Most of you are probably wondering why the winner of the Stuffy Contest hasn't been announced yet.  Well, the answer to that is simply that running a contest like this isn't as easy as I had anticipated.  I'll be sure to shore up the difficulties when next I have a contest-- and yes, I intend to have more than one before I'm through-- but in the meantime, I'm swamped with work.  No worries though-- the prize is more or less procured, I have the entries all before me, and a winner will be declared.  My intention is to produce a series of articles concerning the contest a la American Idol-- a "first round" in which obvious nonwinners are weeded out, followed by a series of decklists of increasing merit, counting down to Number One.  However, I would never be so cruel as to parade a decklist before you and denounce it as unworthy of winning.  And yet, that does seem wildly successful in the world of television, and if this contest is to be viable enough for me to hold others in the future, I have to at least be able to milk a few articles out of it, right?  So here's what I intend to do.  This contest was, at its core, an attempt to get people's most creative ideas out of them, right?  And the criteria of the contest was that the deck had to be fairly original and win through a Stuffy Doll-based combo, right?  Well, be that as it may, it was inevitable that some ideas would get submitted by multiple people working independently.  As I sorted through, it occurred to me that some of those decks were actually quite clever, and yet through no fault of their own were in the lamentable position of using a far-too-common Stuffy Doll combo.  These decks, then, will be the focus of this preliminary articles.  It's the best of both worlds-- I get to weed out decks that are most obviously nonwinners, you get to see a cavalcade of decklists that didn't make it, and the submitters of these decks can know that, even though they didn't win this time, their entry was good enough to make me say, "Wow."

 

Without further to do, let's get into it.  First, I feel the need to explain what exactly constitutes an "original" idea-- or more importantly, what makes a submission "unoriginal".  As I said, it was inevitable that some ideas would occur to multiple people.  There's over 8000 cards out there, but most people (understandingly) stuck with more recent cards, because you just have more experience with cards that were released during the time you were playing.  So, it would be unfair of me to disqualify two entries just because they had the same idea.  But if ten people all submit the same idea, then it surely isn't original, right?  So where's the cutoff point?  Well, early on I decided that it would largely be dependant on the number of entries received.  If I got 10,000 entries, then there'd hardly be enough cards to go around for one person to think of something nobody else had.  And I don't exactly have hard data on how many readers I get, so I wasn't sure what to expect when I opened the call to this challenge, so I decided on the following rule:

 

A Stuffy Doll combo is "unoriginal" if more than 10% of the entries are designed specifically to use that card in conjunction with Stuffy Doll to win.  All decks containing that card, and relying on it as their main win condition second only to Stuffy Doll, will be disqualified.

 

It may sound tough, but there can be only one winner.  And as it turned out, disqualifying the people who fell short often turned out to be tough.  Some of them were really good, as you'll see.

 

Now, this contest had four rules.  1) The deck had to use Stuffy Doll as its primary win condition.  2) It couldn't use Mountains or nonhybrid red cards.  3) It had to be "original" (as we defined it above).  And 4) It has to look like it can win fairly easily, taking into account how long it will take to get your combo set up.  Nobody violated rule #2, and rule #4 was relative, so only rules #1 and #3 led to DQ's.  In particular there were three cards that kept coming up over and over-- Guilty Conscience, Pariah's Shield, and Tendrils of Corruption.

 

Disqualified: Guilty Conscience

 

I had to double-check to make sure this infinite combo wouldn't just end the game in a draw.  Sure enough, playing Guilty Conscience on a Stuffy Doll will indeed win you the game through an unbounded series of triggered abilities.  And so, as one deckbuilder so eloquently put it, "there's no way to justify an effective Stuffy Doll deck in white without it."  That could be the reason I received seven decks designed simply to put Guilty Conscience on Stuffy Doll, out of thrity-five entries.  Remember, I'm using a cutoff point of 10% of teh entries, which would be 3.5 in this case.  That means 3 entries sharing an idea is okay, but four or more isn't.  So seven is just not acceptable-- my apologies to those of you who worked hard on your Guilty Doll decks, but I have to think a combo so frighteningly potent would set off a warning sign in some people's heads saying, "Hey, a lot of other people are probably going to think of this."  But then, most people don't generally care if someone else had their idea too-- they just want a powerful deck.  And Guilty Conscience did lead to some powerful decks.  Like this one, submitted by Stan Crank:

 

     Hey, this is a mainly blue deck with white and black splashed for the 2nd part of our combo as well as insane acceleration and card advantage.

