konda
4 Jungle Lion
4 Skyshroud Elite
4 Jackal Pup
4 Kird Ape
4 Sarcomancy
4 Winter Orb
4 Armageddon
That gives us 36 cards — a nice initial skeleton. In fact, that skeleton is so good that you could add 24 lands and artifact mana, shuffle, and play it as a deck. Not a very well-rounded deck, but a deck nonetheless.
Invincible Counter Troll 250
I chose this deck to 250-ize because it was mentioned in my previous article and it made me laugh with nostalgia. What is ICT you might rightfully ask?
ICT was a deck posited by RandomMiser (Roy Spires) back on BDominia as the best deck in Vintage. Unfortunately for him, many in the community mocked his deck. To be fair, I don’t remember joining the mocking, but I also remember I didn’t have a high opinion of the deck.
If you want more info, check out [author name="Oscar Tan"]Oscar Tan’s[/author] article at the bottom to read one of Roy’s primers for ICT.
The key cards for Roy’s deck include Sedge Troll, Nevinyrral’s Disk, Ophidian, and countermagic.
Sedge Troll has always been a solid creature, and I love it. I’m not sure this is the deck for it, but I still think is grand. We now have Sedge Sliver, which does the same thing, and you just hope that your opponent is a little light in the sliver count. Between these two guys, the deck gets eight of the card it is named after.
The Disk is in the deck to sweep the board but leave the Trolls alive from their regeneration. This concept of sweeping the board but leaving your regenerators will need to make it in our deck. For now, I am just going to run four Disks, but I need to keep my eyes peeled for other options in future articles.
This deck likes card advantage, and Roy admits that one of the key components of ICT is a large love of card advantage. Therefore he ran Ophidian as his only other maindeck creature. We will honor that here with Ophidians in the deck. Being Five Colors gives us some choices that Roy never had. Could we run Shadowmage Infiltrator? What about Ohran Viper? Let make Roy happy and run all three!
I would never normally run countermagic in the skeleton of the deck, instead pushing it to the next section along with removal, card drawing, tutor effects, mana search and other similar effects. However, Roy states that countermagic took his deck to the next level and is an essential part of the deck concept. Therefore, it only follows that our deck run some of the best countermagic ever printed.
I’ll steer clear of Force of Will and Mana Drain. The first isn’t as good in Five Color decks and the second costs way too much for me to put in a decklist on a regular basis. Counterspell is obviously a good call. I’ll also toss in the next best counter, Forbid. You’ll note that we have a solid Forbidian core to the deck.
This gives us a 32-card core. Let’s take a gander.
Invincible Counter Troll 250 Skeleton
4 Sedge Troll
4 Sedge Sliver
4 Nevinyrral’s Disk
4 Ophidian
4 Ohran Viper
4 Shadowmage Infiltrator
4 Counterspell
4 Forbid
We’ve got counters, we’ve got trolls, and we’ve got card advantage and Disks. Roy would be so proud.
Now we’ve come to the conclusion of another article. As a reminder, I will be unable to respond to this week’s comments due to me being elsewhere, but I will read them upon my return. Before I go, allow me to leave you with the final three paragraphs from my previous article.
How is your deck’s skeleton working out? All you probably have for your deck is around 40 or so cards. This is the key aspect of your deck, and was probably really easy for you. Any yokel, myself included, knows how to find the key cards for a deck idea.
The next article will go over fleshing out your deck idea. This is where is starts becoming a challenge. Remember that Five Color is very different, with its own unique metagame. A lot of new players just don’t know where to go from here. How do I fix the deck to make it work? What should my deck begin to look like? That is what we will discuss next time.
For now, think about the different ways your deck can go. Look over your cards and see what you have available to you. Some of those crap rares from long ago will really shine when you have to use 250 cards.
Until later,