The Weekly Guild Build: Sawing Off Your Left Arm

If you want to see excitement, just take a look at Dmitri’s forehead. Dmitri is my friend, and he has expressive blue eyes capped by two twitching, enthusiastic eyebrows.

Whenever you mention Magic to Dmitri, those sapphire eyes shoot open wide like a kid who’s just been told Santa Claus has come to town, and his eyebrows begin to do amazing feats of acrobatics upon the pale white stage of his forehead. They leap in happiness, they crouch down low when you decide upon a time to play Magic, and they practically flip-flop with barely-contained joy when you tell him that yes, he can come along to play cards with you.

The eyebrows are the antennae to Dmitri’s soul. Unfortunately, the last thing Dmitri ever does is actually play Magic.

“I can’t make it,” he says glumly, calling a few days later. “I can’t afford the money for Sealed this week.” Or “I have a commitment. You have fun without me.” Or “My wife and I have other plans.”

Dmitri is a passionate man, but the amount of time we’ve spent planning get-togethers to play Magic exceeds the amount of time we’ve actually played Magic. This is a shame, since I like playing with Dmitri very much, but what are you going to do?

As such, I’ve shifted to Magic Online, since I cannot rely on my real-life friends to go out with me to Draft or crack open a Sealed deck. They seem to enjoy the idea of learning Limited Magic, but lack the follow-through to actually do it.

Which is why I hate purchasing actual physical cards. I don’t use them any more, so they’re just sort of accumulating in my basement, which is stuffed with rares from pretty much every set.

“Why don’t you go through your collection and pull out the cards you don’t need any more, then sell them?” my wife asks. “I bet you could get a fair amount of money from Pete.”

“Aw, man!” I cry, my eyebrows beginning a merry jig. “That’d be awesome! I should totally do that!” And then I never get around to it.

I guess I know how Dmitri feels.

This Week’s Deck
The reason I mention this abhorrence of purchasing real-life cards is because, well, I had an article to write. As we speak, I am currently staying at my parents’ house in Connecticut, seeing relatives, and I don’t have the time to go to a local Sealed Deck tournament, and the prerelease tournaments for Magic Online are, well, today.

I suppose I could have written an article on some broader concept of Guildpact, but I think it’s more instructive to actually go through the exercise of Sealed Deck construction. So I went out to my local hobby store and purchased two packs and a starter, then created a totally artificial deck solely for the purposes of this article.

Can you feel the love tonight? That’s how much I care about you. That purchase was like a warm, snuggly hug from me to you.

In any case, I sat down and thought about this deck, giving myself twenty minutes to create it. Here’s the deck I opened, in rares:

Borborygmos.

Yay! I’m totally playing Red/Green!

Godless Shrine.

Yay! I totally got my money back!

Firemane Angel.

Yay! I’m totally playing Red/Green/White!

I also got Shadow of Doubt (“ “) and Sins of the Past (“What the hell does that do?”)… But given that the first Ravnica uncommon I saw was Lightning Helix, clearly Boros/Gruul was the way to go.

Or was it? I mean, we don’t want to commit this early; it’d be like marrying a girl on the first date, which you should only do if you’re a Moonie. By which I am referring to followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, a popular Korean cult leader who tends to pair up his followers more-or-less at random and marry them in huge ceremonies. Strangely enough, the divorce rate of the people married at random is no greater than the independent married couples who chose each other, indicating that perhaps we’re pretty crappy at figuring out who we should be married to. Maybe the Reverend Sun Myung Moon should marry all of us.

However, Sun Myung Moon cannot build our decks for us, and building our decks at random would be a pretty terrible way of doing things unless you’re a Marvel superhero called Longshot… So we should probably look at the rest of the cards rather than committing to Red/Green/White.

Sealed Deck

Ferrett Steinmetz

Test deck on 02-26-2006

Ravnica Limited

Creatures (43)

Lands (6)

Spells (25)

Now, normally, I’d do a clever breakdown of this pool color-by-color, but that’s a clever writer’s trick of padding an article that’s bass-ackward. When you’re actually building a deck at your tournament, you usually don’t look at the colors one-by-one; you look at your most powerful cards, and then see whether the colors support them. That allows you to dismiss certain card pools instantly (even if you have to go back when you’re done to take a second look at the colors you dismissed).

