Don't F*** with The Mimeoplasm!

First of all, let me preface this post by stating for the record that I do still prefer Damia, Sage of Stone for this color scheme. Unfortunately, so does everyone else in my group. I was a little sad to see the Mimeoplasm getting no love from my playgroup, not to mention it was becoming difficult to play my own Damia deck due to her increased popularity amongst the other members of my group. But, just because I like Damia more, that doesn’t mean I don’t think The Mimeoplasm is straight up gangsta. It’s really just that Damia says “draw lots of cards” in her text box, which always gets me. I’m a sucker for card-drawing engines.

Anyway, disclaimer aside, I figured it was time for me to unleash the Legendary Ooze on my group so they could see what the other GUB Legend is capable of.

As the players in my group have already seen me playing GUB with Damia, and even Vorosh before her, I really wanted to find a way to make this deck different from its predecessors. There was simply no getting around running some of the staples from those past builds, like the Genesis + Evoke Creatures engine, Rite of Replication (duh!) and a handful of other typical GUB Good-Stuff spells.

One of the first things I hit upon when trying to establish the decks identity was the “Graveyard Matters” aspect of The Mimeoplasm. Obviously my chosen General likes to have things in various graveyards to eat.  This leads to some pretty easy logical choices – Buried Alive and Life’s Finale, for example. Graveyards tend to fill up with creatures over a long EDH game, but helping the cause along where possible is not a bad idea.

Another card that likes graveyards to be full is Necrotic Ooze. Once I started thinking about cards like Life’s Finale in conjunction with Necrotic Ooze, I knew exactly where I wanted the deck to go. While graveyard abuse is nothing new or groundbreaking, I’ve never really made use of Necrotic Ooze before, so now was my perfect chance.

Initially, I also wanted to go “all creatures” with the deck, to further distinguish it from my past GUB decks, but that didn’t really pan out. For one thing, not being able to play Rite of Replication was a huge deal breaker, but I also realized there were some cards that this deck just needed to play. I settled on running a maximum of 20 non-creature spells, allowing room for up to 42 Creatures in the deck – the most I’ve ever played in an EDH deck! My hope is that such a creature-saturated deck will still feel different enough that it will have its own identity.

It also helps that this deck does make quite a few card-choices that I wouldn’t have made with any other GUB build – for example, I chose to run Arcanis, the Omnipotent over Consecrated Sphinx. HUH?! That’s right. Simply put, Arcanis plays well with Necrotic Ooze, and Expiriment Kraj, while the Sphinx does not.

There are, of course, plenty of creatures in the deck that do not have an activated ability for the Oozes to copy, but I believe there are around 20 that do. Where possible, I favored activated abilities over static or triggered ones (such as with the Sphinx vs Arcanis conundrum). But I didn’t want the deck to rely entirely on having Necrotic Ooze in play with a full graveyard, so I built the deck to function along different axes depending on how my opponents react to my various strategies.

The deck will clearly have a weakness to graveyard hate, so I did my best to shore up that weakness as best I could. I think it will still have game even with up to 40 to 50 percent of the deck exiled, but it all depends on WHAT get’s nuked, of course… but enough preamble, let’s see the deck!

