Damia, Sage of Stone - Final List

Tonight's list is Damia, a UBG heavy control deck with a strong Graveyard manipulation theme. This deck has performed very well for me, overall, which is no surprise as it heavily resembles my old Vorosh control deck. Basically, I just swapped out the largely irrelevant Vorosh for a more interesting general in the form of Damia. Then I sprinkled in a few cards that were specifically useful in a Damia deck but wouldn't have been very useful in a Vorosh or Mimeplasm deck. Over time, quite a few new cards wormed their way into the deck and the list now looks quite a bit different from the Vorosh list, yet retains the same themes and plays very much like it.

EDIT: Overlooked a couple of cards. Duplicant, Scavenging Ooze and Insidious Dreams have been added.

Creatures

Damia, Sage of Stone

Overtaker
Jace's Archivist
Wonder
Sower of Temptation
Mulldrifter
Body Double
Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir
Shpinx of Uthuun

Coffin Queen
Fleshbag Marauder
Bone Shredder
Undead Gladiator
Dimir House Guard
Shriekmaw
Kagemaro, First to Suffer
Vengeful Pharaoh
Geth, Lord of the Vault
Massacre Wurm

Sakura-Tribe Elder
Fauna Shaman
Scavenging Ooze
Magus of the Library
Eternal Witness
Genesis
Indrik Stomphowler
Acidic Slime
Seedborn Muse
Primeval Titan

Shadowmage Infiltrator
The Mimeoplasm
Psychosis Crawler
Duplicant

Spells and Stuff

Turbulent Dreams
Frantic Search
Rite of Replication
Leyline of Anticipation
Jace, the Mind Sculptor
Treachery

Diabolic Intent
Buried Alive
Insidious Dreams
Barter in Blood
Damnation
Living Death
Beacon of Unrest
Profane Command

Nostalgic Dreams
Cultivate
Beast Within
Krosan Grip
Mwonvuli Acid-Moss
Greater Good
Putrefy
Maelstrom Pulse

Sol Ring
Dimir Signet
Golgari Signet
Simic Signet
Coalition Relic
Lightning Greaves
Mimic Vat

Lands

38 Lands including:

Volrath's Stronghold
High Market
Phyrexian Tower

The deck is a lot of fun to play, but Damia is a tricky general to play. Once you have her on the board, you'll want to dump your hand as quickly as possible to maximize Damia's value. It's hardly worth casting a 7-mana Legend if all she's going to do is draw you one extra card a turn. Yet, if you cast a whole bunch of cheap spells and permanents counting on  Damia's presence to refill your hand, you might find yourself overextending into a Planar Cleansing or similar, leaving you behind on the board AND without Damia around to refill your now-empty hand. If this happens, you'll probably lose.

That's where the Seedborn Muse +  Leyline Anticipation come in. Casting everything at Instant speed helps narrow the window for your opponent to completely blow you out with a Sorcery like Akroma's Vengeance. It also makes the deck a bitch and a half to play against because you can respond to combat by dropping blockers, and almost any other situation gets really tricky when stuff that's supposed to only happen on your turn now suddenly happens any time you feel like it.

The Dreams - Nostalgic, Turbulent and Insidious are all flat-out amazing when combined with Damia and a handful of cards that you don't mind discarding. Incarnations like Wonder or Genesis, for example are cards you want in your graveyard anyway, but the Dreams provide powerful effects in exchange for pitching something you wanted to pitch anyway. Even if you have good stuff like Primeval Titan or Rite of Replication, in this deck you probably won't mind discarding them to a Dreams spell because you'll have plenty of ways to get them back later on.

A few of the cards I selected are just "cute" - like Magus of the Library for example. It's just a terrible card that happens to actually be considerably more playable alongside Damia. With Damia guaranteeing you'll start every turn with a grip of 7, the Magus just guarantees you'll start every turn with 8 instead. I enjoy this interaction, but he's probably not necessary in the long run.

Overtaker was just a neat Spellshaper that doubles as a way to pitch your Genesis or any other unwanted chaff you might draw.

Jace's Archivist and Sphinx of Uthuun are just new hotness that I added because they were new hotness. I'm not 100% sold on either of them, but Sphinx of Uthuun actually has played quite well. It's an easier-to-recur-but-harder-to-cast Fact or Fiction, but in this particular deck having a creature version of a spell is almost always better than it's non-creature equivalent, thanks to Genesis and Geth's importance to the deck.

