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Featured
Writers Deck
Garage MTG Fan Articles Community
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The Heretic's Sermon
Marching Over Your Opponent
- A look at Green in the new Type II Environment
By John Hornberg
First thing is first - I
want to congratulate Fletcher Peatross on his
accomplishment. Good luck on your new position as
editor-in-chief of the site.
Also, I feel I should put
this into one of my articles instead of e-mailing it, so
here it is: I noticed that Fletcher said that he
may be the only thing still the same in the future at
pojo. Well, I'll correct that - I will still be at
Pojo, hell or high water.
I assure all my readers that
I'll still be here, even if I do leave and only write
the occasional article as a guest writer.
I also assure all the people
on the message board that I'll still be there, moderator
or not, and I'll always be helping as best I can.
Thank you.
Well, this has been a week
of ups and downs for me. I became a moderator on
the message board, which is good in my book, I don't
know about anyone else?
Of course, something had to
go wrong. Well, Friday in my fifth period
Newspaper class, some of the students found candy in the
teacher's closet. They were getting into it, and
the teacher, Ms. LaRocca, who had been running errands,
came back to find roughly eight students digging through
the candy.
She burst, through her
papers, and walked out. She gave an angry speech
before walking out, something to the extent that she
would never do that to us.
She came back roughly five
minutes later, made everyone write about what they were
doing, and what their consequences should be. Now
this was all fine and dandy, if there didn't happen to
be little, innocent me in the crowd, along with three
others. Two of us were out of the class finishing
up the collecting of request forms for the advice
column, and my friend Mike and I were back at the
computers working on articles. We get the wrath of
the teacher for doing nothing.
That seems unfair, but
through my philosophy it's not. In the Newspaper
class, we live and die as a team. Thus, we suffer
punishment as a group, and receive praise as a group,
and most of all, work as a group.
Well, that's my little
story. I just thought I'd share it with everyone,
because I truly needed to just talk about it.
Sorry for that. Well, I guess I have an article to
get on with.
When you take a good, hard
look into Odyssey, you find that green got an unfair
advantage at literally everything. It got perhaps
the three best Flashback cards in Roar of the Wurm,
Beast Attack, and Call of the Herd.
It got the best burst card
with Muscle Burst, especially with an addition to it
like Diligent Farmhand.
It got some of the best
threshold cards, with Werebear, Krosan Beast, and Nimble
Mongoose.
All of this doesn't go
without saying that they reprinted Overrun, which is
perhaps the single best game -ender in the entire game
of Magic: The Gathering.
What does this all mean:
Yep, stompy or some variant of it is probably on it's
way back.
The very idea that a mono-
green deck could dominate again is down right scary,
especially with what the style of the deck is capable
of.
It's capable of fast
creatures, fast damage, and an extremely fast death for
your opponent if they aren't able to match you blow for
blow.
You're starting point is
going to be your creatures, which is extremely obvious.
The one major stipulation to stompy is that it has to be
fast, and it has to be furious. Which means that
you never, ever want to miss a first turn drop.
Thus, you want to load your deck with one drops - with
everything from Birds to Squirrels.
Birds are really good, as
are Llanowar Elves, because they are mana acceleration.
I know, this is an extremely obvious statement, and it
is kind of stupid in that obvious way, but it
needs to be said. You definite don't with mana
sources are things that cost two and are 1/1's or 0/1's.
Thus, Quiron Elves don't
belong in this deck, and neither does Millikin unless
you have an overwhelming amount of threshold.
Another good one drop is
Chatter of the Squirrel. This card has turned out
to be surprisingly good, even though it only produces
1/1's. Why? because it produces a first turn
creature, and it's flashback is extremely fair, coming
back on the second turn for another 1/1.
It's a decent deal, because
it gives you an early creature advantage. The
problem is that it can tie up early mana crucial to
making the deck work the way it's suppose to.
One of the cornerstones of
this deck that Odyssey provides is Wild Mongrel, a 2/2
green common for 1G, which has an ability to chuck cards
for +1/+1 and to change color.
If that is not one of the
most broken commons ever, then I do not know what is.
It will enable you to
utilize flashback a lot easier, and a lot faster.
One perfect example of this is with Roar of the Wurm.
Played out of your hand, it takes a cumbersome seven
mana, but with it's flashback, it comes out for four.
Another perk to Wild
Mongrel, is that it would be extremely hard for it to be
killed by cards that are like Dark Banishing and
Annihilate (Destroy target non black creature), and
small time burn, like Firebolt, Shock, and Strafe,
because of his ability. You discard a card and
change his color to get past Dark Banishing type cards,
and you merely keep going to overcome burn.
One of the key things that
he does that he'll do is put all those broken green
flashback spells in the graveyard. The key example
to this is Roar of the Wurm, which is a cumbersome 6G to
play, but flashes back for only 3G.
That makes for a possible
6/6 on the third or fourth turn. Flashing it back
also enables you to bypass counterspells such as good ol'
Counterspell, Absorb, Undermine, and the evil Syncopate.
Last I checked, there weren't many things in Type II
that could handle a 6/6 that early. Aside from
Terminate, if you know of any spells or creatures that
can take it out that early in the game, please do point
it out, because I'm at a loss for what could.
