[Editor’s Note: This article is being placed in strategy because I’ve received tons of requests for articles about Unhinged Draft and Constructed, and while the set may not be legal in sanctioned events, it’s a hell of a lot of fun.]
I recently got my hands on some Unhinged cards, so I’ve been looking at integrating them into decks. Some are stupidly broken, some are just bleah, but some are actually pretty interesting. Unhinged is also a reasonable set for Limited purposes – something I did not really expect from a silver-bordered set.
Drafting Unhinged
I’m impressed that Wizards actually tried to balance the playability of the set. Unglued was full of mispowered cards, and an Unglued draft fell to bombs way too often. This set seems better, although Wordmail may be this set’s Skullclamp. It can be insane. That’s why I’m making it the first draft archetype.
Wordmail gives a creature +1/+1 for each word in the card’s name. It is a common. You draft it, and then hunt for two cards: “_____” and “Our Market Research Shows That Players Like Really Long Card Names So We Made This Card to Have the Absolute Longest Card Name Ever Elemental.” If you draft the first card “________”, a.k.a. the card with no name, then you want to memorize the name of the second card, because that is what you need to recite to name your nameless one. This deck has a turn 3 kill: turn 2 play the unnamed card, turn 3 cast Wordmail, change it’s name to “Our Market Research Shows That Players Like Really Long Card Names So We Made This Card to Have the Absolute Longest Card Name Ever Elemental” and beat for 26. If they have chump blockers, Graphic Violence will give all creatures by a particular artist trample until end of turn. The artist for the unnamed card is Ron Spears. The artist for the long name elemental is Greg Hildebrandt. Bosom Buddy is also acceptable by himself, and broken if you have a couple long name elementals.
The second archetype is the U/W artist-related deck. You are looking for Fascist Art Director, Circle of Protection: Art, Artful Looter, Brushstroke Paintermage. Bursting Beebles can also get involved, since the Paintermage can make them unblockable.
Fat Green, splashing for removal, can also be reasonably good. Cards like Stone-Cold Basilisk and Fat Ass are big beaters, and many of the smaller Green creatures are solid. Be wary of fliers, however.
The Blue fliers are pretty good. Carnivorous Death Parrot is good, and even Double Header is worth playing. Blue also has a lot of decent instants, including bounce and counters – and Framed can also be quite powerful if you choose your lands correctly. If you are incredibly lucky, and have a good memory for cards, getting a Richard Garfield can make Blue decks insane. If you get Richard, draft a lot of instants.
A few words on Cheatyface: don’t. Just don’t. Unhinged drafts are supposed to be fun – Cheatyface can spoil that. The rules – and the FAQ – do not specify where you can “play” Cheatyface from, or what “sneaking it into play” means. Cheatyface is just wrong – more so if you keep trying to play it from the library, the removed from game zone, or elsewhere. If you really want to push the cheating mechanic, don’t put Cheatyface in your deck. Just keep them in your pocket, then sneak them into play from there, or use them as counters, life markers or whatever. Taking this to another level – why bother drafting them at all, just keep a half dozen from other drafts in your pocket. Note that all this is really obnoxious, and illegal, and doing this will either earn you a laugh from your opponent or disqualified without prizes. Or banned. Cheatyface is still cheating. It is a stupid mechanic, and R&D should be quite ashamed of printing it.
Okay, back to real draft strategy. Red/Black decks can be quite powerful, with lots of fast, effective creatures and tons of playable removal. Vile Bile is great – just play with gloves. Red Hot Hottie is solid, if annoying, and Rocket-Powered Turbo Slug is fine – and better if you get several. Funniest Turbo-Slug story I have heard: a player cast Enter the Dungeon, and began the game with two Turbo Slugs in hand. Turn 1 kill.
Note that the format has some good removal, but be careful splashing it. Unhinged does not have many mana fixers, so multicolored decks are prone to mana screw.
One other note of drafting Unhinged – read the cards carefully. Some bears (generic 2/2’s for two mana) have drawbacks, some have advantages. Frazzled Editor is a really good card (even though the FAQ says its ability does not count reminder or flavor text). Goblin Mime is okay, but Working Stiff can be a pain. Literally.
Try an Unhinged draft. It can be nice change of pace, and you get a bunch of cool lands. [I’m not sure if it’s more or less fun with a bunch of drunken beanos, but six of us drafted it Friday night and had a great time. – Knut, happy to play Magic]
Unhinged in Multiplayer
I’ll move on to individual cards in a moment, but first I want to mention that some of the Unhinged cards and mechanics are particularly suited to multiplayer games. The first of these is “gotcha.” Whenever an opponent says or does something in particular, you may say “gotcha” and do something – usually returning a card to your hand. For example, Laughing Hyena says “whenever an opponent laughs, you may say ‘gotcha.’ If you do, return Laughing Hyena from your graveyard to your hand..” Other cards trigger whenever an opponent says something, etc. All of these trigger on any opponent saying or doing something, not a particular opponent, so they get a lot better in multiplayer.