So since I started

Right now, we have:

Firemane Angel / Lightning Helix / possibly the Guildmage
Borborygmos
Drooling Groodion / Putrefy / Golgari Rotwurm / Shambling Shell

There are other good cards, of course, but really those are the combinations that stand out. (That’s an astonishingly good Golgari run, really.) I mean, I am by no means ignoring the quite nice double-Ghost Warden here, but I’m not going to dip into White for that alone.

So how can we combine these things? Again, there are a few possibilities:

Red/White/Green, which gets us the Angel, Helix, and Borborgymos;
Red/Black/Green, which gets us Borborygmos and the nice Golgari stuff;
Black/Green/X, which gets us all the Golgari, but we have to leave off the nice beefy rares we’ve gotten. Chances are, since I’ve already mentioned the double-Ghost Warden, it’s going to be White.
Black/Green/White/Red, which gets us the White cards and a Firemane Angel at the cost of possibly wretched mana.

Let’s analyze them one-by-one.

Red/White/Green
Unfortunately, our Red is pretty wretched here; aside from Tin Street Hooligan and Sell-Sword Brute, there really isn’t a solid maindeckable card I’d be proud to run, which makes this a splash color. (Okay, maybe Coalhauler Swine. But that’s a card that seems to be alternately the best card in the world when I draw it, or “Oh, crap, I just lost.” Also, yes, I like Ogre Savant, but not when I’m not playing blue.)

Unfortunately, neither the Brute or the Hooligan are cards that I would be happy to draw on turn 8, and my rule for a splash is that it has to be good in the late game. Which means that our Green and our White have to be really good…

…and they’re not. White has solid auto-includes in Benevolent Ancestor, Conclave Equenaut, and Courier Hawk, and we mentioned the double-Ghost Warden, but after that it’s all chaff. Green is also a little weak here; Gruul Nodorog isn’t bad, I loves me the Wayfinder, and Scatter the Seeds and Ivy Dancer provide some solid power… But where are my Greater Mossdogs and Bramble Elementals?

To quote the old lady who used to do the Wendy’s commercials: “Where’s the beef?”

It’s not like either the White or Green are bad, but they’re not good enough to be 90% of a deck… And since Red’s fallen down on the job, that’s just what they’d have to do in this color combination. Maybe Selesnya could fill the gap here, but there isn’t a single Selesnya card to be found!

How unusual. How sad.

Red/Black/Green
We’ve already analyzed two of these colors, finding the Green slightly thin and the Red pathetic, so our Black will really have to be strong to carry us over here. Unfortunately, it’s not that strong.

Oh, it starts out nicely, with a Brainspoil and a Clinging Darkness churning down the page in alphabetical order, and Disembowel showing up… But there are no really good critters. I haven’t played with Plagued Rusalka enough to say whether she’s good without a slew of token generators that we don’t have, but Orzhov Euthanist and Restless Bones still leave us in the lurch without significant beef. And in this environment, I don’t want to walk out the door with a slew of measly 2/2s for protection.

And yes, we have three removal spells in Black and so there’s the outside chance that Sins of the Past could really pay off, but paying six mana to recycle a spell doesn’t strike me as being maindeckable goodness.

Gruul is not particularly kind to us, either; Gruul gave us their war chief in Borborygmos, but they seemed to think that this was enough. Neither Scab-Clan Mauler nor Wild Cantor are really powerful Gruul cards. Fortunately, the Golgari cards are so powerful they almost — almost — make up for it.