Creatures

The Mimeoplasm

Dreamscape Artist

Mulldrifter

Phyrexian Metamorph

Morphling

Arcanis the Omnipotent

Death's Shadow

Disciple of Griselbrand

Fleshbag Marauder

Dimir House Guard

Necrotic Ooze

Hell's Caretaker

Shriekmaw

Corpse Connoisseur

Puppeteer Clique

Kagemaro, First to Suffer

Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon

Vengeful Pharaoh

Geth, Lord of the Vault

Avatar of Woe

Spirit of the Night

Sakura-Tribe Elder

Riftsweeper

Fauna Shaman

Fertilid

Wood Elves

Eternal Witness

Timbermare

Chameleon Colossus

Seedborn Muse

Putrefax

Acidic Slime

Silklash Spider

Primeval Titan

Thornling

Shadowmage Infiltrator

Cold-Eyed Selkie

Expiriment Kraj

Wrexial, the Risen Deep

Sisters of Stone Death

Mindless Automaton

Solemn Simulacrum

Duplicant

Spells

Intuition

Rite of Replication

Bribery

Diabolic Intent

Buried Alive

Living Death

Life's Finale

Beast Within
Birthing Pod

Greater Good

Asceticism

Creeping Rennaissance

Sol Ring

Coalition Relic

Mimic Vat

Grimoire of the Dead

Lightning Greaves

Sword of Vengeance
Sword of Feast and Famine
Sword of Light and Shadow

Lands

Breeding Pool

Overgrown Tomb

Watery Grave

Evolving Wilds

Misty Rainforest

Verdant Catacombs

Flooded Grove

Sunken Ruins

Twilight Mire

Dimir Acqueduct

Simic Growth Chamber

Golgari Rot Farm

Drowned Catacomb

Hinterland Harbor

Woodland Cemetary

Llanowar Wastes

Underground River

Yavimaya Coast

Vesuva

Hall of the Bandit Lord

Minamo, School at Water's Edge

Shizo, Death's Storehouse

Volrath's Stronghold

Command Tower

Reflecting Pool

Temple of the False God

Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth

Reliquary Tower

Island x3

Swamp x3

Forest x4

Edited 11/14/01:
- Genesis
- Damnation
- High Market
+ Sword of Feast and Famine
+ Sword of Light and Shadow
+ Hall of the Bandit Lord


Explanation: The cuts were due to lack of cards, and I had to prioritize. For instance, I had three decks calling for Damnation, but only two copies of the card. Someone had to give up their Damnation for something else. Same story with Genesis; that was an easy swap, I just put in Sword of Light and Shadow as it fulfills much the same role. Plus after I got all my decks built I realized I had 75% of my Swords of Stuff and Junk sitting there not in decks, and I couldn't have that!

Hall of the Bandit Lord makes a good fit for the deck, I feel, because it can enable a Haste-y Mimeoplasm one-shot kill. It was also really good with Wrexial, and he's in this deck as well.

The non-Creature selection was tough. I had about 30 cards that I really, REALLY wanted to include, but I was firmly committed to keeping the non-creature count as low as possible, and it turned out 20 was the bottom limit. I’d have been happier with 15, but that meant leaving out some pretty crucial cards. Of course, this led to some pretty fierce competition for slots in the non-creature category, and made for some agonizingly tough decisions on my part as to what to leave out. I’m still iffy on a couple items, but for the most part I think the strength of my choices will speak for themselves. Nonetheless, I will discuss them briefly.

First, the graveyard fuel: Intuition, Buried Alive, Life’s Finale and Greater Good were all primarily chosen for their ability to fill graveyards quickly. Other cards that have different primary functions, but have a secondary effect of adding to the graveyards include: Grimoire of the Dead, Birthing Pod, Diabolic Intent, and of course Damnation. You can see where I chose cards that had a “drawback” or additional “cost” of discarding or sacrificing something, but the deck’s core strategy can easily turn those costs and drawbacks into a benefit, rather than a hindrance.

Living Death is simply a card that thrives in a deck like this, while Rite of Replication, Bribery and Asceticism are more generic “good-stuff” inclusions. Asceticism is one of the few cards I’m not 100% sure deserves it’s slot, but I think it deserves the chance to prove itself. There’s a list of extremely powerful stuff waiting in the wings if it doesn’t perform. It’s such a strong card against targeted removal and some mass removal that I think it’s going to work out in the end.

Sword of Vengeance is an odd pick over the various “protection” Swords, but Haste and Trample are two of the best keywords to enable one-hit kills with the Mimeoplasm, so along with the Power boost, Sword of Vengeance actually seems like a better choice. I definitely would love to have a couple of the pro-Swords in there as well, but for now this one gets the nod.