For example, imagine having Keeper of the Sacred Words, triggering on “yes,” in a seven player game. During your upkeep, mention that you made some brownies. Ask if anyone would like some. Odds are pretty good your Keeper is going to be a lot bigger.
Kill! Destroy! is also pretty good in multiplayer games. You should get that back a lot.
Another card that should be pretty interesting in multiplayer is B.I.N.G.O! It’s cheap to cast, and with a lot of opponents casting spells, you should be able to get counters on the appropriate squares pretty quickly. At least, I think so. I haven’t got my hands on one yet, so this is just theory. However, it is not unreasonable to expect that this could be a 28/28 trampler in a reasonably short period of time – or maybe just a Meddling Mage for certain castings costs, once people realize what it might become.
There’s something funny about a 28/28 trampler that dies to Smother…
Rare-B-Gone is a particularly unpleasant jolt for your opponents if you build your deck around it – moreso in multiplayer.
Unhinged in Constructed
I want to discuss some real deck ideas, but I want to gripe about a couple cards first. My first complaint is about Mox Lotus. Tap, put infinite mana of any color in your mana pool. Cool – it is a totally broken effect for no effort. Why do we need that? Wizards gives us way too many stupid annoying combos already – why make a single card combo? Sure, it costs so much that, by the time you can hard cast it, you should have won already. All I have to say to that is Goblin Welder, Tinker, Eureka, Temporal Aperture, Show & Tell. Land, Chrome Mox, Sol Ring, Tinker, infinite mana on turn 1. Boy, isn’t that fun?
This card is like Worldgorger Dragon – it has absolutely no use outside of completely broken combo decks. Why Wizards would ever print this is beyond me. I guess it “stretches the design space.” Fine, so does this:
Stupid Game Ender 0, Instant
~this~ cannot be countered.
You win the game.
At the beginning of the game, you may yell “shotgun.” If you yell shotgun before any other player, you gain priority and may search your library for ~this~, reveal it and cast it. These actions do not use the stack.
Wizards, feel free to “push the design space” over a cliff, if you find that therapeutic. Just don’t print the card.
Gleemax is in the same category. One million fricking mana? Why? I could include this in my beat with big artifacts, but I actually cast Aladdin’s Lamp in that deck. Admittedly, it could be fun to get Gleemax in play, then use Karn to animate it, Rancor it up and attack, but the only way to get it into play is either get an infinite mana combo going, or to use Welder, Tinker, etc. Generally, if you have an infinite mana combo going, you have won the game. At that point, it’s just obnoxious to dink around animating Gleemax.
If you ever find yourself saying “No, don’t concede! I’ve got this really cool thing I could do…” just stop. You’re being a jackass.
Okay, my meds are kicking in now. I’ll stop ranting. Here are some cards that are a little more interesting and playable.
Fraction Jackson
You can build a deck based on his ability to recur cards. It isn’t amazing, but you do get reusable burn. However, I’m not convinced that the deck is any better than a mono-red deck that relies on mana acceleration and Hammer of Bogardan. Fraction Jackson is a bit fragile to build a deck around.
Meddling Kids
Meddling Kids are a lot more interesting, especially in multiplayer. The first trick is to make sure they stick around – and an easy way to do this is to name “Target” with the first one, and “creatures” with the second. Target eliminates targeted removal, like Terror. Creatures stops most global removal, like Wrath of God (destroy all creatures) and Mutilate (all creatures get -x/-x). If you have both in play, all that can really kill the Kids is Bane of the Living played as a morph. Alternatively, name “destroy” with the Kids, and a lot of targeted and untargeted removal is unplayable. Obviously, this won’t win a game outright (unless you think you can beat down with a 2/3), but it can seriously impair certain multiplayer archetypes.
Mana Screw
This card is destined to be played with two other cards: Krark’s Thumb and Chance Encounter. Since Mana Screw does not require tapping, you can activate it time after time. In general, you should break about even, provided you have enough mana to get past any initial string of bad flips. Krark’s Thumb should skew the odds enough to make this an infinite mana engine. Chance Encounter, on the other hand, should win the game – but it only triggers at the beginning of upkeep, so the infinite mana option is probably better. Just add something that can deal damage or deck people. Rocket Launcher and Whetstone are my old-school favorites. Goblin Cannon is better.
Now I Know my ABCs
My first thought was to try to build something with this and the nameless card, but ABCs triggers at beginning of upkeep, meaning that it will only go on the stack if I already have the permanents with the right names in play – before having an opportunity to activate the nameless guy. I may still try for something like this, but probably in a big deck with a lot of foreign lands. However, this seems like a lot of extra work during deck design, and I’m not sure the payoff would be worth it.
Ach! Hans, Run!
This is an expensive enchantment, but it is pretty amazing once it gets going. You want to play this with a pile of devastating fat creatures, like Nicol Bolas and Darksteel Colossus. You also want to play with methods of sacrificing the creatures after combat, like Fling or Altar of Dementia (great with Darksteel Colossus), or with methods of putting a permanent back I your library, like Rishadan Pawnshop. A long while back, I wrote about my Zirilan of the Claw deck – a lot of the same considerations would apply to a deck built around Ach! Hans, Run!