 

Dark Doll Combo

 

Stuffy Doll x 4

Ornithopter x 4

Phyrexian Walker x1

Shield Sphere x 2

 

Dark Ritual x 4

Cabal Ritual x 4

Chromatic Sphere x 4

Darkwater egg x 4

Skycloud egg x4

Guilty Conscience x 4

Demonic Tutor x 1

Vampiric Tutor x 1

Culling the Weak x 2

Brainstorm x 4

Tinker x 1

Fabricate x 1

Lotus Petal x 1

 

Underground River x 1

Watery Grave x 4

Godless Shrine x 3

Swamp x 1

Island x 1

Hall of the Bandit Lord x 4

 

The deck usually goes off turn 2-3 sometimes on the first (assuming hall of the bandit lord is used to play stuffy) It is a blazing fast combo deck that utilizes black's many ways of acquiring massive amounts of mana then converting it into the desired colors with the eggs and spheres, with the newly gained mana the deck will either drop the doll and win with the Guilty Conscience or drop the Doll and pass for a turn two win. Lotus petal is the card that allows first turn wins, next to the Hall, Because we can utilize its power to chain rituals and then use the Hall on the doll giving it haste, dropping our aura on him is a delicious unpowered, no red, first turn stuffy doll win. This deck could be upgraded with some of the no-brainers like force of will, original duals, mana vault/crypt but i decided to keep the deck semi budget. Anyone can build this powerful deck for an affordable price (despite the vampiric tutor which can become mana vault, or enlightened tutor)

 

Thanks, and I hope you like my deck!

 

Holy Vintage, Batman!  I don't know which disturbs me more-- the thought of dropping by my local card shop for a few games and finding myself on the wrong end of this killing machine, or the fact that he referred to it as "semi-budget".  I assume by that, he meant he left out the Black Lotus.

 

Not that any of that is a problem, mind you.  I made no specifications as to format or budget, so a brutally efficient first-turn killer deck could easily win the contest IF it uses an original idea.  Guilty Conscience is the only thing standing in Mr. Crank's way as far as this contest is concerned, but that sure won't stop him from using this deck to make legions of small children cry, should he so choose.

 

Most of the Guilty Conscience decks weren't quite so focused on a fast kill, but they were all very powerful.  If any of them had been submitted as a normal deck garage request, I doubt I could've improved any of them.

 

Disqualified: Pariah and his Shield

 

For the purposes of this contest, I counted Pariah and Pariah's Shield as the same card.  The only differences between the two is that Equipment can be switched between creatures, and Auras die if the creature they're on dies.  Stuffy Doll is indestructible, and nobody included any creature that would've worn a Pariah's Shield well if Stuffy Doll couldn't, so these two cards were essentially interchangeable.

 

Here, though, a problem presented itself.  Like Guilty Conscience, Pariah makes a very formidable combo with Stuffy Doll.  Unlike Guilty Conscience, this combo won't win you the game-- it will only protect you.  Therefore, a lot of people were adding a few copies of Pariah's Shield to decks that were built around other combos.  So what's a contest judge to do?  In some cases it was pretty obvious that they had just stuck in a copy as a "just in case" feature, but others seemed dedicated to getting the Aura or Equipment on Stuffy Doll, and then usually playing Psionic Blast targeting Stuffy Doll.  However, there were some corner cases.  I think my favorite of all the Pariah/Shield decks was this one, sent in by Ross Makulec:

 

Alright, so the most obvious combo with stuffy doll which is not in red

is guilty conscience. But how original is that? White has so much more to

offer. The en-kor creatures with their redirectability have been used

quite a bit as well, and I must say that I am partial to this ploy. Having

all your creatures immune to damage is always a good thing, but even better

is to be immune to damage yourself. That's where pariah (or I suppose

Pariah's shield) comes in. Fairly defensive, but hard to deal with nonetheless.

This is all well and good, and has all been done before, but the aspect of

my deck that I have yet to see is coalition flag. On stuffy doll coalition

flag is, while amusing, also amazing. Everybody has had a match against

flagbearers that becomes incredibly frustrating as many of your spells

don't seem to work. In multiplayer it's even more powerful. But making

stuffy doll a flagbearer is even better than normal. Indestructibilty,

of course, means that he'll stay around for a while. But, you may ask,

what about the enchantment? Well, disenchant won't kill it...because guess

what, it has to target stuffy. Unless someone is playing spells that only

target enchantments that stuffy is going to carry his flag for quite a while.

So now I present...

 

 

Stuffy: Doll Flagbearer

 

Creatures:

4 Stuffy Doll

4 Warrior en-Kor

4 Shaman en-kor

4 Outrider en-Kor

4 Nomads en-kor

 

Other:

4 Coalition Flag

4 Pariah

4 Enlightened Tutor

3 Argivian Find

4 Mishra's Bauble

 

21 Plains

 

Enlightened tutor searches for both stuffy himself and either pariah or coalition flag. Argivian find returns any of these cards (or even mishra's bauble) from the graveyard. The en-Kor are hard to kill with stuffy doll, and mishra's bauble gets you through your deck faster. All in all, a

force (or shall I see a doll) to be reckoned with.