Creeping Renaissance was a card I was rather cool on when I did my Innistrad set review, and I wouldn’t say my opinion has changed since then. It’s just that with such a high creature count, Creeping Renaissance naming “creature” is too awesome-sounding to pass up. If anything it might prove to be “win-more” and I’ll find myself not needing to cast it, but for now I’d rather have it and not need it, than the other way around.

Mimic Vat should be a no-brainer. It’s already one of the best EDH cards in the Scars block, and should basically be in every deck ever. Here it actually manages to be right in line with the deck’s strategies.

Finally, we have two of the best possible mana-rocks in the game: Sol Ring and Coalition Relic. I’d be happy to include a Darksteel Ingot as well, but I can’t find room right now. Maybe later.

Two cards I really want to find room for are Twilight’s Call and Jace, the Mind Sculptor. I have a feeling Creeping Renaissance might lose its slot to Twilight’s Call, while I have no idea what could come out for Jace.  

As for the creature base, well… roughly half were chosen for having a cool activated ability that Necrotic Ooze or Kraj might want to copy, the other half are either finishers or utility, chosen for being awesome targets for The Mimeoplasm – after all I needed to make him relevant too!

The best cards are those that fulfill two or more roles. For instance, Fauna Shaman plays three critical roles: She helps fill my graveyard with creatures for my oozes to copy, she finds Necrotic Ooze itself, and she has an ability that the Ooze can copy, once she’s dead! She’s a perfect card to tie all my various themes and strategies together. I came very close to including Green Sun’s Zenith as one more way of finding Fauna Shaman, but I think the deck will prove reliable enough without it.

Wrexial made the cut because I’m so light on Instants and Sorceries, and Wrexial is a way for me to cheat on my answer count by using my opponents’ spent spells. I considered Memory Plunder as well, but it’s not a creature, so that was out.

In the end, I wound up cutting quite a few cards that seemed cool on their own, but I realized that they enabled various infinite combos. Bloom Tender, for example, led to an infinite mana combo via Necrotic Ooze. If I had the Ooze in play, with Morphling and Bloom Tender in the graveyard, and any other permantent that was Green and/or Blue, I had infinite mana. I don’t know what I’d do with all that mana, but I was uncomfortable with having any sort of infinite combo in the deck, so Bloom Tender got cut.

I don’t think there’s much else that would require explanation, so that’s a wrap for this one. One more deck to post and my deckbuilding project will be complete.

Enjoy!

Vorosh, the Hunter EDH

Got another EDH list for you today, and it's a real bitch of a deck.

Vorosh, the Hunter

This deck was born out of an idea I had to put Genesis into a deck with Mulldrifter and Shriekmaw. Basically the thought was to just recur utility cards like these two Evokers to eventual card-avantage my opponent to death. And it works pretty well, too!

Card advantage wins games, as has long been the prevailing theory in Magic. And this deck is designed to break one of the fundemental rules of EDH, in that it is a Singleton format, meaning each card is unique and therefore a precious resource to manage carefully and not waste. If you only have 1 Swords to Plowshares in your deck, you'll want to save it for a dire threat like Yosei, Keiga or Akroma, rather than waste it on a minor annoyance like Acidic Slime or Solemn Simulacrum.

But if you know you can just reuse your removal and utility spells all day long, you're free to blow them early and often, just be sure you can get them back later when you need them. Having Genesis + a variety of creature-based utility (several with built in sac outlets like Evoke or Echo) lets you be more generous with your removal. Yes, getting your graveyard nuked late game is kind of a downer, but I can still usually win even after that.

So what else is in the deck? Take a look for yourself:

General: Vorosh the Hunter (chosen simply because he's the only Legend in this color scheme)

Blue dudes:
Looter il-Kor
Sower of Temptation
Mulldrifter
Body Double
Vesuvan Doppleganger
Keiga, the Tide Star

Black dudes:
Coffin Queen
Fleshbag Marauder
Boneshredder
Undead Gladiator
Dimir House Guard
Shreikmaw
Corpse Connoisseur
Puppeteer Clique
Kagemaro, First to Suffer
Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni

