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BMoor's Magic The Gathering Deck Garage
Child of Alara Contest Winner
July 20, 20
09

Welcome to Part One of Six, of the Five Colors, Six Choices Contest conclusion! Entries are closed, and it’s time to declare the winners! Alphabetically is as good an order as any to do this, and so today we’ll be looking at the entries for Child of Alara.
 

This will also establish the format I’ll use for the other five articles. First, I’ll present each entry along with its author’s commentary. Next, I’ll measure them up against each other using some common criteria—the same ones I’ll use for all the submissions. A winner will emerge and be applauded, and losers will be thanked for participating.
 

Then finally, in the spirit of “I’m not asking you to do anything I wouldn’t do myself”, I’ll build a sample deck of my own that uses the card in question.
 

Let’s get started! Our first entry comes from someone who didn’t give a name, but Yahoo! Identifies as “James”.

 

Hey BMoor, I've never actually built a deck myself, but hearing your renewed call for submissions based on the five-color cards from Conflux I decided to throw in my lot. I always read your articles for free so I figure this is the least I can do. Here is my Child of Alara deck.

LAND x23

Reflecting Pool x4
Rupture Spire   x3

Jungle Shrine   x3
Seaside Citadel x3
Savage Lands    x3
Arcane Sanctum x2
Crumbling
Necropolis x2
Miren, the Moaning Well x1
Volrath's Stronghold x2

CREATURES x22

Child of Alara     x4
Saffi Eriksdotter  x4
Kitchen Finks     x4
Loxodon Heirarch  x4
Dauntless Escort   x4
Ghost Council of Orzhova  x2

Non-Creature Spells x15

Engineered Explosives    x3
Darigaaz's Charm           x3
Naya Charm                  x3
Altar of Dementia            x3
Helm of Kaldra               x2
Jund Charm                    x1

So basically I'm just trying to wipe their board constantly with Child while keeping my
big hitters around. I have explosives, altar, and Miren to send Child to the yard with a bunch of ways to bring Child back and keep my other dudes on the field. Not sure about the mana, but the idea seems fun. Thank you for the opportunity to brew this deck.

 

Our second entry has neither a name nor a Yahoo! Tag (I wish you folks would identify yourselves!), so we’ll call him T.J.K, derived from his E-mail address.

 

I was bored today, so I put together this deck. It's an effort at breaking the symmetry of the Child of Alara. The idea is that, between Cauldron of Souls and Heartmender, you will be able to shrug off the destruction of the Child with little or no penalty. Admittedly, the Cauldron itself gets destroyed by the Child, but if you're returning the Child of Alara you shouldn't need much more help. Knight of New Alara turns the Child into an 11/11 trampler, which can win all by itself, and Meddling Mage is an early drop that can shut down combos. After that, I just added the best kill spells I could think of: Pernicious Deed and Maelstrom Pulse. I though of the Overbeing for card draw, and Wargate to find an important spell, but I'm not sure how well either would actually play.


Lands:
4x Temple Garden
4x City of Brass

4x Reflecting Pool
4x Godless Shrine
2x Hallowed Fountain
2x Forbidden Orchard
2x Breeding Pool
2z Steam Vents

24 lands total

Main Deck:
4x Child of Alara
3x Captain Sisay
4x Heartmender
3x Knight of New Alara
3x Cauldron of Souls
4x Wargate
4x Pernicious Deed
4x Meddling Mage
4x Maelstrom Pulse
3x Overbeing of Myth

36 non-land cards

I also put together a sideboard, though with no play-testing I'm not sure how it will all work

4x Hunting Grounds
4x Wiltleaf Liege
4x Bant Charm
3x Vindicate


I get the feeling this deck will be much stronger in multi-player, where it has more time, but the sheer cost of all these cards makes it highly unlikely I'll ever play it.

P.S. Do I get bonus points for making a deck exclusively of rares?

 

And finally, we have Jason’s entry.

 

Without further ado, the deck i came up with.

 

Alara's Playpen

 

Land x25

4x Rupture Spire

3x Seaside Citadel

1x Arcane Sanctum

3x Jungle Shrine

1x Crumbling Necropolis

1x Savage Lands

3x Forest

3x Swamp

2x Plains

2x Mountains

2x Island

 

Creatures x16

4x Vedalken Heretic 

4x Dauntless Escort 

4x Scarland Thrinax  

4x Child of Alara 

 

Other Spells x19

4x Trace of Abundance

3x Exploding Borders  

4x Behemoth Sledge

4x Reborn Hope 

4x Soul Manipulation  
 

This deck, in case you couldn't tell from the subject line and the blunt allusion to children in the title, not to mention in the deck list, is about Child of Alara. The goal here is simple. beat face with the Child. stick him/her/it with a Behemoth Sledge and go to town. Vedalken Heretic is just there to draw cards. Dauntless Escort is there to protect the rest of my creatures from destruction (WoG, Volcanic Fallout, Child of Alara...) including my own Child of Alara. See the board wipe combo? 


Child + Scarland Thrinax + Dauntless Escort = all nonland permanents except my creatures die.

And i can use reborn hope/soul manipulation to do it again, not to mention Reborn Hope can grab back my Exploding Borders/Trace of Abundance for more mana fixing. Soul Manipulation stops nasty creatures such as Progenitis from coming in uninvited. So, 6/6 trampler carying behemoth sledge + repeatable board sweep combo should do nicely for kitchen table. For duels, it functions much like a mana ramp deck. You use Trace of Abundance + Exploding Borders to ensure you can drop your 6/6 WoG on legs on turn 4 or 5, swing, pop it with a Thrinax, follow up with a heretic or two and a couple sledges to stabilize/get ahead, then start the Escort/Thrinax/Child combo, swinging all the way.