 

The worst part is that Ross also had one of the most original ideas in the whole contest in Coalition Flag.  I especially like how Stuffy Doll makes the Flag immune to Disenchant-effects, as well as protects all your creatures and enchantments from respective targeted destruction.  But if I made an exception for him, I'd have to do it for everyone, and we have to narrow it down to one winner somehow.  Sorry, Ross.

 

Disqualified: Tendrils of Corruption

 

This one really hurts-- because it was at the core of the "Twenty-Course Meal" deck I myself built as the black demonstration deck.  Great minds think alike, I guess.  What's worse is that practically every deck that had Tendrils of Corruption in it also had either Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth or Feast of Flesh.  I like Feast of Flesh, and I do recommend it a lot, so maybe I've been influencing you all.  It was fitting, however, that my favorite out of the Tendrils decks used neither of these cards, but did use a single Pariah's Shield.  This is a prime example of the kind of deck that would not get disqualified for using a Shield, if only it didn't get disqualified for using Tendrils:

 

Creatures: 4

[4]  Stuffy Doll

 

Artifacts: 10

[4]  Plague Boiler

[3]  Dimir Signet

[1]  Bloodletter Quill

[1]  Pariah's Shield

 

Sorceries and Instants: 22

[4]  Douse in Gloom

[4]  Ribbons of Night

[4]  Seize the Soul

[4]  Tendrils of Corruption

[3]  Moonlight Bargain

[3]  Pongify

[1]  Grim Harvest

 

Lands: 24

[16] Swamps

[4]  Overgrown Tomb

[4]  Watery Grave

 

Drain spells: Drain your own Stuffy Doll for damage and some life.

 

Bloodletter Quill and Moonlight Bargain: convert gained life into cards, which will aid in more life gain and damage.

 

Pongify: Instant speed 3/3 creatures for 1 mana seems pretty good.

 

Grim Harvest: Sudden Death kills Stuffy Doll, so I need a way to bring them back. With its Recover, only 1 copy is needed.

 

Plague Boiler: Field reset. It kills my Dimir Signets but its worth it as I'm probably going to die if I didn't reset the field.

 

I especially like how well Michael took to the "indestructible" aspect of Stuffy, with Plague Boiler and Pongify.  Plague Boiler makes a good way to take care of anything problematic short of an opposing Stuffy Doll, and Pongify works well as either creature removal or a 3/3 with Flash for one mana.

 

Those three cards were the only ones that showed up enough to earn a DQ-- the next most common combo, Squall Line, only appeared in 3 decks-- less than the 3.5 cutoff point.  However, three other decks were disqualified, for not using Stuffy Doll to win.  I'll admit that "Twenty-Course Meal" wasn't the epitome of innovation, but I built it because I felt it important to bring up the difference between hitting Stuffy with a Tendrils of Corruption and with a Consume Spirit.  Tendrils can only target a creature.  It can't win you the game without Stuffy Doll, it makes a good Stuffy Doll combo.  Consume Spirit, however, can easily target a player and Stuffy Doll therefore becomes a useless extremity, or at best a sideboard card against Circles of Protection.  Therefore any damage dealing ability should be creature-centric in a Stuffy Doll deck-- as Sunlance and Lightning Axe demonstrate, creature-centric burn is often the most powerful.

 

Heres the decklist of a deck i came up with using some of these crazy combos i already use with my stuffy doll deck.

 

4 Urza's incubator

4 Dross Scorpion 

4 Blasting station

4 Myr retriever

4 Rite of passage

4 Triskelion

4 Stuffy Doll

4 Pentavus

4 Triskelavus

4 search for tomorrow

20 forests

 

theres a few ways u can win with infinite damage in my deck

 

1. Bring out the urzas incubator then call myr for the creature type reducing its total cost down to 0 Then make sure you have blasting station out and have 2 myr retrievers either one in your hand and one on the field or both in your hand and also on the field should be stuffy doll of course. Then play out ur 1st retriever then sacrifice it with blasting station to deal a damage to stuffy  then play your second retriever to get the 1st back and repeat the process until you feel that your job is done. This way can be pulled off as easily as turn 5.
 

2. Have stuffy doll out with 2 rites of passage and triskelion/triskelavus. Remove one counter from triskelion to damage it self so it gets 2 more +1/+1 counters  then you can repeat this till you get him to a 500/500 if u feel like it  then remove all those counters and deal the damage to stuffy doll. Then with triskelavus u remove the counter to make a creature then sacrifice it to to the same as its brother id like to call it lol.

 

And the pentavus is in there just for fun and the search is to get my higher cost cards out faster and also thin the deck so i can get my stuffy or whatever i would need faster.