R&D’s Secret Lair
A land that obliterates errata is interesting – especially for those of you with a ton of old cards. Playing the cards as written can get strange, since many of these cards were printed before the great 6th Edition rules revisions. For those of you not playing Magic at that time, the world changed. We played with cards called Interrupts, that were faster than Instants, and no one needed a stack. Playing rules lawyer with this in play would be dumb – I would recommend trying the classic infinite turn combo – Time Vault and Voltaic Key. Errata blew this combo away, but if you can blow off the errata, you could start the game like this: Land, Dark Ritual, Grim Monolith, Time Vault, Voltaic Key, infinite turns.
Abiquity
I wanted to abuse Time Vault with this as well, but the FAQ says you have to can only put a counter on a permanent that already has a counter on it, and Time Vault’s errata requires you to remove all time counters when you gain the turn, so that does not work. Wizards has, effectively, neutered this card to the point that it is almost completely useless.
Topsy Turvey
Running the phases of turns backwards is an interesting effect – and one that we should be able to abuse. Note that this just reverses the phase order (e.g. end, 2nd main, combat, 1st main, beginning), but not the steps within a phase (e.g. it still goes untap, upkeep, draw.) That may seem counterintuitive, but just imagine trying to take damage before assigning attackers or blockers…)
Anyway, my first thought was to bounce Topsy Turvey just before my turn was to end. I thought that might give me some extra steps, but Ingrid and Chris Richter set me straight. Their rulings were that Topsy Turvey did not let you repeat phases. In other words, if I cast Topsy Turvey during my 2nd main phase, I would not get another combat, first main and beginning phase. Casting Topsy Turvey basically means that the players turn ends at the conclusion of whatever phase they are in.
That’s sad, since it makes the card a lot worse, but it isn’t fatal to the plan. Instead of casting Topsy Turvey during my turn, I now need a method of casting it during my opponent’s upkeep – meaning I have to play Vedalken Orrery. That opponent will get the untap and draw, but their turn will end before their main phase, so they will never be able to play anything but instants. I also need a method of bouncing Topsy Turvey at will – and the best option there is probably Umbilicus.
I probably want to play Leonin Abunas or Fountain Watch, to protect my combo pieces, and some card drawing and tutors, especially Enlightened Tutor.
Let’s see how this plays out. Assume I have Orrery and Umbilicus in play. On my turn, I tap a land for mana, cast Enlightened Tutor for Topsy Turvey, return the land via Umbilicus, replay it and pass. During my opponent’s upkeep, after they have returned their permanent, I cast Topsy Turvey, and that player’s turn ends once they draw and pass priority. Since turns now run backwards, I will get the next turn, even in a multiplayer game. I take my full turn, in reverse, and get to beginning phase. I untap, return Topsy via the Umbilicus, then draw my card and end my turn. Turns run normally, so my neighbor again gets an untap, gets to return a permanent and again I cast TT before the draw. After a few turns, my opponent will have no permanents in play, and I can beat down with the Fountain Watch, or whatever. And repeat that with the next player.
Super Secret Tech
There really is such a card. You won’t find it on the Wizards website or on the official Unhinged spoiler. I guess that’s why it is “Super Secret.” It does exist, though, and you can buy them through the store. The wording is: All premium spells cost 1 less to play. All premium creatures get +1/+1. A premium card is a foil, or a special promo card released by Wizards. The tokens Wizards sends out as player rewards are premium cards, as are the DCI and Arena league prize cards, even those issued before foils were first printed.
This card is great for Mr. Suitcase – and anyone else with huge collections. It would also go nicely into some 5color decks – I can just see Jim playing that Korean foil Fact or Fiction for 2U, while my shiny Japanese Skullclamp would be free. The 5color ruling committee should consider making an exception to the “no Unhinged / Unglued cards” rule, specifically for this card.
I first thought of including this card in a 5color deck, or something that could produce lots of premium tokens, but I’m afraid the best fit would be in a Affinity deck. It is not that hard to find foil artifact lands, and almost everything but Ravagers is at least uncommon. So maybe this is yet another card to make Affinity cheaper, faster and better.
Sometimes I depress the hell out of myself.
However, if that Affinity player starts annoying you, Unhinged has an answer. Just Tooth and Nail out Uktabi Kong, and Shatterstorm their artifacts. Heck, he’s not Legendary, bring out two, just in case someone has a Welding Jar. Uktabi Knog may be the second best “Uncard” you can fetch with Tooth and Nail.
The best “Uncard” to fetch with Tooth and Nail? Big Furry Monster – both halves.
One parting thought: I am wondering about “Unstandard” tournaments – basically Constructed Type Two plus Unhinged. Would people be interested? Would it be too broken? What do you think? (Speak up in the forums – now with nifty new software!)
PRJ
[email protected] (incidentally, I know it should be “jahnp at it is dot com”, but after hanging that email address on a hundred articles, it’s too late to change now…)