So I had a little free time on Friday and I decided to go up and play some standard at a new store with a few of my buddies. I had wanted to play Faeries, but I was missing two Ancestral Visions so I decided not to play the deck with out them. So I started digging through my cards to come up with something to play and this little concoction is what resulted.
4 Avalanche Riders
3 Grinning Ingus
4 Murderous Redcap
4 Primal Forcemage
2 Siege-Gang Commander
4 Wall of Roots
4 Harmonize
4 Mwonvuli Acid-Moss
4 Search for Tomorrow
3 Wild Pair
10 Forests
3 Karplusan Forest
7 Mountains
4 Treetop Village
Some of you might remember this back from Timespiral Block, but the deck is surprisingly good. Primal Forcemage is a house, and curving out into either a Redcap or an Avalanche Rider is so absolutely back breaking. The can also randomly play turn 3 Siege-Gang Commanders which is pretty good. Then there’s the combo. Even without a Grinning Ingus to do seriously broken things just playing a Forcemage into a Redcap, or even better if you have a Forcemage already in play and play a Redcap into a Redcap the game can swing in your favor really quickly.
The mana base is a bit sketchy, but like I said I came up with this deck in the course of like a day and a half and didn’t have time to find anything else, but if anything the only non-basic land this deck probably needs is Treetop Village. You could probably just cut the Karp Forests for Mountains and the deck would be fine, and pretty much blank Fulminator Mages in the process. I don’t really think that adding any non-basic lands to this deck will help it, but if you want to go right ahead.
The sideboard I played at the FNM was pretty terrible, but here’s what I think a good sideboard would probably look like.
4 Firespout
4 Riftsweeper
4 Krosan Grip
3 Magus of the Moon/Fulminator Mage/Vexing Susher
This sideboard is exclusively to combat Swans combo and Faeries as the deck is rediculously good against other “Big Mana” decks. I’m not really sure about Magus of the Moon or Fulminator mage, but I feel like both cards are good against both Faeries and Swans, but resolving a Vexing Susher against Faeries probably makes the game a lot easier. I like Firespout better than Raking Canopy because it’s more flexible and can be very good against all the various Elf decks. Krosan Grip is better than Ancient Grudge because it will always get Bitterblossom.
Playing the deck right means knowing how to use the stack correctly, if you can’t properly manipulate the stack you can make some pretty bonehead plays. If a Forcemage is in play you always want to resolve the Wild Pair trigger first otherwise you won’t be able to fetch anything in you deck. Don’t forget that you can start the combo off with a Wall of Roots by producing a green mana in response to the Wild Pair trigger.
Overall the deck is pretty easy to play. Build up your mana, slow down your opponent with the odd land destruction spell or Redcap. Then you win, by doing unfair things. The decks worst match-up is probably Faeries and I haven’t done nearly enough testing to know if this can be changed at all, but if you can come up with some kind of way to make the match up even close to 50/50 I really like this deck against the rest of the meta-game. Like I said the deck is really good against any of the big mana decks and if you draw the hate pretty good against Swans. I guess they can always just have the nuts and you don’t draw one of your 8 spells that stops them, but that’s just how the Swans match up works.
I went 2-2 at the FNM with it losing to Swans and in an attempt to spilt the 3rd place prize with my opponent conceding because his tie breakers were a little bit better than mine. I’m pretty sure I would’ve won the match had we had time to play out the last game, but time was called and we negotiated the split instead of drawing and ruining both of our chances at prizes. Not to mentioned his chances of winning the first game was pretty much nothing, but I literally drew all but 4 of the land in my deck, after playing 3 Harmonize, and 6 land fetching spells, and spent about 7 turns looking for any of one of about 6 or 7 spells that would’ve just won me the game. Talk about bad beats. In the end he got 4th and I walked away with nothing. Oh well. This deck is really fun to play and surprisingly good, so I feel like the night was overall a success. Until next time.
Bob
Tags: Magic Standard
Related to:
Magic: the Gathering
