Alex Hockey's Deck Garage
10.23.02 Elf Opposition

Hello, and welcome to my very first deck garage. Firstly, a few general points that I should have said last week in my opening blurb but I forgot:

1. I’ve realise that I have no experience with Type I decks so please don’t send them to me.

2. Please send all e-mails in normal text. Any e-mails with weird fonts, weird colour letters or all in caps will be deleted without being read.

3. If I’m going to review your deck I will keep it in my inbox so there’s no need to send it again.

Right, now onto the article. Unfortunately, my computer died this week taking the e-mail of the deck that I was going to review with it. Fortunately, I did print it out beforehand but apologies to the writer of the e-mail as I’m going to paraphrase the e-mail to save on typing.


“Dear Alex. This is my deck, elf opposition


Llanowar elf x 4
Elvish Warrior x4
Wirewood Herald x4
Wellwisher x4
Heedless One x4
Elvish Champion x4
Squirrel Nest x4
Opposition x3
Read the Runes x3
Counterspell x4
Complicate x4

Wirewood lodge x2
Forest x12
Island x10

Its onslaught type 2. I think elves are cool so I’m using them over wizards. I don’t think squirrels are fat enough to go for the kill.

Complicates are there ‘cos I don’t have a discard engine for logics. The heralds may need to come out but there in there so I can chump block with them in the late game and search out a heedless one and go for the kill”

From Red7Hawk.

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Squirrel opposition decks won the game by firstly tapping all your opponents’ creatures, and then as you got more tokens, you could tap all his lands during his upkeep to stop him from playing any more spells. After that, all you needed to do was create 1 token a turn to tap the land your opponent might lay and then you cruised to victory with an army of squirrels.
Unfortunately, this deck can’t win this way. There are no elf generators so every almost every creature this deck has on the table is a creature card. The advantage of this is you get more bang for you buck in the short term. However, opposition is still a control strategy so it is most vulnerable to beatdown and there are a lot of beatdown decks that will make it into the new type 2 from the old one unscathed. For this reason, I think the best way to go with this deck is to aim to play lots of fat creatures early on to protect against a weenie rush and then drop an opposition for the game.

So we want cheap creatures that are good blockers. So lets see what we can lose from the deck.

Wellwisher and Elvish warrior are both great creatures that will help you in the early game. Elvish champion makes all you elves bigger by +1/+1 which could allow you to keep your elves alive in the early game when you’ll be wanting to block aggressively.

In a deck where no card costs more than 4 mana, the usefulness of Llanowar Elves is dubious – out they go. Same goes for the heralds and heedless ones as they are to situational and not good enough early on. I’m also going to temporarily remove every other spell in the deck except for the oppositions so I can more clearly see what cards need adding.

This leaves the following in the deck:

Elvish warrior x4
Wellwisher x4
Elvish Champion x3
Opposition x3
24 assorted lands

Clearly we need more fast creatures. Wall of mulch fits the bill perfectly as it can quite happily block most creatures and if for some reason it does die, you get to sac it to draw a card.

At the moment, this deck is going to have mana problems. With only 10 islands, you can only expect to have UU by turn 6 and some games even later. This may be too late to save you so we need more blue mana sources. Fortunately, Birchlore rangers can give you blue mana and are also cheap elves to power up wellwisher.

I find it strange that Red7Hawk didn’t put in any artifact/enchantment removal. So I’ll put some in. 2 naturalize and 2 Elvish scrappers go in here.

I’m going to put the counterspells back in just because they are so good. I’m also putting in 2 tribal unites. From the e-mail I received, I think this guy is afraid of not having enough punch to win the game when he’s ready to. This card should change that. Simply tap all your opponents creatures during his turn then play a huge tribal unity an attack will all your creatures who will be completely unblocked!

That lot adds up to 32 cards so I’m going to bung in 3 read the runes and another opposition just to make sure that the deck can draw an opposition (which it will almost certainly need for the win).

So the deck at the moment is:

Elvish Warrior x4
Wellwisher x4
Elvish Champion x3
Opposition x4
Counterspell x4
Tribal Unity x2
Naturalize x2
Elvish Scrappers x2
Birchlore Rangers x4
Wall of Mulch x4
Read the Runes x3

That just leaves the lands. A couple of cities of brass replace a forest and an island to give the deck more mana stability and with the wellwishers in there you’ll barely feel the damage.

The Wirewood lodges are good in this deck just so you can untap wellwisher and tap it again for even more life. In fact I’m going to up the number to 3 for this very reason.

So the lands are now:

Wirewood Lodge x3
City of Brass x2
Forest x11
Island x8

There you go. I’ll just say a few words before I get abuse from people who don’t like my deck fix. Firstly, there are only 4 countermagic spells. This is because I am not a fan of complicate; I think its costly and not that useful. The deck doesn’t really need it. Just save the counterspells for the really game breaking spells (Wrath of God, Armageddon etc.). Secondly, I took out the squirrel nests because this deck isn’t designed to be a prison deck so it can’t lock down the opponent’s mana very effectively. This means that the nests are no longer needed.

Ok, that is pretty much the end of this article. I hope you liked it and I hope the modifications I made work!