Finally, it appears that Extended season is done. It was good laughs while it was here, but I’m really ready to stop having to read about Faeries this and multi-colored aggro that in every one of the Premium articles. Finally we can go back to talking about Standard and…
… aw, crap.
This summer is going to be the Season of Standard – PTQs for Austin, Regionals, Magic Cruise Qualifiers, StarCityGames.com $5000 Standard Opens (three in June!), heck, even Friday Night Magic applies in most cases. For the next four months, we’re going to be buried under an avalanche of decks and strategy with cards from the last two years.
And the nice thing is, it shouldn’t get TOO stale, since in that time, we’ll have two new sets, including the big shift from 10th Edition to Magic 2010. Sure, we’ll see plenty of Five-Color decks and Cryptic Commands, but there’s going to be room – and time – for plenty of innovation. I mean, I hope so, or poor Bennie Smith head will explode.
Standard … Reborn
We’re less than three weeks away from the Pre-Releases for Alara Reborn, and already we’re starting to get little snippets of the golden, uh, gold cards that will be inside. Wizards is piling pretty much every excuse for making powerful cards into one set. Last set in the block? Check. Two-color or three-color casting costs? Check. And they’ve already been pushing the power level, especially for the commons and uncommons, throughout the whole block.
Looks like Alara Reborn has a good chance at being a winner.
Already it’s looking like Blightning Deck Wins (or possibly some other RB deck) is getting some awesome toys. Since Blightning is a pretty inexpensive deck to start with, adding in some powerful Reborn commons and uncommons may be the catalyst to push it back up into Tier One.
Can Blightning Strike Twice?
To see where we go from here, we need a good starting point. Luckily, Star City just held a 5K last weekend, so we have a number of decklists to peruse, starting with Roland Fletcher’s Blightning decklist that Top-8’ed the associated Cruise Qualifier.
Creatures (21)
- 4 Mogg Fanatic
- 4 Boggart Ram-Gang
- 4 Figure of Destiny
- 4 Hellspark Elemental
- 2 Goblin Outlander
- 3 Shambling Remains
Lands (23)
Spells (16)
Sideboard
Rare Cost Summary:
Figure of Destiny ($20.00 x 4 = $80.00)
Banefire ($10.00 x 2 = $20.00)
Auntie’s Hovel ($4.00 x 4 = $16.00)
Graven Cairns ($5.00 x 4 = $20.00)
Sulfurous Springs ($3.00 x 4 = $12.00)
Pithing Needle ($15.00 x 3 = $45.00)
Everlasting Torment ($4.00 x 2 = $8.00)
The money investment for this deck is the Figures; even as a Release foil, it still is running around twenty bucks based on how many decks use it: Boat Brew, B/W Tokens, Kithkin (which is still around, believe it or not) and Red Deck Wins all use the little hybrid pumper. Of course, because he was a Release foil, it increases the chances of you having picked one or two up in your travels. The rest of the money is in the manabase and the Pithing Needles in the sideboard.
Roland’s deck includes the Faerie-stuffing, Spectral-Procession-crushing Volcanic Fallout, and his creature base is designed to survive it — and I think any budget version of this decks needs to keep this in mind in order to have any shot at the top-tier decks.
But first, we should look at some spoiled Alara Reborn cards that might just find a spot in this deck.
Blightning … For Free?
(Rumors and spoilers all come courtesy of MTGSalvation, and may be subject to change as Alara Reborn nears its release date.)
When I first saw Tar Shards, I thought, “Double Cast is a dangerous mechanic.” Oh, here’s the card:
Tar Shards
3BR
Instant (U)
Double Cast
Tar Shards deals 4 damage to target creature.
When you play this spell, reveal cards from the top of your library until you reveal a nonland card with lesser converted mana cost than this spell. You may play that card without paying its mana cost. Then put all remaining revealed cards on the bottom of your library in any order.
The immediate question is: Is this good? There are a lot of reasons to say, “Probably not.” The mana cost, for one – for five mana, you should be looking at a complete game-changer, and Blightning still has access to Demigod of Revenge or Siege-Gang Commander. The second is that you have to target a creature with it, and your opponent is not guaranteed to have a creature on turn five for you to target — especially if you’ve been doing your job as a pilot of this deck and continuously attacking. On the other hand, it’s instant speed, meaning you can run the gambit mid-combat or end-of-turn and see what you flip.
But you know what the tempting part is: “without paying its mana cost.” Single-handedly that phrase will cause players to at least consider playing the card. I anticipate trying it in place of Flame Javelin, the only card in the deck that it can’t cast for free, just to see how I feel. Deals the same damage to a potential blocker, AND I get a free Blightning or guy or burn spell?
The Only Certain Things in Life Are Terminate And Taxes
You gotta love the people at Wizards who come up with the April Fool’s jokes. They make it obviously a joke (I’m looking at you Tauntaun sleeping bag), but still manage to slip in some real information, making the real trick separating out fact from fiction.