 

This deck looks like a lot of fun (I actually enjoyed Mirrodin block despite the degenerate combos it spawned) but had three strikes against it.  One, Triskelion and lasting Station deal damage to creatures and players.  Why bother playing Stuffy Doll in this deck?  It seems like you could pull it out for Spellbombs and this deck would work more efficiently.  That's not what it means to be a Stuffy Doll deck.  Two, infinite combos involving a pair of Myr Servitor have been done to death.  Any player who played during Mirrodin block knows that Myr Servitor needs to be removed from the game post-haste before its controller gets an opportunity to sacrifice it, because they've all seen it go down countless times.  And that's just not original.  And three, this deck uses Rite of Passage.  That in and of itself is a good thing, because every time Stuffy pings itself, it gets a +1/+1 counter.  I'm counting this as a strike because the deckbuilder here made no mention of this.  A Stuffy Doll/Rite of Passage deck would've been horrorshow original and probably a lot of fun, and this poor soul got so close to deckbuilding gold and just walked away from it.

 

Here's a different variation on a similar mistake:

 

Hey! I'm Seamus from sweet home Alabama. I have just completed my Stuffy deck a few days before your article came out. originally the deck is red and white but that is against the rules so i guess i'll write the other deck that i thought would be fun with stuffy doll. before i lose track of where i am, i might as well list the deck.

 

Ceatures

4x llanowar elves

4x fyndhorn elves

4x wall of roots

4x Stuffy doll

 

Other spells

4x drain life

4x channel

4x dark rituals

4x sudden death

4x terror

2x krosan grip (for the pesky enchantments like worship)

 

Lands

2x overgrown tomb

10x swamps

10x forests

 

 

Hopefully it doesnt matter what sets i used to make this deck, but i thought that this would be a fresh new way to see how versatile Stuffy really is.

 

This deck seems to be using Stuffy and Wall of Roots to stall until he draws enough Elves, Dark Rituals, and a Channel, at which point je will unleash a lethal Drain Life.  I'm not sure if Stuffy's role here is as an impenetrable blocker or as the lightningrod for the Drain Life.  But if I can't tell what the flagship card is being used for, that's a problem right there.
 

This deck gets shown the door for not really needing Stuffy Doll, as well as for not actually working--Drain Life specifies, "Spend only black mana on X", while Channel provides colorless mana and all his Elves and Walls provide green mana.  Unless I seriously misunderstood something, this deck is built around a combo that doesn't even work.

 

By contrast, here's a combo that does work, but has... other problems.

 

Hi Bmoor

 

            When i saw your contest i knew i had to take on the challenge. I decided to use the infamous stasis deck for the base of the deck:

 

20 islands

 

Creatures

4 Stuffy doll

 

artifacts

4 Isochron scepter

4 Chrome mox

2 Howling mine

 

bounce/counter

4 Boomerang

4 Force of will

4 Counterspell

4 Chain of vapor

 

draw

4 Impulse

4 Brainstorm

 

awesomeness

4 Stasis

 

The reason that isochron scepter is in the deck is so that you can imprint chain of vapor or boomerang and bounce stasis back to your had so you can untap. The other cards are really just keep everything else off the board.

 

Thanks,

Evan

 

Evan here is using Stuffy Doll in what he calls, "the infamous stasis deck".  I'm not sure what "the infamous stasis deck" is, actually.  I started playing a good bit after Stasis was out of print, but I did play against a Stasis deck once.  It used Chronatog to skip all its turns, thus dooming the opponent to turn after turn of not being able to do anything, and eventually drawing its entire deck.  This deck doesn't do that; it uses Isocron Scepter and Boomerang to constantly return Stasis to its hand, thus locking everyone else out of untapping while still untapping itself.
 

Sp where does Stuffy Doll come in?  Stuffy Doll is the win condition.  Every lockdown/control deck needs a card that can actually win the game-- what card it is hardly matters.  That's the problem here-- this deck isn't built around Stuffy, it's built around the Stasis combo.  Evan even admits that Stasis, not Stuffy Doll, is the "awesomeness" of the deck.  You could stick Air Elemental in this deck and it would work exactly the same.  It would work better in fact, because then you could kill the helpless opponent in 5 turns instead of dragging it out for 20.  That's not fun for anybody.  I doubt Stuffy Doll would ever even kill anyone in this deck-- most people will see how the combo works and just concede, regardless of whether or not you've even played the Doll yet.  In fact, you coukd take the Doll out completely with no win condition whatsoever, and you'd still probably win a lot with this deck simply due to people conceding.  You might even deck out some people.  And I guarantee they'd hate you for it.

 

So, that covers this preliminary look into the Stuffy Contest entries.  For as long as it took, that was the easy part-- now I have to choose one winner from the remaining contestants.  I promise, though, that the rest of the Stuffy articles won't take so long to write. ;)

 

Good luck!

 

~BMoor