 

Okay, so there are our contenders. Let’s get to the criteria.

 

1: How does each deck win?
 

Oddly enough, all three decks submitted seem to focus more on sacrificing the Child then on attacking with it, which just gives me Children of Korlis flashbacks about “child sacrifice” jokes. Is there a correlation between Magic: the Gathering and infanticide? The same people who pushed the Demon type out of Magic for six years would like to think so. But let’s move on.

 James’s deck seems to be a w/g midrange decks that uses Kitchen Finks, Hierarch, and Escort to hold the line until the Child makes its appearance, then sacrifice it to Ghost Council, Miren, or what-have-you to wipe the board while keeping his own board relatively intact via Saffi, Escort, or persisting Finks. The major selling point over the other two here is that James appears to have kept his mana base down to focusing mainly on white and green, so that he can cast the majority of his spells more easily.
 

T.J.K takes a more comboish route, using Captain Sisay or Wargate to assemble his combo of Child, Cauldron of Souls, and Heartmender in order to pull off a one-sided Planar Cleansing, after which he proceeds with Child beats augmented by Knight of New Alara. The best thing about his deck seems to be his inclusion of ways to search his library for combo pieces.

Finally, Jason’s deck is geared around sacrificing the Child to Scarland Thrinax, then popping an Escort to protect the rest of the team while wiping out the opponent’s board. At which point, Reborn Hope or Soul Manipulation will return the Child to his hand to be replayed.

 

2: What flaws does each idea present?
 

The biggest problem that strikes me with James’s deck is that he seems to want to use Loxodon Hierarch to regenerate his team from a Child tantrum, but the Child specifies “they can’t be regenerated”. I also don’t get why he would use the Helm of Kaldra when Shield of Kaldra seems to make so much more sense.
 

T.J.K. is relying so heavily on Ravnica’s shocklands and City of Brass to play out his technicolor spell base that I’m afraid he might take so much damage from his own lands, a fast opponent could kill him before he ever gets anything rolling.


And Jason has set up a three-creature combo such that, when two of the creatures are sacrificed, the opponent’s board is erased and all his creatures live. But what creatures? At least one Dauntless Escort and the Child of Alara had to die to make the combo work. There’s a 3/3 Scarland Thrinax left, and possibly another Escort, Thrinax, or Vedalken Heretic. But the Heretic is a pretty weak card any time other than when all your opponent’s creatures are dead, and the Thrinax only excels when you’ve got a lot of disposable creatures.

 

3: You never draw Child of Alara. Now what?
 

James would be fine, he could just play like a typical W/G deck. In fact, you could almost argue that his deck would run better if he were playing Wilt-Leaf Liege instead of the Child. But then you never get the one-sided board wipe, so I won’t quite hold it against him.

T.J.K. has way too many ways to tutor for a Child to ever worry about this. But worst case scenario, he has Heartmender to chump block forever, Cauldron of Souls to keep his army alive, and Overbeing of Myth beats.


Jason’s deck absolutely falls apart unless he manages to get a Behemoth Sledge live, and even then it’ll be an uphill race.

 

Well, Jason’s deck just feels like it doesn’t have enough teeth to it. He seems so focused on ways to protect his team from the Child’s board wipe and return the Child from the graveyard, that he hasn’t really included anything worth protecting.


T.J.K. is onto something with the Heartmender/Cauldron combo, but that really doesn’t need the Child to work. And despite his high valuing of extra card draw and tutoring—very valuable things in a combo deck—his deck feels like it has too many agendas. It wants to cast Captain Sisay, then Wargate for a Cauldron of Souls, and still be able to fit in Pernicious Deed and/or Maelstrom Pulse.


James feels like he’s using the Child to augment a midrange beatdown strategy. While I can’t say I’d’ve gone with the Helm of Kaldra or the Altar of Demetia, I do approve of both Ghost Council of Orzhova and Miren, the Moaning Well. So I’m going to declare James the winner of this division. Congratulations, James! Send me your address, and I’ll have your promo card prizes in the mail!

 

Now, for my turn. I mentioned earlier that I was surprised that everyone was so focused on cheating the “destroy all” effect. Think about it—people have been playing Wrath of God since it was printed in Alpha. They never felt the need to try and pull off a combo to protect their own cards so that the Wrath only hits the opponent. They just learn to play around it. Don’t play as many creatures. Bait out your opponent. Well, why not use the Child the same way?

 

4 Blightning

4 Countersquall

4 Soul Manipulation

3 Bituminous Blast

3 Deny Reality

3 Terminate

2 Double Negative

4 Child of Alara

3 Sedraxis Specter

4 Grixis Charm

4 Kaleidostone

4 Teramorphic Expanse

4 Crumbling Necropolis

1 Forest

1 Plains

4 Swamp

4 Island

4 Mountain

 

This is essentially a Grixis control deck that uses Child of Alara as a finisher/board reset. Use your disruption to stagger your opponent until you can stick a Child, which your opponent won’t want to kill because it’ll completely erase what he’s got, while you’ve got nothing at risk beyond Sedraxis Specters. And they have Unearth, so you don’t care anyway.

Five colors, six cards, and one division down. Next time: Conflux!

 

~BMoor


 

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