No clear consensus emerged from my last article about where to go next. Some folks wanted me to try and turn one of my Betrayal of Flesh decks into something worthy of Friday Night Magic, others wanted me to do the same kind of pseudo-brainstorming I did with Betrayal but using another one of my Mirrodin Class I cards. In the end, there seemed to be slightly more people wanting me to move on from Betrayal of Flesh (due in large part, apparently, to people thinking Betrayal is a pretty boring card), and more people mentioned Fireshrieker than any other choice.
The people have spoken. Fireshrieker it is.
The problem came as I started jotting down sample decklists and I realized that I had way too many decks. Not only was I looking at losing my financial shirt in building so many decks on Magic Online, but the article would have taken me four months to write competently and have somewhere on the order of fifty decklists.
So I decided to narrow my focus a bit. Today is a look at Fireshrieker in primarily mono-Green decks. Why Green? Mostly because, although I am a fairly open-minded deckbuilder, I am a Green mage at heart. The other minor reason is that I already owned a lot of the key rares necessary for building the kind of decks I wanted to make. Don’t worry… for you budget deckbuilders there’s a section in here for you.
It’s been awhile since my Standard Disclaimer, so here goes: If you want to hone your Limited skills, find a deck to beat Affinity, or win yourself a PTQ, then run far, far away from me. Anyone who thinks of me as a”Strategy” writer goes in with the wrong expectations and gets their hopes dashed. I also know next to nothing about multiplayer, Five, or Peasant Magic. Instead, I’m writing for you folks who gather regularly around dining room tables for one-on-one duels and who think competitive thrill is a 3-2 Friday Night Magic record with a deck of your own creation. I make my decks using a Standard card pool because it allows me to easily play my decks on Magic Online and because it’s a constantly-changing, fun format.
Whew. Glad that’s out of the way.
Why Green Loves Fireshrieker
I can spend less time convincing you of Fireshrieker’s merits than I spent on Betrayal of Flesh. Sure, Fireshrieker costs five mana to get into play and use. And yes, it’s Equipment, which means it’s reliant on combat-induced creature damage to help you win the game, but double-strike is one of the more powerful abilities you can bestow upon a creature. Small creatures become threats. Medium creatures become deadly. Big creatures become immediate game-winners. Any creature that has triggered abilities based on combat damage become insane. Fireshrieker is an artifact, which means it can be used in any color. But who am I speaking to? Casual players and creative deckbuilders everywhere already know and love Fireshrieker.
So let’s focus instead on the color Green. Why should Green be one of the colors slavering for Fireshrieker goodness? Ah, let me count the ways…
1. Combat damage
Some creatures do fun things when they deal damage to an opponent, and these are the creatures you should pay particular attention to when building a Fireshrieker deck. If the creature has a power greater than one, that’s also a bonus as far as Fireshrieker is concerned. Don’t get me wrong: One-power creatures like Headhunter still trigger twice when they tag an opponent. But they are much less scary wielding a flaming stick and there is very little reason for your opponent not to block them.
Green’s host of combat-damage triggers offers a few gems. After dozens of games I’ve decided that Hystrodon is my favorite. It is both beefy and has trample, so you are almost always drawing one card with Fireshrieker even when it’s blocked, and usually two. After Hystrodon there’s: a) Slith Predator, which like all the Sliths quickly get huge and out of control with Fireshrieker, b) Serpentine Basilisk, which become a bit more fearsome when it can deal first-strike damage, c) Living Hive, which is just too silly to ponder, and d) Brood Sliver, which is a bit like the poor-man’s Living Hive.
Then too there are the other bits of Equipment that trigger with combat damage and can be used in any color. Most people think of Loxodon Warhammer or Banshee’s Blade, but I like the efficiency and deck-sifting goodness of Mask of Memory. Sword of Kaldra is a temptation, too. The only problem with these cards is that I worry about having too much Equipment and not enough creatures to equip. If you use eight pieces of Equipment, for instance, you are really limited in deck design because you are committing the rest of your cards to mostly be either land or creatures. As a result, most of the decks you see listed today only use Fireshrieker as Equipment, though I admit this feels more like a stylistic preference than anything else.