This year, the ‘fact’ was that Terminate was seeing a reprint in our all-gold set. Terminate is an amazing tool, not only for Blightning, but also for 5-Color Control — both can swap out the Terrors that they run maindeck or sideboard for Terminates, and be assured of killing dead whatever creature they want, black, artifact, or otherwise.
Terminate is critically important for this deck in specific. Spending one card to kill Doran, Wall of Reverence, or any other big-boned creature is efficient like a Fortune 500 secretary, and much better than being forced to use your mid-game burn-to-the-face just to clear a path for your dudes. At two mana, it runs in exactly the same curve spot as Terror. The only downside? It doesn’t kill Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tender. It also doesn’t kill Chameleon Colossus, but that guy isn’t seeing much play right now — maybe Terminate’s reprinting will give him a second life as well.
The deck is already mostly comprised of commons and uncommons, so filling in spots for those $20 Figures brings it down into the realm of cards you probably have stuffed in the cracks of your couch.
4 Boggart Ram-Gang
4 Hellspark Elemental
4 Mogg Fanatic
4 Shambling Remains
2 Stigma Lasher
4 Tar Shards
4 Incinerate
4 Shock
4 Blightning
3 Volcanic Fallout
10 Mountain
3 Savage Lands
2 Ghitu Encampment
4 Graven Cairns
4 Sulfurous Springs
Sideboard:
3 Guttural Response
4 Goblin Outlander
2 Everlasting Torment
3 Terminate
3 Infest
Rare Cost Summary:
Graven Cairns ($5.00 x 4 = $20.00)
Sulfurous Springs ($3.00 x 4 = $12.00)
Everlasting Torment ($4.00 x 2 = $8.00)
Step one: Replacing Figure of Destiny. I wanted something in the same casting cost slot, but let’s face it, beyond Fanatic and Figure, red’s one-drops aren’t exactly supermodel levels of attractive. It could have been Tattermunge Maniac, I imagine, or possible Spark Elemental, but I decided to go with Shock. I wanted to make sure that I could increase the burn potential of the backside of Tar Shards, and that seemed like the easiest way.
Step two: Fit in Tar Shards and Terminate. Tar Shards goes into the maindeck in place of Flame Javelin, for a test. There’s plenty of sideboard options to swap for creatureless or low-creature decks, like 5CC or Swans.
Step three: Cut down on the cost of the manabase. I think Graven Cairns are the critical piece here, capable of producing RR and BB, although you don’t need BB until you hit that sideboard Infest. Of the two remaining rare lands, Sulfurous Springs is the cheaper of the two, and with the move of the Goblin Outlanders to the sideboard, you’re only looking at eight possibilities to get that Auntie’s Hovel untapped. (If you have Auntie’s Hovels and would like to use them over Sulfurous Springs, the Shocks should be Tarfires.) I think adding in Savage Lands in place of the rare lands is acceptable because we’ve cut back on the one-drops that NEED to be played turn one; a Shock is a Shock on turn five.
Step four: Get the Pithing Needles out of the sideboard, and replace them with good alternatives for this metagame. Guttural Response is in as a weapon against Cryptic Command. The Goblin Outlanders go out to the sideboard as a group, and that makes room for a pair of Stigma Lashers in the maindeck, as they’re increasingly relevant in today’s Standard environment. The Terrors become Terminates, and the Everlasting Torment and Infest stay put.
Blightning … Extracted
One last thing I want to mention in this discussion of the Blightning deck, and its place in Standard as a budget option, is the rumored Alara Reborn rare currently named Exsanguination:
Exsanguination
2BR
Sorcery (R)
Choose target player. Name a nonland card. That player reveals his or her hand. Exsanguination deals 3 damage for each card with that name in that player’s hand to that player. Remove cards with that name from that player’s graveyard, hand and library, then shuffle the library.
The wording is probably templated a little wrong, but I think you see what this does. Did you ever say to yourself, “You know, Cranial Extraction is a pretty good tool against decks, but what I’d really like is if it did a bunch of damage at the same time.” That’s like getting a paycheck and saying, “I like getting paid, but what would be really great is if the check itself was made of gold!” Well, now, it looks like we’re getting it. Fast enough to hit either of the token decks and eat Reveillarks before they get online. Powerful enough to hit sorcery-speed mass removal, or other high-casting-cost guys that get clogged up in your opponent’s hand.
If you plan on playing Blightning (or, possibly, some sort of Black-Red control deck) over the summer, start looking for these aggressively at the Pre-Release.
Greased Blightning
To sum up: Blightning is not only a great, aggressive deck to play, but it’s also a strong deck that adapts well to any budget. And with only about a dozen cards so far spoiled for Alara Reborn, there’s certainly a good possibility that more black-red cards will make an impact.
Next Week
The official previews start at the mothership, and no doubt we will be inundated with all sorts of good stuff as the dams break and the floodwaters of information rush in. That’s almost poetic. See you next week.
Dave
dave dot massive at gmail and facebook and twitter