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Elements of Victory: Building An Elemental Deck In Standard
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For my debut Magic: The Gathering article I just couldn’t think what to write about and then it occurred to me; the Lorwyn tribes. It might sound like an obvious choice as they are a very up to date set but many people at the moment are running the strongest tribe, which would be Faeries or are attempting to crack the tribe considered the worst, Giants.I then had to decide on which tribe to begin with and I thought I’d start with the elementals for several reasons:Ø They’re just plain coolØ They’re very versatile with them being in every colourØ Very different decks can be built with themSo then I needed a starting point I don’t know how many people will read this article (hopefully lots) and I can’t gauge the average skill level of these readers but I can have a good guess that it will be the “casual player” so I like a base to work from and that’s where the theme decks come in handy.So here is the “Elementals’ Path” pre-constructed theme deck. Theme decks are always a big jumble of good and not so good cards with loads of major and minor themes that can be tweaked and worked on to create a pretty decent, respectable deck.Theme decks are never going to win many matches to begin with against anything other than another theme deck due to them being generally inconsistent but the deck has serious inconsistencies. That’s because of every single colour being crammed into the deck. Despite that there are several cards I really do like from this deck: Incandescent Soulstoke: One of the two rares in this deck, he is brilliant having the “Lord” ability along with a very aggressive support ability, this guy can throw a Supreme Exemplar at your opponent on turn four! Changeling Berserker: Another card that reinforces this decks emphasis on aggressive playing, very efficient as long as you have another creature in play. Shriekmaw: This guy is probably the biggest rival to Nekrataal in decks running plenty of Black creature kill but it’s his versatility that makes him stand out too; at the beginning of a match he can be played as a Terror then later in the match he is a creature that can swing for 3 and has evasion to boot. Then there is some cards I love to complain about: Consuming Bonfire: When I look at this card I just start to cringe it is probably the worst of the Tribal spell cycle, with Bitterblossom and Tarfire being played a lot this card just looks even worse. Four damage on turn five is just not going to cut it and seven damage to a treefolk isn’t that much better since they have the highest toughness. Stick to Shock and Lash Out. Mournwhelk: This deck gives with one hand and takes with the other, Shriekmaw I mentioned earlier in the article and is great the other Black card in the deck, Mournwhelk, is a plain waste of time. Firstly, Mind Rot is cheaper for discarding cards and no one would want to pay seven mana for a 3/3. Flamekin Brawler: Another waste of mana- his price looks really cheap but the fact that you have to pay mana every turn to get any kind of offensive out of him is bad. My next big question I need to ask myself is do I want to keep all five colours in my deck? If I did then I think I would need to splash some Elementals that are Black, Blue and White and form the core of my deck out of Red and Green: Green for mana acceleration and Red for the Flamekin; particularly Smokebraider to iron out mana issues and to speed up my attack.Testing the DeckFirstly, I tested the deck without altering it. Like I predicted not very organised and inconsistent, what hurt this deck more was that the mana base let the deck down a lot which isn’t always a problem with other pre-cons. So the first thing I wanted to sort out was the mana base and that needed some shuffling of the creature line-up. Consuming Bonfire was out first, I was contemplating using Incinerate but thought that the Clash effect on Lash Out was too good to miss so three Bonfires were for three Lash Out.Mournwhelk was next on my hit list and thought that this was a brilliant time to try out more Shriekmaw in the deck so both Mournwhelk were gone in favour of two more Shriekmaw bringing the total up to three. Finally, the last creature alteration was removing the Flamekin Brawler for two more Flamekin Bladewhirl.Now I was able to sort out the land problems in this deck. I removed the Wanderer’s Twig and replaced it for Terramorphic Expanse which is much more reliable and then I altered the basic land type amounts; the final change I did was add four Primal Beyond to further sort out any mana issues. This is the deck now: 1 Dawnfluke 1 Mulldrifter 2 Æthersnipe
Tags: Magic The Gathering Elemental Deck Building
Related to:
Magic: the Gathering
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