Anyway, the deck basically just plays a slow, grindy, control gameplan, answering everything possible while building up card advantage and a dominant board position. As with any deck, mass resets like Planar Cleansing are bad news, but with such a prolific graveyard package, it rarely spells doom for the deck. We can get anything we need back, over and over again usually.

Vengeful Pharaoh is an amazing Buried Alive target and happens to be a very cool and flavorful card too. I definitely think he will stay in this deck for a very long time.

As for winning the game, the usual win condition is simply to reanimate an opponent's scariest threats via Geth, Beacon or Coffin Queen. Psychosis Crawler is pretty good with Damia out, though most worthy opponents won't let you stick both at the same time.

Massacre Wurm is metagame tech for me. I have an Edric player whose deck is loaded with 1/1's and 2/2's and there is of course Ghave to contend with as well. A well-timed Massacre Wurm can... well... massacre and opponent with too many tokens on the board.

Maelstrom Pulse is in for the same reason - to deal with token decks - and to deal with Rite of Replication. Rite of Replication is one of the biggest and most popular game-winning spells in my group, and Maelstrom Pulse just laughs at it (as long as they didn't RoR something with Haste!).

Mimic Vat is a big fat "duh!", and fits the theme of "kill opponent's threat, take threat from opponent, kill opponent with their own dude".

Mimeoplasm and Living Death round out the win condition package.

All in all, this is one deck I'm very happy with. There are only a few cards that I would even consider cutting and none that are outright bad choices. It can be an agonizingly frustrating deck to play against, because it usually just tries to kill everything that hits the board, but at least I'm not running countermagic!

Enjoy.

Wrexial: Deck Hijacker

So with New Phyrexia up and running, I've had the chance to acquire a few cards from the wishlist I posted a while back. Oros, so far, has gotten the most love overall, and boy what a sweet little package of cards that deck got! But here is the Wrexial deck I've been keeping under wraps for a while... partly because I hadn't actually played the damn thing yet, and partly because I just felt like it couldn't truly be complete until I had a Praetor's Grasp for it.

Well, folks, this weekend brought the remedy to both of those little issues. My buddy Chad came through with the Grasp, and selflessly volunteered to be Wrexial's punching bag for a few hours. Wrexial may be Black and Blue but, after a few games, so was Chad. Okay, lame joke. Sorry.

Anyway, the deck was obviously designed with Multiplayer in mind, but it performed remarkably well in 1v1. I wasn't really expecting that, but in hindsight it makes sense. Lemme break it down:

The major theme of the deck is using opponent's cards against them. I can steal creatures in play, from libraries or from graveyards. I can steal almost anything from libraries via Praetor's Grasp. I can cast Instants and Sorceries out of libraries or graveyards. Basically almost any sort of spell in any zone is potentially available to me as a resource. Wrexial just hijacks your deck, and he plays it better than you can!

This aspect of the deck really likes a multiplayer environement, because the more players involved the more options I'll have to steal and use things. For example, when playing 1v1 with Chad, he had alarmingly few Instants or Sorceries in his deck, and rarely had anything of interest in his graveyard, making Wrexial's ability virtually useless 99% of the time. In a 4-player game there's a much higher chance that someone will have something useful in their 'yard at any given time.

However, this aspect of the deck is grafted into a pretty basic U/B Control deck archetype. I don't run countermagic, but between all the removal and theft effects, it is still pretty consistent in keeping the board manageable, and negating any serious or overwhelming threats.

The thing is, controling one opponent is much, much easier than controlling three. I run quite a few "Wrath" cards, as well as a fair dose of spot removal. But the U/B Control aspect of the deck actually thrives on having only a single opponent to keep in check. I cannot stress how often I was able to answer/negate/hijack nearly every significant play my opponent made... all while easily keeping my hand full at 6 to 7 cards at all times.

I expected Wrexial to be one of the weaker deck's I've built but so far it seems to be an all-time great. I must add the disclaimer that: My opponent was playing his own brand-new mono-white build and it certainly was still in the "being tuned" stage of development. He realized after about 9 or 10 games that he'd somehow left out Swords to Plowshares.