Also, Wrath doesn't count.
Every creature bows to Wrath.
Okay, back to the article!
Among all the cards in the
set, a new age stompy deck would probably abuse Overrun
the most. Overrun provides the deck with a key win
condition, and the ability to change the tides on a game
that could be otherwise out of reach. It works as
a sort of removal, especially for the new format with
all the creatures in it, because to take fifteen damage
from three or four creatures is downright suicide.
They have to block, and
blocking gets rid of creatures.
In the time that I've played
it, I've either won, or come so close to it, that all it
took was one more turn.
Now, when building the deck,
you should take into considerations all of the above
suggestions. A few things to remember is that you
should run a little less land than normal, probably
around 18 to 20 or so, because you'll be running four to
eight one drop mana sources, which are in the form of
Llanowar Elves and/or Birds of Paradise.
Growth spells, such as
Explosive Growth, Wax/Wane, or even Giant Growth, should
at least be on your considerations list. Muscle
Burst should most likely be in the deck, just because it
is that broken. I talk from experience, because
that card is killer late game, as it is early on in the
game, plus it's not a big deal if you loose it because
of it's ability, which is similar to Accumulated
Knowledge and Kindle.
Another key suggestion is to
not focus the deck on any one thing, such as threshold.
This is so because if you do that, you become susceptible
to things that are against you're goal, Cremate, and the
other Rapid Decay variants in Odyssey. So, while
I'm not saying that you shouldn't have threshold cards,
I am saying that you should keep them on their toes.
Don't make you're goals obvious.
This is something that
happens a lot when a new set comes out, especially with
the beginners. I've noticed that they try to build
a deck that has an easy theme, such as abusing
threshold, and then they take it to a tournament, a big
one like a local convention, and get destroyed.
Then they wonder what went wrong.
One key weakness to this
deck is not what it's poor up against, but what it's
missing from its original version. It got Overrun
back, which is good. Still, it failed to get a 3/3
for 1G or GG, like Albino Troll. It also failed to
get a cheap, effective, and downright evil creature
enchantment like Rancor. This means that the lack
of Trample in many of the creatures could be a problem
if the draw goes against you, because usually, Rancor
turned a normally passive elf into a rude 3/1 trample.
A modern, Type II version would lack that.
Also, the lack of a card
like Worldly Tutor makes it incredibly tough to get the
right creature at the right time, or get a creature with
offensive power at all.
Again, a lack of great mana
producers like Priest of Titania and Gaea's Cradle makes
mana acceleration a little slower than normal, but still
potent.
As you can see, the deck
lost a lost in the utility part, but in the end does
have some key tricks up it's sleeve. Splashing
blue for Fact or Fiction, Think Tank, and the
possibility of Gaea's Skyfolk. It also allows you
to play crucial blue sideboard that is essential for
this format - Syncopate.
Syncopate has the potential
to ruin a players strategy for those trying to reach
threshold. It can also be damning to the player
with that crucial flashback spell, namely Call of the
Herd or Roar of the Wurm when they play it out of their
hand.
This deck should not have a
major problem with counter decks if you hit early and
hard. A Force Spike could absolutely destroy any
momentum that you could generate in the first three
turns, and as a game progresses, blue decks get more and
more of an advantage on you.
The potential for Sligh
making a major comeback in Type II could mean this
deck's unfortunate downfall. Sligh has enough burn
to throw around to kill your speed, while it also has
enough creatures to create speed for itself.
Creatures like Skizzik are
going to run right through you're multitudes of
creatures because it has trample.
Aside from that, there's the
obvious threats: Lobotomy, Traumatize, Millstone decks,
etc. etc. We all know what these decks are capable
of. The new
blue/black deck will probably run all of these, as well
as a lot more mean mean things (Shadowmage Infiltrator,
Psychatog, Recoil, and all of the aforementioned cards.)
Well, to put everything in a
nut shell, this deck is going to be extremely creature
based, using cards like Wild Mongrel and Chatter of the
Squirrel to hit early on, and to put your opponent into
an early hole. Overrun provides you with a late
game win condition, and a way to possibly dig your self
out of a hole.
The lack of a two drop that
is like Albino Troll hurts the deck, as does the absence
of a effective enchantment like Rancor, and a search
card like Worldly Tutor. Mana is slightly slower
without Gaea's Cradle or Priest of Titania. What
it does gain is a cheap, no draw back, 6/6 in Roar of
the Wurm, and a decent replacement for Blastoderm in
Beast Attack.
Sligh is the only deck that
could oppose this deck on a regular basis, at least at
the current moment. This does not go without
saying that any other deck could give this deck a run
for it's money at any given point.
Well, I guess that raps it
up. It's 9:45 PM on a Sunday night, and I still
have Pre-Calculus that I need to do, so I'll leave you
here.
Signed,
John "The Happy
Heretic" Hornberg
If you wish to reach me, I
have gained another e-mail. I can be reached at
either promiseland85@hotmail.com
, or preachy_moderator@hotmail.com
. If I'm slow to respond, or don't respond at all,
don't feel bad. I've just got a lot of work to do
with the paper and all my homework.
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