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BMoor's Magic The Gathering Deck Garage
Dusan's Sliver Deck
February 19, 2007

Magic has given us quite a few timeshifted cards in this most recent block, so it's only appropriate, and also my pleasure, to bring you a deck garage installment with a timeshifted client.  Yes, that's right, today's correspondent is someone I've worked with before, a long time ago.
Hi Bmoor,
you might not remember me but i have submitted one of
the first decks you fixed: Dusan's dimir deck. I never
properly thanked for that, but your deck fix helped me
a lot. Well so much for the introduction, here's the
deck list:

Lands
6 Island
6 Mountain
6 Swamp
4 Gemstone Mine
1 Gemstone Caverns
1 Izzet Boilerworks
1 Rakdos Carnarium

Creatures
3 Sedge Sliver
2 Psionic Sliver
2 Vampiric Sliver
2 Two-Headed Sliver
2 Shadow Sliver
2 Dementia Sliver

Spells
3 Lotus Bloom
3 Wrecking Ball
3 Mana Leak
3 Electrolyze
3 Sudden Shock
3 Perplex
3 Telling Time

The deck mechanics are somewhat simple: use sedge
sliver to regenerate and pump up slivers, psionic to
deal damage, and the rest are just for fun.
Electrolyze, sudden hock and wrecking ball to keep the
board clean and mana leak and perplex to counter any
nasty spells.
The main problem is that i cant develop much in the
early game, and that is not a good thing playing
against weenie/control decks. Weenies have too many
creatures out before i develop and controls just
counter/kill everything i play. I was maybe thinking
of maybe throwing in Damnation (if i get any; no one
wants to trade it), or maybe a couple of more
counter spells.
I would only ask you that you keep the deck T2 legal.
also i would appreciate if you kept sedge sliver and
electrolyze because i really love those cards.
As for the budget, please don't get carried too much
away. I wouldn't mind 7 or 8 expensive cards, but please
keep within those limits.

Looking forward to reading from you.

Yours Sincerely,
Dusan Kovacevic

P.S.
Please ignore all and any grammatical errors you
encounter for English i s not my native language.
For those of you who don't remember Dusan here, his Dimir deck was probably the first one that ever got submitted to me as a deck mechanic.  So naturally I'm glad to help him out again.  And this time, he's running Slivers.  I hope his Dimir deck didn't fail him though...
 
So, anyway, Slivers.  Everybody loves Slivers.  Except the guy on the other side of the table, anyway.  So, you want a good, robust Sliver deck that can stand up to an aggro rush or a control deck.  Well, first of all, you do not want Damnation.  Sliver decks win by having hordes of Slivers in play, or not at all.  Damnation is the worst card you could ad to this deck.  Well, that's not exactly true.  I guess Dizzy Spell would probably be up there...down there...as well, but it's not worth going out of your way to get Damnation.  What you need is to build up your Sliver army faster.  So let's take a look at what Slivers you've got, versus what you could have.  Dementia Sliver?  Vampiric?  Shadow?  Not good.  Dementia Sliver is completely useless unless you can tap four or five Slivers per turn to its ability.  And then, there's still so many other more useful things you could be doing.  Shadow Sliver will allow you to swing unblocked, but also make it impossible for you to block.  And Slivers sacrifice size for cool abilities, so you're probably not going to be able to win a race.  And Vampiric Sliver bestows the Sengir Vampire ability.  Everyone knows nobody ever blocks Sengir Vampire without killing it; it's the dumbest thing you can do to a vampire in a horror movie, and the same applies here.  So vampire abilities just never trigger.  Then again, you could trigger Vampiric's ability by killing a creature with Psionic's ability, but none of your creatures can even survive using Psionic's ability!  Well, with a Sedge out they might regenerate or the +1/+1 could save them, but still-- Vampiric isn't good enough.  Let's see what else there is.
 
Mindlash Sliver?  Well, "each player discards a card" isn't too impressive unless you played out your hand and your opponent didn't, but then it is a Turn One play, and you did say you have a lot of trouble building up Sliver presence fast enough, so we might consider it.
 