So against a better-tuned deck I would not expect such stellar results, but even allowing for that, the deck has already surpassed what I expected of it. Ironically, though, I still feel like it needs some work. It's tuned enough that there really isn't any single card that feels out of place, yet I also feel like the build is vaguely sub-optimal.

Obviously, the main ingredient missing is counter-magic. But I refuse to open that door. My group largely shies away from Counterspells in EDH (not so much in 60-card, just in EDH). So I have left those out entirely (though the argument COULD be made that Gather Specimens is a mass Desertion). Also, counterspells don't really play well with Spellweaver Volute - since you have to cast a Sorcery to get the Instant, you're still playing the Instant as Sorcery-speed.

Either way, the deck did remarkably well in 1v1, so hopefully next weekend I will get to test it in a proper Multiplayer arena!

The List

Wrexial, the Risen Deep

Phyrexian Metamorph
Mulldrifter
Body Double
River Kelpie
Sphinx Ambassador
Fleshbag Marauder
Big Game Hunter
Dimir House Guard
Bane of the Living
Shriekmaw
Puppeteer Clique
Kagemaro, First to Suffer
Geth, Lord of the Vault
Myojin of Night's Reach
Shadowmage Infiltrator
Mindleech Mass
Solemn Simulacrum
Steel Hellkite
Duplicant

Twincast
Foresee
Deep Analysis
Mystical Teachings
Rite of Replication
Treachery
Evacuation
Bribery
Spellweaver Volute
Volition Reins
Gather Specimens
Knowledge Exploitation
Mind Spring
Vampiric Tutor
Demonic Tutor
Words of Waste
Reckless Spite
Bottomless Pit
Praetor's Grasp
Syphon Mind
Unnerve
Barter in Blood
Damnation
Beacon of Unrest
Painful Quandary
Life's Finale
Decree of Pain
Suffer the Past
Black Sun's Zenith
Profane Command
Recoil
Memory Plunder

Jace Beleren
Liliana Vess

Expedition Map
Sol Ring
Dimir Signet
Coalition Relic
Darksteel Ingot
Lightning Greaves
Whispersilk Cloak
Geth's Grimoire
Caged Sun

Swamp x 9
Island x10
Lonely Sandbar
Halimar Depths
Minamo, School at Water's Edge
Barren Moor
Cabal Coffers
Bojuka Bog
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
Creeping Tar Pit
Dimir Aqueduct
Underground River
Dreadship Reef
Drowned Catacomb
Tainted Isle
Temple of the False God
Reliquary Tower
Duskmantle, House of Shadow
Evolving Wilds
Terramorphic Expanse


I want to give credit to Andy over at CommanderCast, as his $30 Wrexial deck was the basis for this list. I essentially built his list card-for-card, then threw out the budget restriction, adding things like Planeswalkers and Bribery and such... While my finished list has evolved quite a bit from the budget version, the core of the deck and the overall theme remained wholly intact. Several of his key cards have survived to the present incarnation, so he certainly deserves a good deal of credit.

A kinder, gentler Zur...

General:
Zur the Enchanter

White Creatures:
Sunblast Angel
Sun Titan
Yosei, the Morning Star
Akroma, Angel of Wrath

Blue Creatures:
Mulldrifter
Body Double
Vesuvan Doppleganger
Keiga, the Tide Star
Consecrated Sphinx

Black Creatures:
Fleshbag Marauder
Dimir House Guard
Shriekmaw
Puppeteer Clique
Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon
Geth, Lord of the Vault
Grave Titan
Massacre Wurm

Multicolor Creatures:
Shadowmage Infiltrator
Angel of Despair

Robots:
Solemn Simulacrum
Duplicant

Zur-chantments:
Seal of Cleansing
Luminarch Ascension
Oblivion Ring
Ghostly Prison
Battle Mastery
Rhystic Study
Copy Enchantment
Archmage Ascension
Propaganda
Phyresis
Seal of Doom
Necromancy
Steel of the Godhead

Planeswalkers:
Jace, the Mind Sculptor
Venser, the Sojourner

Artifacts:
Sol Ring
Azorius Signet
Dimir Signet
Orzhov Signet
Coalition Relic
Obelisk of Esper
Mimic Vat
Skullclamp
Lightning Greaves
Sword of Fire and Ice
Sword of Light and Shadow

Other Spells:
Path to Exile
Swords to Plowshares
Wrath of God
Phyrexian Rebirth
Deep Analysis
Foresee
Bribery
Rite of Replication
Time Spiral
Demonic Tutor
Barter in Blood
Damnation
Profane Command
Black Sun's Zenith
Vindicate

Land:
36 assorted lands, including the holy trinity of Kor Haven, Volrath's Stronghold and Academy Ruins...

