Okay, why am I asking about angels? I mean, Serra was reprinted in 7th and has hardly made an appearance on the tournament scene in more than a year and a half. Don’t blame the busty one for that, though: Flametongue Kavu was all too ready, willing, and able to blow her from the sky. She had to stay in hiding until he was gone. It’s now safe for her to come back out and play.
If you read this column frequently – and everyone involved hopes that you do – you know that I like to build and play my own decks. Sometimes the deck is a serious venture that I truly believe can win a tournament here and there… Other decks are purely fun, like the one this piece is about. It’s annoying to play against. If you accidentally win with it, expect your opponent to be very mad. Oh, and I have pictures of hot babes.
ELVISH CHAMPION: Okay, settle down. Let’s get down to business. I’d like to welcome you to the 23rd meeting of the Elvish Convocation Interdimensional. I’d like to say 23rd”annual” meeting – but as we all know, Odyssey block was a bad one for elves. So we haven’t met in over a year. Luckily, Wizards took our petition to heart and has added to our ranks in Onslaught. Which brings us to our first order of business: It seems that Jason Jablonski is all hyped about all of the Elves in Onslaught.
My friend Josh Sharp had been working on an idea for using Tainted Aether in an Astral Slide deck. Gosh, wouldn’t that just hose up someone if you could somehow **cough** **Astral Slide** **cough** find a way to make their creatures leave and reenter play a lot?
Since I switched to StarCity (Our Motto: No Matter What Your Rating Is, You’re Better Than at Least One of Our Writers), I have seen a huge increase in my e-mail. I’m pretty sure that it’s mostly due to spam-bots, since these e-mails typically offer genital herbal enhancement (“Be the envy of all your friends!”), dating services (“Meet desperate, usually-single women in your area!”), and easy money (“Yo, Chris, it’s your cousin Vito again. Call me on the safe phone”). Still, I’d better answer ’em.
Don’t you hate tournament reports that start out with a passionless description of how the person got to the tournament and with whom they went?”Paco, Rebecca, and I hopped into the Toyota Tercel for the four-hour drive to Baton Rouge.” So I’m going to try to spice mine up a bit. Parts are true. Parts are fiction. Some parts I am simply filling in blanks where I either (a) didn’t take notes or (b) was passed out in a drunken stupor.
“But, Chris,” you say,”I have some extra money that my grandmother sent me for my birthday, and I’d really like to spend it on a Beast deck with a ton of rares in it. What do I do?” Well, first off, you have to realize that, while I can hear my Self when I talk to my Self, I can’t hear you when you talk to me. Unless you got my phone number. Which would be a great trick, since I don’t have a phone.
Have you got some extra money and were thinking,”Gosh, how could I blow $150 on a B/W Clerics deck?” Well, here’s your answer – along with a much cheaper one, for those of you who like that sort of thing. Also, I get to play with Shelter, which is sad because I can’t play with the Shelter chick. She’s hot.
I see possibilities in unloved cards. I am a one-man Isle of Misfit Cards. For example, while everyone is going completely ape slick over the beef in Onslaught (yes indeedily-doodily, Silvos is block rockin’ beats), I have to wonder why people aren’t playing Gurzigost… But, alas, Gurzigost is from all the way back in Torment.
Neither of these decks are groundbreaking. I mean, where are all of the Onslaught cards? But you gotta remember that sometimes, new cards just don’t help certain decks. Look at PTQ Chicago in 2000: Fires decks were all the rage. But what won the thing? A good, solid Rebel deck. Invasion didn’t give Rebels anything… But it also didn’t take anything away.
Island
This is the land that makes blue mana. If you have two of them untapped, your opponent will always worry that you have a Counterspell. As such, many people consider this the best land ever printed. And for good reason! If you have two Forests untapped, what is your opponent going to be scared of? Double Giant Growth?
The cost for Wall of Mulch’s activated ability should just be”G, Sacrifice Wall of Mulch” – unless you plan on playing with eight or twelve or sixteen walls. If you do, let me know where you’re playing; I need a bye in round one.
I wish Aphetto Vulture cost one less. But it doesn’t. So, I’ll have to live with it? Will this be one of the secondary themes for this block:”Good but too costly”? I hope not.
Mistform Mask
This will be great at the kitchen table in multiplayer games. See, you can get twenty or thirty of these and put them under that leg that’s short and that causes the table to wobble. This prevents spillage of beer and chips onto the playing surface, thus keeping your Child of Gaea and Teeka’s Dragon safe and clean.
Chris Romeo is back… And he’s WRITING FOR STARCITY AT LAST! (Well, after that brief dalliance with MagicCan, but we’ve forgiven him.) If you’ve never read Chris, all we can say is that his set review is more amusing than most. As witness:
Battlefield Medic
There’s a guy like this in every block. And in every block, I use him as a proxy for the really good cards until I can afford them.