Here was my first attempt at a Green Fireshrieker deck:
Tag
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Wall of Mulch
4 Slith Predator
4 Forgotten Ancient
4 Nantuko Vigilante
4 Hystrodon
3 Duplicant
4 Rampant Growth
4 Fireshrieker
1 Revive
4 Tranquil Thicket
2 Temple of the False God
18 Forest
What I came to realize in building this deck is that Slith Predator has a really hard time getting off the ground with regards to dealing combat damage. One way around this problem is to include extra oomph in its first attack with something like Giant Growth. Another way is to use creature elimination, which Green unfortunately has in short supply. Since I had been itching to use Forgotten Ancient in a deck, I resorted to +1/+1 counters to give the Predator a boost while Duplicant provides a slow way to remove blockers.
Once I had committed to the Ancient, the rest of the deck fell into place. Nantuko Vigilante is a necessary evil in the Casual Constructed room these days because everyone is trying out their new Mirrodin toys, and since morph cards are pretty slow I ended up needing the Wall of Mulch as early defense. It’s probably a deck that needs to splash another color for either more creature elimination or counterspells, but it works fine as mono-Green and illustrates the general yumminess of double-strike.
As for the cards not included in the deck, I’m saving Living Hive for an article all its own, since it’s another one of my Class I cards. Serpentine Basilisk never quite made the cut in any of my decks. And then there is Brood Sliver. Admittedly, you aren’t crazy if you include Brood Sliver as your only Sliver in a mono-Green Fireshrieker deck. After all, unabated it produces two additional creatures and six damage from a Fireshrieker attack, and each of those creatures can create more of their kind as long as Brood Sliver is on the table. This situation can quickly get out of control and win you the game all on its own.
The problem is that I really want to make a Fireshrieker Sliver deck and mono-Green has a really hard time handling Slivers in Standard today (alas, we miss you Muscle Sliver). In addition, think of those other Slivers that do juicy things with Fireshrieker: Magma Sliver piles up the damage, Essence Sliver piles up the life, Toxin Sliver piles up the corpses, and Synapse Sliver piles up the cards. As a result, during my deckbuilding I took one detour from my mono-Green focus to make a few sample Sliver decks. I won’t discuss them too much because they are all relatively straightforward. I will point out that the Red and Black ones tend to be the more aggressive of the decks, the White one is more of a bad control deck, and the Blue one fits somewhere in between.
Magma Shrieker
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Hunter Sliver
4 Proteus Machine
4 Blade Sliver
4 Nantuko Vigilante
4 Magma Sliver
4 Brood Sliver
4 Predator’s Strike
4 Fireshrieker
4 Shivan Oasis
4 Wooded Foothills
9 Forest
7 Mountain
Essence Shrieker
4 Nantuko Vigilante
4 Essence Sliver
4 Brood Sliver
4 Krosan Tusker
3 Eternal Dragon
4 Rampant Growth
4 Fireshrieker
4 Arrest
4 Wrath of God
2 Riptide Replicator
4 Elfhame Palace
4 Windswept Heath
8 Forest
7 Plains
Toxin Shrieker
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Crypt Sliver
4 Proteus Machine
4 Spectral Sliver
4 Nantuko Vigilante
4 Toxin Sliver
4 Brood Sliver
4 Rampant Growth
4 Fireshrieker
4 Grand Coliseum
11 Forest
9 Swamp
Synapse Shrieker
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Mistform Dreamer
4 Nantuko Vigilante
4 Shifting Sliver
4 Brood Sliver
4 Synapse Sliver
1 Mistform Ultimus
4 Aether Spellbomb
4 Mana Leak
4 Fireshrieker
4 Grand Coliseum
10 Island
9 Forest
Now, onto the second reason Green loves Fireshrieker.
2. Trample
You know what stinks? When you have a 6/6 monstrosity strapped into Fireshrieker, ready to pull twelve life from your opponent’s scalp and a Gold Myr has the audacity to stand in the way. Sure, the little metal dork dies, but your monstrosity feels pretty unfulfilled. You effectively just used a tank to squash a bug. What’s worse: You let the bug stop your mighty tank.
Enter Green’s most prominent evasion ability. Trample lets your tank eat the bug without slowing down on its way to a bigger meal. I can’t tell you how many times an opponent has misunderstood how trample interacts with double-strike, throwing a chump-blocker in the way only to have their face smashed in.
