You CAN Play Type I #95: Sifting Through Scourge, Part V – Sorceries and Instants

COLUMN: You CAN Play Type I #97

AUTHOR: Oscar Tan aka Rakso

I had one of my most amusing openings ever last week, something to lighten the mood of every Sligh hater out there (Oliver Daems, this means you!):

That was even more amusing than Swamp–Dark Ritual–Phyrexian Negator-Oops, Fire?!?! Whether or not to put Fire/Ice back in, I’m not sure just yet, though. The metagame should take a few steps back in a few weeks and Sligh is back, but you still expect a lot of fat.

It was interesting to meet a reader who comes from your old high school, incidentally. 15-year old Gian Lao is a member of Manila’s Xavier High School Class of ’06, which is quite a stretch from my ’97 (heck, he’s a cousin of an old classmate who’s also in a law school now). From what he says, apparently some things are still the same, though their building was brand new when I was a high school freshman and they’re now wrecking the old elementary gym before they build a new one.

It’s also heartening to see the local 15-year olds play with skill quite beyond their lesser experience. We had fun discussing one play against his Goblin Sligh. I had The Abyss in play, and two Forces of Will, two Mana Drains, Gorilla Shaman and Brainstorm in hand. However, his mad Wasteland topdecks left me with just one blue land, despite Wastelands and a slew of Moxen.

With two cards in hand and five Mountain(and two Reckless Charges already flashed back and removed from the game), he played a Jackal Pup. I was stapling photocopied law readings and distractedly let it go due to The Abyss but we both immediately realized my mistake.

With just one other card in hand, the only intelligent reason for Jackal Pup was following up with Reckless Charge or Goblin Grenade, with Charge especially painful since he could flash it back in the same turn. Though he only had two Charges left, there wasn’t much need to take calculated risks yet since the Brainstorm would probably turn something up (and I did draw into another dual land and Stroke of Genius with loads of colorless mana), and another dual would let my counter-filled hand get to work.

I won despite not countering the Pup, but it shows you not to discount the teen-agers who are content to just play in the cafeteria. Hey, I started there, and one of those guys packing a Poison deck in my high school days was this year’s defending National Champion, though very few people can put in the time for that.

I had another amusing moment against Gian after he switched to Stax. I Mana Drained his first big play then Wasted all his Workshops throughout the game. He finally got something in, Yawgmoth’s Will. However, he was forced to just replay a Volcanic Island and have just enough mana left to cast Time Walk and Ancestral Recall.

At that point I reminded him that nothing he had would help him, since I had a full hand and twelve mana on the table (and I showed him Gorilla Shaman). Looking at indeed useless Tangle Wires and Spheres of Resistance, he showed two Smokestacks anyway and said he could still sac them to themselves to go down fighting.

The sharper readers might notice that Stax has received disproportional media mileage in my columns, with hardly a mention since it did well several Dülmen tournaments back. As you know, I maintain a nondisclosure policy on discussions made in confidence. Stephen Menendian aka Smmenen e-mailed me his compiled notes last May 18, with a request not to share them until after he played in Origins and not to discuss Sphere of Resistance. Steve piloted his build on Day 2 last week (and won Day 1 with Growing ‘Tog, and lost only to a highly metagamed "The Deck" on Day 3) and finally lifted the gag order.

The article has already been released, and I guarantee Steve poured blood, sweat and tears into this one over the summer.

Hopefully, we’ll see more of Stax when we move to the control portion of the Control Player’s Bible, unless we need to talk about it much earlier. Definitely, though, it’s not just an anti-Growing ‘Tog deck (with that one’s low number of permanents) as some people opined when Stax first received its spotlights.

Sifting through Scourge: Sorceries

As usual, we go back to our two rules:

1. Is the card more efficient than an established benchmark? (Or, do I get more bang from my buck?)
2. Does the card do something no past card ever did, and if it does, is this new card playable?

Onslaught gave us sorceries on the level of Blackmail and we haven’t been able to use them very much. If you follow Randy Buehler columns, though, they discussed sorceries recently, and we sometimes get newly balanced twists of old abilities, in addition to new stuff for Rule #2

Decree of Annihilation

The strange thing about Scourge sorceries? They’re really instants that are on better terms with Burning Wish. Decree of Annihilation was one of the scariest cards (after Mind’s Desire) that jumped out of the spoiler, conjuring memories of how Jon Finkel massacred Michael Long with an overkill of an Obliterate play in the Sydney Magic Invitational.

First of all, in case you don’t get it, the Apocalypse on Steroids main effect isn’t something to rely on, no matter how flashy. It’s the uncounterable, instant speed Armageddon in the fine print you’re really looking at. So the real question is, how good is an uncounterable 7-mana Armageddon?