Green dudes:
Sakura-Tribe Elder
Ana Battlemage
Eternal Witness
Ohran Viper
Ravenous Baloth
Genesis
Indrik Stomphowler
Arashi, the Sky Asunder
Acidic Slime

Multicolor Dudes:
Cold-Eyed Selkie
Shadowmage Infiltrator
Wrexial, the Risen Deep
Simic Sky Swallower

Artifact/Colorless Dudes:
Solemn Simulacrum
Duplicant
It That Betrays

Blue Spells:
Frantic Search
Intuition
Foresee
Rite of Replication
Jace, the Mind Sculptor
Treachery

Black Spells:
Demonic Tutor
Diabolic Intent
Damnation
Beacon of Unrest
Living Death
Consuming Vapors
Decree of Pain
Mind Twist
Profane Command

Green Spells:
Harrow
Krosan Grip
Greater Good
Mwonvuli Acid-Moss

Multicolor Spells:
Putrefy
Pernicious Deed

Artifacts:
Sol Ring
Dimir Signet
Golgari Signet
Simic Signet
Coalition Relic

Lightning Greaves
Sword of Light and Shadow
Sword of Fire and Ice

Lands:
Island (x3)
Forest (x2)
Swamp (x2)
Watery Grave
Overgrown Tomb
Breeding Pool
Underground River
Llanowar Wastes
Yavimaya Coast
Verdant Catacombs
Misty Rainforest
Dimir Aqueduct
Golgari Rot Farm
Simic Growth Chamber
Drowned Catacomb
Creeping Tarpit
Twilight Mire
Vivid Creek
Vivid Marsh
Vivid Grove
Faerie Conclave
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
Treetop Village
Lonely Sandbar
Barren Moor
Tranquil Thicket
City of Brass
Shimmering Grotto
Evolving Wilds
Volrath's Stronghold
Phyrexian Tower
Temple of the False God
Gargoyle Castle
Miren the Moaning Well

I'll go over some of the highlights and some of the card choices that might be less than obvious.

Several cards have to do with getting the Genesis engine online - Looter il-Kor, Corpse Connoisseur, Frantic Search, Intuition and Greater Good all help with this in some capacity. All of these cards are good in their own right, though, and aren't dead cards once I have Genesis online.

Looter il-Kor, for instance also has good synergy with Ink-Eyes, being small and evasive.

Sower of Temptation is a recurrable Control Magic, as is Keiga.

Fleshbag Marauder, Bone Shredder and Shriekmaw are all good as recursive pin-point removal, while Kagemaro, First to Suffer is a recurrable Damnation on a stick, and can be an able-bodied finisher if need be.

Coffin Queen and Beacon of Unrest are there because I am going to be killing a LOT of my opponents guys, and the deck is a bit short on fatties, so... why not just use whatever my opponent was going to use on me!

Undead Gladiator - okay, this guy might seem out of place, but he's really good with Intuition. Basically, when you cast Intuition with this deck you're always going to get Genesis + 2 other guys, right? Well if your opponent is any kind of decent player, he's going to give you the Genesis and pitch the other 2 guys, because he knows you WANT to pitch Genesis, so he's going to make you work for it. Well, if one of the other 2 guys you get is Undead Gladiator, you can just discard Genesis on your next upkeep, and then Cycle the Gladiator later when you don't need him. So he's just really good at setting up Genesis. He's also really good for late game mana pockets.

Dimir House Guard is a versatile tool. You can transmute him for Damnation, Rite of Replication or whatever. Or you can cast him as a sac outlet to help you recur things with Genesis. Oh, AND he lets you sac Genesis himself, should you draw into him without any other way to discard him. Another good card to help setup Genesis, but it also has several other relevant uses as well.

Ink-Eyes is extremely good here, because you're going to be killing most of your opponents creatures, meaning A) nothing will be able to block her and B) your opponent's graveyard will be well-stocked for Ink-Eyes to pilfer out of. She works well with the fairly large number of cheap, evasive creatures, AND her Ninjitsu ability is yet one more way for you to get multiple uses out of a ETBF utility creature.