Let’s see how many runnable cards we have total:

1 Civic Wayfinder
1 Elves Of Deep Shadow
1 Gruul Nodorog
1 Ivy Dancer
1 Scatter The Seeds

1 Brainspoil
1 Clinging Darkness
1 Disembowel
1 Orzhov Euthanist
1 Plagued Rusalka
1 Restless Bones

1 Bloodscale Prowler
1 Coalhauler Swine
1 Sell-sword Brute
1 Tin Street Hooligan

1 Borborygmos
1 Scab-clan Mauler
1 Wild Cantor

1 Drooling Groodion
1 Golgari Rotwurm
1 Putrefy
1 Shambling Shell

1 Lurking Informant

I dunno, man. That’s twenty-three cards, so it’s enough for a deck, but I’m not feeling the love. It feels weak to me, like I’m basically playing a lot of mostly-vanilla weenies in the hopes that Borborygmos shows up to cement them all together into a strategy. (That syndrome remains even if I cut one or two guys to throw in the Glass Golem and the Spectral Searchlight.) Also, aside from the Rot Farm and the Wayfinder and maybe the Searchlight, we have no mana-fixers or bouncelands to use.

(As a side note, “borborygmi” are the noises your stomach makes when it’s empty. The leader of the Gruul clan is well-named indeed!)

We can run this, but let’s explore our other options. Like, f’r example…

Black/Green/White
The White isn’t the strongest, but let’s take a look:

1 Drooling Groodion
1 Golgari Rotwurm
1 Putrefy
1 Shambling Shell

1 Lurking Informant

1 Civic Wayfinder
1 Elves Of Deep Shadow
1 Gruul Nodorog
1 Ivy Dancer
1 Scatter The Seeds

1 Brainspoil
1 Clinging Darkness
1 Disembowel
1 Orzhov Euthanist
1 Plagued Rusalka
1 Restless Bones

1 Benevolent Ancestor
1 Conclave Equenaut
1 Courier Hawk
2 Ghost Warden

1 Agent Of Masks
1 Souls Of The Faultless

That feels better to me; there’s still a little beef shortage, but there is at least more evasion and the Ghost Warden and the Ancestor can help provide parity against opponents’ Streetbreaker Wurms. Souls of the Faultless is a tricky card to cast mana-wise, but I’ve seen it shut down ground assaults, which buys us a little more time — something I can feel good about. Agent of Masks isn’t great — I usually like more than a 2/3 for my five mana — but it basically reads, “If we get into a stalemate, I’m winning it.” I’m not crazy about this combination of cards, but…

…There’s the mana fixing. It’s great. I mean, we have a dual land for Black/White and a bounceland in both of our colors. The chances of us getting mana-screwed (particularly if we throw in the Searchlight) are about as low as we can possibly hope for in Limited.

But are we excluding stuff? I mean, can we go with Green/Black/Blue? Well, I’m not impressed. As we’ve said, this particular Green/Black is slightly thin on solid creatures, particularly in the early game, and Blue — as is traditional in this format — offers a lot of support, but not a whole lot of back to carry your deck on. Halcyon Glaze is an excellent card that’s pounded me a couple of times, and Stratozeppelid is a serious air threat, and double-Repeal will help. The Dimir cards are kinda light in the loafers, though.

But then you lose a lot of the mana support. A case can be made for going Blue here, and I suspect that one of y’all will do so in the forums, but it feels iffy to me; I like smashing with men, not buying time with Repeal. Especially since we might try for….

Total Friggin’ Greed: Black/Green/White/Red
We have pretty good mana-fixing here, so do we want to add in two sources of Red mana to splash the Firemane Angel, or perhaps even the Lightning Helix as well?

I’m a little leery of this tactic, though it’s not totally bad. As I’ve shown in my last two articles, the undefeated Sealed decks usually did not splash a fourth color for a fourth card — they splashed for an additional effect, like to get the off-color Guildmage power. And when they did so, they did so off of a bounceland or signet that was in their colors; we have no bouncelands or signets to work with here.

And even if we did want to do that, we’re going to need not only a single Red mana, but two mana from what’s most likely going to be our least-used color (White). Even given that we’ll have both a dual land and a bounceland to provide white mana sources and a Searchlight for the Red, that still makes the chances of us drawing and casting the Firemane fairly sketchy. An awful lot of Firemane draws will be Dead on Arrival.

That said, we are lacking a little power here; there are a bunch of decent cards, but no huge finisher aside from the Groodion (and possibly the Rotwurm). And if we can’t cast it, the Angel is not a bad card to have in the graveyard (even if that’s not where we want it, and it’s unlikely we’ll get it there outside of a truly wretched draw or an opponent’s Strands of Undeath).