Immediately after the Sydney Invitational, I stuck an Obliterate in my deck for kicks. It mainly achieved two things: 1) Effectively make me mulligan every time it appeared in the opening hand instead of the bottom of the library, and 2) Attribute the roots of my deck to Finkel instead of Brian Weissman in the eyes of uncultured Type II players.

In case you missed the basic red portion of the Control Player’s Bible (Part XI, Playing the Rubies), here’s the real story behind Obliterate in the Sydney Invitational (these are Noah Boeken, Gary Wise and Chris Pikula):

So like Obliterate, Decree of Annihilation’s cycle effect is incredibly powerful, but that makes you ask which deck it fits in. Obviously, it’s not something aggro, aggro-control and combo need. As for control, Armageddon was used in Type II to keep an opponent’s mana count down while a big creature beat down or an artifact-based lock held him tight. The 7-mana price tag attached to uncounterability precludes this.

That leaves you with blue-based control decks with a red splash, but why would these mana-intensive decks want to wreck their own mana and hurt themselves more?

Thus, I don’t think you’ll need to be sideboarding Stifles anytime soon.

Of course, someone might always not read this humorous dismissal, pack Decree of Annihilation anyway, and catch you at a bad time with a full hand of counters. Random things happen, and you can’t lose sight of the important things by considering every minute probability. Mike Torrisi, for example, said that Ichnuemon Druid shuts down Growing ‘Tog, but I know for a fact that Smmenen didn’t worry about this setback and he won the Day 1 Origins event.

If you’re still not reassured, just consider countering Burning Wish a lot more often, since Scourge lets it fetch Storm cards like Mind’s Desire or Tendrils of Agony, or cycle-trigger cards like this one.

Decree of Pain

Again, you probably won’t get much out of the sorcery, but the Massacre side effect is interesting. Still, it’s a tad expensive, and if you plan to use it with Burning Wish, Pyroclasm is still worlds cheaper. If you find the ability nice regardless, I suppose you’d run something like Prophetic Bolt first.

Decree of Justice

The white segments of cycles aren’t the flashiest if the Wishes are an indication, but you might look at Decree of Justice from a different perspective. It looks like a card for someone who likes Sacred Mesa or Goblin Trenches, but these two are win conditions in Type I decks and not mere fun cards. You can actually look at the cycle effect as an uncounterable win condition you can dump your mana into end-of-turn, and only a few cards like Balance, Powder Keg and Pernicious Deed deal with it. Early on, it cycles into a more useful card.

That said, I’m not sure where this can go into. If you read about Olle Rade beating Mike Long at the 1997 Hong Kong Invitational with Snake Basket, though, maybe you’ll try it for a week or two just for the style points.

Unburden

This is an improved version of Bog Down and Mind Rot (and Deception), but one doubts you’ll need it. Having more than twelve discard slots in a discard-based deck usually means you’re casting discard on an empty hand and not beating down, and you shouldn’t forget that knocking out an opponent’s hand just doesn’t win by itself. The twelve are usually filled by Duress, Hymn to Tourach, then Hypnotic Specter or something else like Unmask, or even Bottomless Pit in more casual creatureless builds.

You might, however, be in one of those areas where Hymns are just not available, and you’re using Stupors as a stopgap. You may prefer the cycling to the half-random discard, and this is common.

Still, two mana is worlds better than three, and you should just order a set with all four alternate arts from Star City, right?

Break Asunder

This is a Naturalize with the 2-mana price premium for cycling, and you might think the issue is whether cycling beats Creeping Mold’s land destruction ability. Generally, though, a deck that needs this kind of slot will find Naturalize useful anyway and won’t be able to waste a turn and four mana. Or, better yet, it’ll have Survival of the Fittest and a Druid Lyrist plus Scavenger Folk anyway.

Goblin War Strike

I’m sure this looks interesting for your Goblin theme, but it’s just not better than Goblin Grenade when you consider the dangers of overextension, and you doubt you’ll have room for both specialized finishers.

Dimensional Breach

A very interesting ability, but again, you don’t know what to do with it. Maybe if you were the guy who broke Thieves’ Auction, you could tell me.

This might inspire memories of Hatred, but it’s weaker than that (and Hatred is far more erratic without unrestricted Demonic Consultation). If this caught your eye, let me tell you that real casual black players with balls use Kaervek’s Spite. Flavor text is comparable, though, wouldn’t you think?

(Insert rant from Anthony Alongi here, who may bite his tongue every time I type the word "casual." Casual, casual, casual!)