Ana Battlemage - I admit this is a pet card of mine, but don't laugh it works. Seriously, I've made some pretty devastating plays with it before. You almost always want to kick it for the 2U ability, but you'd be surprise at how often the 1B ability has also be highly relevant. This little guy has outright won me games!

Ravenous Baloth - just recurrable life gain, should you need it.

Arashi, Sky Asunder - Repeatable anti-Akroma tech

Cold-Eyed Selkie - Just imagine how sick she is with a Sword of Fire and Ice...

Wrexial, the Risen Deep - So far I can't tell if this guy is worth running. He seems like a natural compliment to the stellar Ink-Eyes, as he basically does for sorceries and instants what she does for creatures. But so far he hasn't been relevant, but I haven't actually played enough with him to know for sure. I usually just keep drawing him way too early and either can't cast him, or my opponent's 'yard is full of nothing but permanents.

Duplicant - Reusable Swords to Plowshares... on a stick... I'd run 4x if I could!

It That Betrays - Another one that looks good on paper, but I haven't played the deck much since I slotted him in, so I can't say yet if he'll work out.

Rite of Replication - The other day I cast this for 5 Baneslayer Angel tokens. Do you really need more explanation than that? Okay, try casting it for 5 Eternal Witness tokens. Five Keiga tokens? Duplicant? It That Betrays?

Diabolic Intent is almost BETTER than Demonic Tutor here... you generally WANT your guys going to the bin. How else do you break Genesis?

Consuming Vapors - I keep wanting to swap this out for Barter in Blood. Both have their merits and drawbacks, but I really want this card to work out. It seems like it should... I haven't really given it a fair chance yet, as it is a new addition, but one of the last times I transmuted Dimir House Guard I REALLY wanted this to be Barter...

Mind Twist - Am I a dick for running this? Yes... but this deck is really so dick-ish even without the Mind Twist that it really doesn't make any difference.

Profane Command is just really good. If you need more than that, I'm sorry but you just have to trust me. I've never once been unhappy to draw it. It's so damn versatile, it's ALWAYS relevant.

Mwonvuli Acid Moss - I really don't like LD, as I feel it's even more douchebaggy than Mind Twist. However, this card is really great for two reasons. One is that this deck really needs to establish a mana advantage early on - Acid Moss helps. Say you and your oppoent both hit 4 mana. You cast this. Suddenly you're 2 ahead in the mana race, and losing one land rarely cripples them to the point the concede on the spot. The other is that sometimes utility lands mess things up, and this deck doesn't have too many ways too deal with that. This and Acidic Slime are about the only two cards that can kill lands, so I don't think I'm overdoing it here. Another thing is if your oppoent drops their Volrath's Stronghold first - you really need Stronghold in a lot of games, so Acid Moss lets you get theirs out of the way so you can safely drop yours.

Increasing the LD slightly would make this deck quite a bit better, as Acid Moss has been very good when I cast it, even fairly late in the game. But it would also make you that much more of a dick. I try to keep dickery to a minimum.

You'll also notice that the list of artifacts is pretty much the exact same list of artifacts in my other EDH decks... yeah, Sol Ring, three signets, Relic, Greaves and two Swords... I'd like to be a bit more original here, but damn it these are all TOO DAMN GOOD to leave out!

The mana base is equally straightforward - just run as many duals as you can get your hands on, add in a smattering of good utility lands (Volrath's Stronghold is a MUST).

Once built, this deck plays out like a control deck, spending the early turns developing the mana base and accelerating where possible. Then just Damnation or something to slow the game down a bit, and start killing everything your opponent tries to put on the table. You can answer just about any permanent type with this deck, but planeswalkers can be a bit of a trick. If you feel the need, you might add Vampire Hexmage. I personally have never really needed it, but I can see where she might fit some metagames.

As for other inclusions, the one card that SCREAMS to be put in this deck is Survival of the Fittest. Alas, I don't have one, but I definitely would run it if I did. Bribery could easily be a solid addition. I'm also considering replacing Intuition with Fact or Fiction, but I dunno...