This is a Zur deck that is trying to subvert the stereotypical image that Zur decks usually have. Which is that they are unfair, dick-ish and unfun to play against. To that end I'm not running many of the ubiquitous staples of the archetype, namely Necropotence and anything to do with locking players out of the game (i.e. Stasis prisons, etc...).

I have also built the rest of the deck in the manner of a "Good Stuff" deck with lots of powerful tempting spells to provide alternatives to the rather linear strategy of "attack with Zur, get echantments".

Sometimes I might not even attack with Zur, if something in my hand is more relevant or powerful than any particular Enchantment I could fetch up... I also have to be careful with piling a bunch of Aura's onto Zur because spot-removal is very prevelant in my metagame.

In a 1v1 game, I can probably afford to go aggro as fast as possible, often going through my buff auras first to get an early lead on general damage, but in a multi-player game, it's going to be wiser to wait until late game, when everyone seems to be running out of steam before I try to piling on auras.

One thing I'm seriously considering for this deck is to add the Sovereigns of Lost Alara + Eldrazi Conscription. I realize that seems like a bit douche-baggy, but really it would be more like a mercy killing.. instead of dying a slow, painful death 1 point of General Damage at a time, it's more like a 1-shot kill (using Sovereigns to get Conscription, and Zur himself to get Battle Mastery) putting them to a swift and merciful end.

In the one game I played so far, I was able to effectively gain the upper hand and take control of the board, but once in control I had trouble putting the game away. It took forever to actually kill anyone, and that made it seem like the game was dragging out a bit too long for all of us. With a well-timed Conscription, I can end the game much quicker, which if it seems to my opponents like I'm assured to win anyway, that would be a mercy, would it not?

On the other hand, it's a powerful enough combo that it might even let me steal a win when I'm actually losing... while that seems like a great reason to do it to ME, my opponents might not feel the same way.

It's something I'll have to consider, but I'm going to play at least a couple more games before making any changes...

From the Vault: Control

Decklist first, discussion after...

1 Morphling
1 Blinding Angel

4 Isochron Scepter

2 Mystical Tutor
2 Snap
3 Echoing Truth
3 Memory Lapse
4 Counterspell
3 Orim's Chant
3 Swords to Plowshares
1 Holy Day
3 Raise the Alarm
3 Wrath of God

1 City of Brass
2 Coastal Tower
3 Thalakos Lowland
2 Adarkar Wastes
5 Plains
9 Island

There are a lot of things I want to say about this deck...

I guess I'll start with the beginning. It was mid-Mirrodin block, and Darksteel was out, but not Fifth Dawn yet. My best friend Stephen had been away from the game for a couple years (he's the one who got me into it in the first place). I kept playing while he took an extended break, which included selling me his whole collection.

A few years later, I'd made some new friends, ironically not through Magic, but it turned out they played it! So we had fairly close-knit playgroup, as we all played Magic, but were friends outside of the game. Steven was part of the circle, too, and naturally got sucked back in.

I had enough cards at this point that I could build many decks at once, so he'd just ask me to build something in a certain color or something. He'd just play whatever I built for him, and that was fine for a while. Soon enough, though he wanted to actually build decks himself, and so he came over to peruse my ample collection.

He'd seen Isochron Scepter in action, but NONE of us new it's true power yet. And this is where I go on a tangent, so bear with me.

I had never heard the term "net deck" before. I didn't go online and look up ANYTHING on Magic. I read Inquest magazine, but every time they talked about tournament decks, I zoned out and flipped past it. I tell you this, so that you know: I'd never seen a single decklist from any other source with Isochron Scepter, except a really janky one that Inquest published as soon as the set was spoiled.

The one thing I DID know was that Orim's Chant was one of the absolute best possible spells to imprint on the Isochron Scepter. I had three of them, that I'd never used. I was aware that they were a high-dollar rare, because they were always in the case at Top Deck Games and usually had the highest price tag of anything in the case. So I knew they were good, and worth some dough, but I just didn't have any use for such a spell.

