Wow. Lin-Sivvi, Defiant Hero is good. The more I look at that card, the more impressed I am at the subtlety of its design, inherent power and three toughness. It’s perfect.
She’d totally win the Miss America talent contest. She’s all over the place. Her rebel search ability is smarter than your a-ver-age bear’s. In fact, she’s more like a mercenary. But wait! Her ability is better than a mercenary search. She can order up anybody, not just the chumpos. She’s THA BOSS.
“Ramosian Sergeant, get over here!”
“Jhovall Queen, get over here!”
“Sky Marshall, get over here!”
She’s a beast.
Incidentally, doesn’t the Ramosian Sky Marshall look a lot like Ace and Gary’s long lost brother? He’s the Friend of Friends’ Friend. Spooky.
Anyway, the point is, Lin Sivvi leads a cast of powerful rebels into March 1st Type II. Rebel searching is turning, more and more, into a game of Survival of the Fittest (remember that card?). With all these good searchers, a rebel deck can practically cough up a solution to most any problem. Here comes Skittering Skirge! Nightwing Glider magically appears. Woah– that’s a Viashino Cutthroat! Who let you in this tournament? Oh well, I’ve got a Thermal Glider. Masticore’s on the case! I think Cho-Manno might block him. Here comes the metric system! Defiant Vanguard should take care of that.
If you have a problem, I guarantee the rebels have an answer. Unless, of course, the problem is named Morphling. Then, like everyone else in the world– you’re screwed. There is nothing anyone can do about Morphling. When he hits the table, you better Vampiric Tutor for a Yawgmoth’s Something Or Other and win the game. If you don’t, you lose, regardless of anything else. Must be pretty good.
White weenie has always been a tier one or two deck. It has an assortment of cheap, powerful creatures, creature enhancers, Disenchant and Armageddon. One thing it has always lacked is card advantage. Now, with the rebels, it even has that. Every rebel searcher is a Thawing Glaciers… except it’s better than Thawing Glaciers, in many ways. You get to put creatures into play, for only a little over their casting cost, at instant speed, so they surprise block or have“haste.”
Here’s my working decklist:
White Weenie
2x Lin Sivvi, Defiant Hero (NE)
4x Ramosian Sergeant (MM)
4x Mother of Runes (UL)
1x Defiant Vanguard (NE)
4x Steadfast Guard (MM)
2x Nightwing Glider (MM)
2x Thermal Glider (MM)
3x Defiant Falcon (NE)
1x Devout Witness (MM)
4x Armageddon (6)
2x Reverent Mantra (MM)
4x Crusade (6)
4x Disenchant (6)
3x Rishadan Port (MM)
3x Gaea’s Cradle (US)
17x Plains
Sideboard:
2x Glorious Anthem (US)
4x Arrest (MM)
2x Erase (UL)
2x Reverent Mantra (MM)
1x Cho-Manno, Revolutionary (MM)
4x Scent of Jasmine (UD)
Key cards:
Gaea’s Cradle– this is sneaky. Rebels use colorless mana to search (you weren’t actually thinking of CASTING them, were you?), and the Cradle coughs it up in Spades. Unchecked, the Cradle will beat your opponents, almost by itself.
Reverent Mantra– you have no idea how good this card is. Initially, I was playing Cho-Manno’s Blessings in Type II… but Mantra is SO much better. I’d never seen a Magic player cry until I Mantra’d in response to what looked like a game-winning Wildfire. There was a tear in his eye… like that old Keep America Clean commercial.
Lin Sivvi– I cannot stress her enough– she is AWESOME. Her ability allows you to work around the other rebels… achieving maximum card advantage.
Armageddon– blowing up the world tends to put a damper on everything, including this deck. Still, thanks to Gaea’s Cradle, recovering is not so difficult a task as it may seem.
Arrest– yeah. Masticore is pretty bad. Usually, this deck can handle them, between Crusade, Disenchant and Armageddon. When they pop up in blue, however, it’s a whole different ballgame. Blue can somehow stop your spells from being played– which tends to disrupt your strategy.
Scent of Jasmine– that’s high tech anti-Yawgmoth’s Something Or Other. Just sit back, relax, and gain fourteen life. That’s pretty good against a deck that can only deal thirty two damage. Sure, they can go manual with the Skirge Familiar… but we’ve got some Nightwing Glider action going on.
Oh… I tell you. I can’t WAIT for Prophecy. More rebels to go and find. It’s like hide and go seek. Or cheating. Or something. I always loved Thawing Glaciers, and Land Tax. Not as much because they gave me extreme card advantage, but because they let me shuffle my deck.
Magic seems so fatalistic to me. Most decks, you shuffle up, your opponent cuts, and your fate is sealed. You may not know it yet, but the cards are all in an unfixable order, set, with no way to alter the outcome. If you’re screwed, you’re screwed. There’s no way around it. You could almost just look through the decks and figure out who is going to win. If you only have one copy of an important card, it could be at the bottom of the deck, buried for the entire game. You’ll never know, either. Each time you look at the top of your deck and say to yourself“man, I really, really need Card X,” you won’t know that it is card number fifty-six. You’ll keep hoping for it, hoping, hoping hoping… never knowing that it just isn’t in the cards for you.
But with a shuffler… it’s like starting over, every turn. You don’t have a fate. Any card in your deck could be the next one you draw. There will never be a game where you never had a chance to draw Card X– it’s always almost there. It just makes the game more exciting, if you ask me. And, if you have bad luck, like me, shuffling every turn can only help you.
Omeed Dariani.
Eic, www.starcitygames.com
Contributing Editor, Scrye Magazine
“I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
-The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot”
-should have been the flavor text on Arrest.