Here is an example of a deck trying hard to make trample matter:
Shrieks And Fangs
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Hunted Wumpus
4 Nantuko Vigilante
4 Krosan Tusker
3 Fierce Empath
3 Duplicant
1 Kamahl, Fist of Krosa
1 Silvos, Rogue Elemental
1 Platinum Angel
4 Dragon Fangs
4 Rampant Growth
4 Fireshrieker
4 Tranquil Thicket
19 Forest
The point here is to put Dragon Fangs on a Birds of Paradise, Empath, or Vigilante until the creature becomes annoying enough to kill. Then a six-cost fattie drops into play, suits up with Dragon Fangs, and Fireshrieker madness ensues. The other option is to merely put Hunted Wumpus down on turn 3 with Fangs and Fireshrieker enhancement. Hunted Wumpus followed by Duplicant makes me unusually happy.
Another variation on Dragon Fangs comes in Predator’s Strike. If your Green creature doesn’t have trample naturally, Predator’s Strike can make a Fireshrieker deck insane. Consider the Hunted Wumpus example if you need convincing. You attack with a Fireshrieking Wumpus and your opponent blocks with that Gold Myr. You play the Strike, and your opponent not only lost her Myr but a whopping seventeen life. Boo-friggin-ya.
Trample is another reason why a Fireshrieker–Living Hive deck is not far in my future.
And you insightful readers may be wondering how I can justify using things like Dragon Fangs and Predator’s Strike in addition to Fireshrieker and poo-poo extra pieces of Equipment. I can only answer that you are indeed insightful and please sit down.
3. F. A. T.
As I said in my”Mirrodin Menu” article, there are two temptations with Fireshrieker. The first is to do tricky combat-damage tricks as with Hystrodon, Slith Predator, or Mask of Memory. A second perfectly reasonable temptation is to try and deal twenty points of damage in one swing. I’ve mostly focused on the first strategy so far. Now it’s time to turn attention to the second use of Fireshrieker: To win in one swing of a mighty bat.
One of the few things Green does better than any other color is to put creatures with impressive stats on the table. These creatures don’t always have the trickiest abilities, but they are uniformly big. With Fireshrieker, sometimes big is all you need. Consider this deck:
Bellow
4 Vine Trellis
4 Fierce Empath
4 Elvish Piper
4 Nantuko Vigilante
4 Krosan Tusker
3 Duplicant
1 Kamahl, Fist of Krosa
1 Silvos, Rogue Elemental
1 Clockwork Dragon
1 Platinum Angel
1 Thorn Elemental
4 Fireshrieker
4 Explosive Vegetation
2 Temple of the False God
22 Forest
Gone is any semblance of combat-damage tricks. The idea here is to get a fattie into play as quickly as possible, which usually means via Elvish Piper. In an ideal world, you want to get Silvos, Clockwork Dragon, or Thorn Elemental onto the table along with Fireshrieker. Each has evasion in their own way, so each is going to be dealing the maximum damage to an opponent possible. I didn’t really push the envelope here, since you still usually need two swings of your fattie to win the game, but you get the idea.
A 6/6 body is another reason why a Fireshrieker–Living Hive deck is not far in my future.
Of course, if your creatures aren’t naturally large, the other way to deal piles of damage is with…
4. Creature-pumpers
What if Giant Growth or Predator’s Strike gave your creature +6/+3? Or how about if Might of Oaks gave +14/+7? With Fireshrieker, that’s pretty much what happens. The same is true with”permanent” creature pumpers like Timberwatch Elf or Canopy Crawler. Fireshrieker does nothing less than turn lots of damage into lots and lots and lots of damage.
I am quickly getting sick of Elf decks, but here is a variation meant to exploit Might of Oaks. With this deck you are hoping that somehow, someway, twenty points of damage are going to sneak through to your opponent before you die.
Oak-Shriek
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Elvish Scrapper
4 Wirewood Herald
4 Wirewood Hivemaster
4 Elvish Warrior
4 Caller of the Claw
4 Timberwatch Elf
1 Viridian Shaman
1 Glissa Sunseeker
4 Fireshrieker
4 Might of Oaks
4 Tranquil Thicket
18 Forest
And finally, there is another very good reason to play Fireshrieker in Green:
5. One-drop fliers
You may have noticed I use Birds of Paradise a lot in these decks. The reasons are twofold. First is mana acceleration. I almost only ever play Fireshrieker when I have access to five mana, so that I can swing with it the turn it comes into play and Birds (along with Rampant Growth, another card I use repeatedly today), gets me to five mana as quickly as possible. I also play morphs like Hystrodon and Nantuko Vigilante which are nice to get out on turn 2 and then flip over turn 3. The second reason for using Birds is I have realized that a small flier will often sneak through an opponent’s defenses.