Then as Stephen sat in my floor, flipping binders, he decided he'd make a deck with Isochron Scepter in it. He expressed this desire to me, but didn't know what else he wanted in the deck. Oh, wait, except he'd also found my three copies of Treachery and wanted to use those too. He said he knew the two cards had little to do with one another but he asked if I could help him build a deck with both.

Well, I said that if he wanted to use the Scepter, he'd have to include white, as the best thing to pair with it was Orim's Chant. Okay, so between these three cards, we seemed to be firmly in W/B control territory. Which was something we both never really did. However, we'd both heard of control decks that played exactly ONE win condition: Morphling. That was also something we didn't really know much about. We knew such decks existed but had no clue how to build them OR play them.

So we set out to forge a new path for ourselves, and enter the uncharted realm of Control.

I pointed out to him a few more spells, but largely left it up to him to construct the deck, as getting him back in the saddle of deckbuilder was the whole point. I was just there as a helper in case he got stuck. In the end, after about an hour of thumbing through every blue or white card I owned, he'd built some 73 card monstrosity. But as I thumbed through the deck he proudly handed over, I realized that it wasn't a monstrosity, or at least not a bad deck.

It looked pretty solid, actually. It had a few issues, mainly the over-the-moon card count, but amazingly enough the main reason was that he'd gotten afraid of the whole 1-win-condition thing and threw in some extra creatures. Fine ones, such as Man-O-War, and some not-so-fine ones that I can't remember. I cut all the excess creatures, save one: Blinding Angel (Morphling was not an excess creature, it was the one that already belonged). Two creatures was still kinda scary for us, so I kept in the Raise the Alarms he'd thrown in. But it really felt right at this point. Cutting all the creatures, left nothing else but No Stick, Treachery, Bribery, and Wrath as the only non-imprintable spells. That seemed exciting to us.

I trimmed the fat from his deck, and I think I added the 3 Wrath of God but the rest of the deck was all Steven. He built it, I streamlined it down to 60, and we were off to the races!

God. The deck KILLED our poor, poor friends. At the time we thought it was great fun, being able to respond to virtually every single threat laid before us... It wasn't very fun for our opponents. It never lost a game.

Paul pretty much always played Elves. If Blinding Angel hit once, he was never going to attack again the rest of the game. Holy Day on the Stick was the same thing. Or, obviously, Chant. He could ONLY win by attacking, and had little artifact removal, which the ample countermagic was able to ward off.

Anne played... I don't remember what exactly, but I'm sure it had Blue, or Black, or both. I do remember a game against her where I got Memory Lapse on the Stick and she drew (and tried to cast) the same spell about 5 turns in a row. When I pointed out to her that she could break the cycle by NOT casting anything, she said "well, what's the point, then?!" and scooped up her deck.

Chad played a few different decks, but played against the deck piloted by Stephen maybe once, and piloted by me maybe once, and then refused to even shuffle up his deck if he knew we were playing this deck. I played it in a few 4 or 5 player free-for-all games. Counterspells should be terrible in multiplayer, but when you have near-infinite counter magic, it actually works like a charm. Bolstered by the Wraths and Bribery's it easily took down a whole table.

I think we had the deck together a month or more, but it only took about two nights of gaming before every single one of our friends learned to say "No" to the No-Stick. We literally could NOT get a game if we brought the deck out. Fortunately I had several decks built, so we still got our Magic fix, but the W/B deck was very clearly off limits.

Sad thing was, it was hands down the best deck either of us had ever built at that point. It's telling, I think, that THIS deck was banned from our table, but my Tolarian Academy deck stocked with Tinkers, Memnarch, Mycosinth Lattice and Karn was not. Oh they hated the Academy deck, to be sure. But they never expressly forbid me from playing it. I played it for months before they finally begged me to give it a rest. But the W/B No-Stick? I played 5 game at most with it ever, before it was officially blacklisted.

Steven played a few more games with it, as he was the lesser pilot, but only because he was just getting back into the game, and was still re-learning the ropes. But I honestly don't think even HE lost a game with it. Soon enough, even he couldn't play the deck.

Well, I guess that is the story of how I learned to play control decks, and Stephen built one of his masterpiece decks. And, between this and the Academy deck, I earned a reputation that I still haven't shaken to this day, despite not having cast an Isochron Scepter in over 5 years.