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Elvish Piper Deck
 

Jonas sent me this decklist for a post-May type 2...assuming that the spoilers are right and some of the following cards are making it into the basic set:
Thorn Elemental
Serra Angel
Elvish Piper
         He'd like the deck to be prepared for friday night magic, and if it does well, for other type 2 tournaments.  Its important that I give a disclaimer before this article:  I can't gaurantee that this deck will be incredibly competitive against the usual type 2 decks, being that its based on a very fragile set of "combos," so to speak, so, whle its a fun deck, and may have some good games, I make no promises for this deck's performance.  Here's what the deck originally looked like:
Creatures:
4x Birds of paradise
4x Llanowar Elves
4x Thorn Elemental
2x Rith, The Awakener
4x Serra Angel
4x Blastoderm
1x Tahngarth, Talruum Hero
1x Reya Dawnbringer
The Crew:
4x Elvish Piper
1x Captain Sisay

Spells:
4x Fires of Yavimaya
2x Saproling Burst
2x Rith's Charm
1x Belbe's Portal
2x Eladamri's Call

Lands:
7x Forests
3x Rith's Grove
3x Shivan Oasis
3x Elfhame Palace
4x City of Brass

         I see a couple things that I'd like to change about the deck to make it more powerful and effective.  There are a lot of things that I feel don't belong in this deck, so I'll try to get those out of here first.  The main culprits are Belbe's portal and rith's charm, as they either are too expensive for their ability, or just don't fit the needs of the deck.  What we're going to do is shape the deck around its main concept and cut the chaff, good as it might be.  We're also going to put some combos in the deck that are pretty neat.  The first is the obvious one:  captain sisay and elvish piper.  Then, we'll add aether rift, as that combos well with a lot of creatures, as your opponent will either be forced to pay a whopping 5 life, or have some fatties come dropping down on their head.  Captain sisay and eladamri's call are both good ways to fill your hand with those pesky "creature cards" to make aether rift a real pain.
         The other notable thing I want to do is cut the non-creature spells to a bare minimum.  That means that fires of yavimaya and saproling burst, while being superb cards in their own right, will fall by the wayside since they really don't help in giving you the advantage of higher quality creatures, especially ones that stick around.  We'll also add a neat card that has recently gained a lot of attention because of Invasion-Block-Constructed; overabundance.  Overabundance doubles your mana, and allows you to "hard cast" your creatures as early as turns 3 and 4.  So let's see what we have so far and where we have yet to go:
3 overabundance
4 aether rift
3 captain sisay-these guys'll probably die when they figure out what you're doing, so we need to have more of them
3 elvish piper
4 eladamri's call-this allows "3-ofs" for a lot of your creatures
4 birds of paradise
4 llanowar elves-these are fine, but utopia tree is better for what we want to do, as we add more of the dragons and more creatures that aren't necessarily green, red, or white.
         So now, with 29 cards taken care of, we need another 18 cards to finish up the deck.  We're going to add 3 more land to the deck than before so that overabundance is betterfor you than for them, or at the very least equally good.  The creatures in this deck are really rather arbitrary, but I'll try to trim the fat from...the rest.  Let's have our creatures look like this:
4 Thorn elemental
1 Reya, Dawnbringer
1 Tahngarth, Talruum Hero
1 Darigaaz, the igniter
1 Crosis, the purger
1 Dromar, the banisher
1 Treva, the renewer
1 Rith, the awakener
1 Nemata, grove guardian
1 Latulla, keldon overseer
1 Jolrael, empress of the beasts
1 Mageta, the lion
1 Tsabo Tavoc
2 Verdant Force-can't dis this guy, he's too good if he in fact does come back in 7th
         The creatures look like this for one reason:  Captain Sisay and eladamri's call.  We don't want two of any legend, because it pretty likely that we'll see them.  The only 5 non-legend creatures are game breakers in their own right, that can win you the game.  So now let's hit the land.  Lets change it to look like this:
4 Brushland
4 Karplusan Forest
4 City of Brass
2 Mountains
2 Plains
7 Forest
         The land just makes sense.  You can't play without green, and red and white are both pretty key in and of themselves, so you really need to support them.  Wiht birds of paradise and possibly utopia trees helping out, 10 white sources and 10 red sources along with 19 green sources assures that landscrew will be something that this deck will be unfamiliar with.  I don't know what your usual opponents are like, but I'll suggest some sideboard options.
CoP: White-rebels and counter rebels
CoP: green-fires and fires variants
Simoon-blue skies and fires
Boil-uh, blue?
Flashfires-rebels and maybe, maybe counter-rebels, doesn't hurt you with only 2 plains
Tangle-fires

Well, I think that's a pretty thorough all-around overhaul for this deck, I hope you have lots of fun ordering your dragons to eat all of your opponents alive.  See you in a Flash! 
-Wally West

 

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