Obviously a 0/1 creature wielding Fireshrieker does absolutely nothing. But add Forgotten Ancient, or Might of Oaks, or Blanchwood Armor, or Bonesplitter, or any number of other ways Green can boost a creature’s power, and you suddenly have a flying gargantua able to dominate the game.
I made a deck whose only real aim was to get Forgotten Ancient into play with a 0/1 flier – either Birds or Xantid Swarm – and win with Fireshrieker. So far, it has been by far the most fun and effective Green Fireshrieker deck I’ve made.
Banzai!
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Forgotten Ancient
4 Nantuko Vigilante
4 Hystrodon
3 Duplicant
2 Xantid Swarm
4 Lifespark Spellbomb
4 Rampant Growth
4 Fireshrieker
4 Might of Oaks
4 Tranquil Thicket
19 Forest
The Budget-Minded Builder
Unfortunately, I just told you about my most fun deck and it’s a deck stuffed full of rares. I hate it when that happens. In fact, I hate it so much that I’m going to pull a Chris Romeo and add a section into these articles briefly discussing some tips on building decks without rares. I am very proud that I coined the term”lite” on Magicthegathering.com to refer to a deck sans rares, and I recognize that most casual players don’t have access to the kind of budget I do for making odd decks. [Less Filling! Tastes Great! – Knut, still waiting for MTG.com to appropriate his contributions to the”lite” designation]
The good news is that Fireshrieker is an uncommon. Also, Mono-Green decks don’t require any fancy rare lands to make them reliable. Also, Rampant Growth and Nantuko Vigilante–two cards I use throughout today–are both common. Also, all creature pumpers except Might of Oaks are either common or uncommon. Also, Green has fatties in every rarity. Also, I am going to stop saying”also” and just get to a decklist.
Shrieking Beasts (lite)
4 Wirewood Savage
4 Branchsnap Lorian
4 Canopy Crawler
4 Hunted Wumpus
4 Nantuko Vigilante
4 Krosan Tusker
4 Predator’s Strike
4 Rampant Growth
4 Fireshrieker
4 Tranquil Thicket
20 Forest
This deck is a surprisingly-lethal deck in the midgame. The same principles I discussed above apply here. Trample is good, bigger is better, and Green can squeeze in a fair amount of card-drawing when it has to. Even though the deck would benefit from Ravenous Baloth and Contested Cliffs, there is no shame playing a deck that deals so much damage in heaps. Without Duplicant, Green loses its only good creature elimination, so you simply need to make them block to survive or win with Predator’s Strike when they choose not to block.
Elves is another tribe worth pursuing if you are small on budget but large on interest in Fireshrieker, solely due to the existence of Timberwatch Elf. For a non-tribe deck, center your strategy around making Hunted Wumpus as fearsome as possible.
The Non-Standard Builder
Since I’m trying to please everyone, let me step outside of Standard for a moment. I’m not even going to pretend that I can tell you all of the fun combinations of Fireshrieker in Green if you wander outside of the Standard card pool. These days, Caustic Wasps are clearly fun. There are too many trampling fatties of goodness to count like Weatherseed Treefolk and Child of Gaea. You can even make a Mono-Green sliver deck thanks to the addition of Muscle Sliver, Horned Sliver, and Metallic Sliver, though I would personally splash red for Spined Sliver too.
The ideas go on and on, but there are two I want to specifically mention. The first is poison. I’m certainly not the first person to mention Fireshrieker and poison counters, but it’s still an idea worth trying. The trick is using only the poison creatures that trigger on combat damage versus those that trigger when they aren’t blocked (sorry Suq’Ata Assassin, Crypt Cobra, and Swamp Mosquito). And yes, luckily for today’s theme, most of these creatures are Green…
Icky Shriek
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Wall of Blossoms
4 Pit Scorpion
4 Sabretooth Cobra
4 Marsh Viper
3 Myr Retriever
4 Rampant Growth
4 Fireshrieker
4 Tawnos’s Wand
3 Serpent Generator
4 Bayou
4 Llanowar Wastes
1 Yavimaya Hollow
1 Swamp
12 Forest
I may not have the mana in this deck to reliably get Serpent Generator going and I have no answer for opposing creatures, enchantments, or artifacts. But hey – I’m playing a deck with Tawnos’s Wand, so I don’t pretend I’m looking for reliability.