Screeching Sliver?  That's more like it.  A 1/1 for one that provides an extra way to win if you feel the need.  I doubt this ability will be that much more useful than Mindlash's, but at least it brings your mana curve down.
 
Ghostflame Sliver?  Why on earth would you play that?  Because it's a 2/2 for two and you need some more efficient bodies to receive the cool abilities of your high-end Slivers.  Besides, turn two Ghostflame into turn three Sedge looks mighty fine, and it can keep random Pentarch Wards from ruining you.
 
Frenetic Sliver?  By now most of you are probably walking out on me, but hear me out.  Just because a card says "flip a coin", it's not automatically jank.  Frenetic Sliver is a respectable-sized body, its ability costs nothing to use, and it basically says, "Whenever a Sliver would die to combat damage, or a kill spell, or even a Damnation, maybe you get to just laugh in your opponent's face and get it back."  The Sliver deck's biggest weakness is that one wisely-aimed removal spell can leave your whole army suddenly bereft of an ability you needed for the win.  In the middle of combat, nothing hurts more than suddenly losing the influence of Sedge or Two-Headed and watching helplesly as your Slivers charge headlong to their doom.  With Frenetic on the field, you get a 50/50 shot of getting back any guy-- a much better proposition than the guaranteed doom you're used to.  And besides that, it makes the game so much more dramatic when every attempt to kill your guys comes down to luck.  Just remember to flip for Frenetic last-- when he leaves play, all your Slivers forget how to gamble for their survival.
 
Syncronous Sliver?  Well, this is on the high end of your mana curve, but it would be helpful if your guys could attack and still use their Psionic Suicide with damage on the stack-- and then maybe save themselves via Sedge or Frenetic. That's sort of asking for a lot to go right, though, but with Sliver decks, a lot usually does go right.
 
That pretty much covers the best and the brightest-- and I'm bracing myself for the flood of E-mails telling me which Slivers I forgot and why the ones I picked were awful-- so let's move on to your other spells.
 
Take out Lotus Bloom please.  It doesn't hit until Turn Four, and you have to sacrifice it to get mana.  It's basically a Dark Ritual that you can't play until turn four. It's only good if you're using it on that One Big Turn where you need a massive Storm payoff-- anywhere else, use something that stays in play, like Prismatic Lens.  I find myself recommending the Lens more and more often-- it's quite good.
 
Everything else is fine here except Perplex.  Counter target spell or discard your hand.  You used Perplex in your last deck, didn't you, Dusan old buddy?  You do realize that if your opponent has no cards in his hand, he can discard "all zero" of them so his spell doesn't get countered?  General consensus among all the pundits is that Perplex fails as a counter when there are other, more reliable options.  What Perplex does do is transmute.  In your deck, that means search for Sedge Sliver, Electrolyze, and maybe Frenetic Sliver if you decide to add it.  Those are your best cards, so I guess you could keep it in for that reason, but you did say "Mana Leak and Perplex are there to counter nasty spells."  Well, Dusan, Perplex does two things, and at each of those things it's not the best.  Which do you want, a tutor spell, or a counter spell?  If you want a counterspell, you'll have much better luck with Cancel, Controvert, Dismal Failure, Remand, or even Dash Hopes.  Dash Hopes isn't all that much more reliable than Perplex, but at least your opponent can't get to the point where he can choose to give up nothing.  While Perplex gets less useful the longer the game goes on, Dash Hopes gets more useful as the game progresses and players' life totals drop.  If you'd rather just have a tutoring spell, one more mana gets you Diabolic Tutor.  Or you could try Infernal Tutor for one less mana, but that may be a chase rare.  Diabolic's probably fine.
 
And that leaves your lands.  I'm impressed that you got your hands on 4 Gemstone Mine, but something in me wants to say Terramorphic Expanse.  I'm sure the Mine is fine, though.
 
And thus concludes another installment of BMoor's Deck Garage.  Y'know, it's hard to believe I've been doing this for-- how long now?  A year?  And I'm not about to stop now.  Thanks for sticking with me all this time, Dusan, and thanks to all my readers out there.
 
~BMoor


 

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