And so we return to the old question: Will we win with Firemane more often than we’ll get mana-screwed by trying to accommodate her? In this case, my sneaking suspicion is “We’ll get mana screwed,” and we have a fair amount of firepower here without her, so I’m going to leave her on the sidelines.

I suspect many will disagree with me. That’s what the forums are for.

Thus, in the end my final deck looked like this:

Lurking Informant
Clinging Darkness
Gruul Nodorog
Civic Wayfinder
Ivy Dancer
Brainspoil
Scatter the Seeds
Putrefy
Disembowel
Conclave Equenaut
Courier Hawk
Souls of the Faultless
2 Ghost Warden
Spectral Searchlight
Orzhov Euthanist
Elves of Deep Shadow
Benevolent Ancestor
Glass Golem

Boros Guildmage
Drooling Groodion
Golgari Rotwurm
Shambling Shell

Golgari Rot Farm
Orzhov Basilica
Godless Shrine
5 Swamp
4 Plains
5 Forest

The problem was, in the end I had to cut one of three cards to get down to twenty-three business cards: It was either the Agent of Masks, the Boros Guildmage, or the Gruul Nodorog. I briefly considered dropping the Guildmage because of the color requirements — two white might be a bit difficult, even with our mana-fixing — but given that I had so many creatures that could be completely insane with first strike, I had to leave her in. That left the slow drain of the Agent of Masks, or the straight 4/4-with-a-potential-Red-splash of the Nodorog… And I wanted beef over a marginal card that I’d never want to throw into combat anyway.

The other remaining question was, “Did I want Svogthos in my mana base?” I haven’t been terribly impressed by Svogthos; yeah, he can be a house in the late game after a huge attrition war, but more often he seems to pop up in the early game when I really want colored mana, and I’m pouring five mana into him to get a 3/3. As such, I decided to leave him out of it and put in a Forest.

I suppose the other question is, “Do you really need seventeen lands? With two bouncelands, can’t you get by with sixteen?” And honestly, I’m not sure. I tend to err on the side of caution when it comes to mana bases, and it’s possible I’m overloading here. Lemme know what you think, guys.

Now, here’s the part where I hate to abandon you — because I like to actually, you know, play the deck I built and tell you where it went wrong. I did a couple of test draws with this and it felt fine, but because this wasn’t built in a place where I can play it, I honestly can’t tell you how on-target I was. I’d feel confident going in with this build, but who knows how much I’m overrating Nodorog, or underrating Agent of Masks?

That’s what the MODO prereleases are for, I guess. Check back next week to hear me bitch about buggy cards.

A Word From Roy Thijsen
I dissected Roy Thijsen’s undefeated deck last week, and he emailed me to say this:

“I’d like to comment on some things: the Overwhelm was really good – better than the Woodwraith Corrupter. Also, the Golgari Brownscale is more than just a filler card. Do you know how many 2/2’s there are in the format?

“The only other playable rare was a Niv-Mizzet but I couldn’t go into U/R/g and didn’t want to play black or white with this. The deck I played was an autobuild as well; I was ready in twelve minutes.”

The only thing I will say is that I have been underwhelmed with the Brownscale. It’s not a bad card, but it’s not the kind of card that makes me drool and go, “Ooo, I’m playin’ Green now!” The 2/3 vanilla body is okay (even with the double-Green cost), and the dredge effect has gotten me out of a few situations, so I’ll usually run it… But I have never had a deck where I went, “Hot damn! Double-Brownscale!”

That’s all I’m sayin’.

The Weekly Plug Bug
This week’s Home On The Strange — which, if you’ll recall, is the amazing webcomic written by Yours Truly — deals with S-E-X. And roleplaying. And, perhaps, sex in roleplaying.

It does not, however, deal with roleplaying sex, so alas there will be no naughty nurses to be found. I mean, it’s not that kind of webcomic.

Signing off,
The Ferrett
TheFerrett@StarCityGames.com
The Here Edits This Site Here Guy