The other interaction I want to mention is with Gurzigost. Longtime readers of my articles know that I looooove Gurzigost, and it’s the most efficient and dangerous Thorn Elemental-like ability around. The opportunity to make a Fireshrieker–Gurzigost deck is way, way too tempting to pass up.
Shriekin’ G
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Wall of Blossoms
4 Gurzigost
4 Krosan Tusker
3 Hystrodon
2 Genesis
4 Insist
4 Mind Stone
4 Naturalize
3 Fireshrieker
4 Blasted Landscape
4 Terminal Moraine
4 Tranquil Thicket
12 Forest
The only -and I do mean only – point of this deck is to get Fireshrieker onto Gurzigost and swing twice. This time I could fit in Naturalize to slightly disrupt an opponent’s plans, and this deck actually has creatures it can use to block. But who cares? I just want to get Fireshrieker onto Gurzigost and swing twice.
Like I said, I haven’t even begun to tap this well, so if there are other interactions you think are worth mentioning with Fireshrieker and Green, feel free to speak up in the Forums.
Pondering Darksteel
Since I’m tied to Magic Online, I won’t be able to include Darksteel into my deck ideas for another month. I do think that Darksteel provides a number of cards that fit into the kinds of decks I’m describing today, though. I’ll quickly run through the options as I see them, but this too feels like a good topic for Forums discussion.
Fangren Firstborn, Juggernaut, Karstoderm, and Tangle Golem are F. A. T. and efficiently priced for Mono-Green. Fat creatures like Fireshrieker and Fireshrieker likes fat creatures. ‘Nuff said. [Does that mean Fireshrieker is a chubby chaser? – Knut, philosophical]
Viridian Zealot probably replaces Nantuko Vigilante in every one of the decks I’ve listed today. The extra point of power and surprise factor are nice on the Vigilante, but with the Zealot you’re talking four total mana activation versus five and a creature that comes out on turn two instead of turn three. Fireshrieker decks are slow enough that the Zealot’s extra speed in both categories is really appealing.
Tanglewalker is subtle, but I think he has potential in Mono-Green Fireshrieker decks. Unblockability is huge when you’re talking about giving your creatures double-strike. I don’t think it’s a big enough deal to use Myr Landshaper, but it is a significant boon to a color that has a hard time outright removing blockers. These days, he could even fit into the maindeck since almost every deck I face in the Casual Constructed room uses artifact lands.
Skullclamp, Specter’s Shroud, Sword of Fire and Ice, and Sword of Light and Shadow are worthy Equipment to include in a Fireshrieker deck. As I mentioned, I don’t like relying on more than four pieces of Equipment in a deck, which mostly excludes anything but Fireshrieker. But if you don’t have similar qualms, try these out along with Bonesplitter, Mask of Memory, and Loxodon Warhammer. Of the Darksteel bunch, Skullclamp is the one that most intrigues me since a) Green’s fatties can take a drop in toughness, b) Green always appreciates card-drawing, and c) Green struggles for ways to kill weenies.
Okay. Fine. I’ll try a first-draft Darksteel deck:
Shrieks And Fangs V.2
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Viridian Zealot
4 Tangle Golem
4 Krosan Tusker
3 Fierce Empath
3 Duplicant
1 Kamahl, Fist of Krosa
1 Silvos, Rogue Elemental
1 Platinum Angel
4 Dragon Fangs
4 Rampant Growth
4 Fireshrieker
1 Revive
22 Forest
Next time… ?
I’ll end today as I ended last time. These articles serve as an excuse for me to play lots of Magic Online in the midst of a very busy life. Without the articles, I fear I would play occasionally, sporadically, and then not at all. So in some respects, I don’t care about what I play and write as long as I enjoy doing so. Of course, I’ll only write if I feel like there’s demand for the writing, which means that ultimately I want you to enjoy these monthly forays of mine.
Which is all to say that you have a lot of power to determine my next article. If you would like me to focus on one of these decks and tune it (take the word”tune” with a large grain of salt… think”Diary of doctorjay” kind of tuning) into something more competitive with a sideboard, I’m happy to do so. If you want me to look at Fireshrieker in another color, name the color and I’ll get to work. If you want me to focus on a new card, pick one from my”Mirrodin Menu” and give me a reason why. Just like last time, once I sense a slight consensus, that’s what I’ll do next. Voice your opinions in the Forums or, if you are particularly shy, send me an e-mail.
As always, I hope your enjoyed my rambling and see you next time,