12.11.01  Hi, everyone. Hope you liked the last article on White Weenie. This time I’m again going to try something different. Since Pro Tour New Orleans impeded my review of the effect of Odyssey on Extended, I’m going to go ahead and do an analysis of one the T8 decks from New Orleans. The first deck that jumped out at me (besides Benzo, which we’ll save for a later day) was Operation Dumbo Drop by Tomi Walamies. Here is the list:

3 Adarkar Wastes
3 Flood Plain
1 Plains
4 Savannah
4 Tropical Island
4 Tundra
2 Wasteland

3 Tithe
1 Intuition
3 Brainstorm
4 Impulse
4 Fact or Fiction
1 Morphling
3 Call of the Herd
4 Counterspell
1 Forbid
4 Force of Will
2 Gaea's Blessing
3 Seal of Cleansing
3 Swords to Plowshares
3 Wrath of God

Sideboard:
1 Call of the Herd
3 Circle of Protection: Red
2 Devout Witness
2 Hydroblast
1 Intuition
2 Powder Keg
2 Rootwater Thief
1 Seal of Cleansing
1 Swords to Plowshares

As always, here’s the reason for the cards in the deck. The lands pretty much speak for themselves, except for the Flood Plains. These can search out any of your dual lands, which mean you will have a smoother mana base and you can run less land, which leaves more room for better cards. The Tithes serve the same purpose as the Flood Plains. They can search out some of your lands and put cards in your hand to pitch to Forbid. The Intuition is there to search for anything from removal to land to a few Call of the Herd. This can swing the game to your favor with only one card. Not a bad deal at all. The Impulses and Brainstorms are there to let you find better cards and get others that aren’t useful out of the way for the time being. The Fact or Fictions are great in this deck. Not only will it give you a few more cards in hand, but it has great synergy with the Call of the Herds. If you turn over a couple of good spells and a Call or two, that will make the decision on making the piles all the more harder for your opponent. The Morphling (the best creature in the game) and the Call of the Herds serve as the deck’s win conditions. The Counterspells, Force of Wills, and Forbid help you stop your opponent and protect your plans at the same time. The Gaea’s Blessings can be extremely helpful in either just letting you draw a card, stopping recursion plans (which just became pretty popular), keep you from decking yourself, stop a Millstone/Traumatize strategy, let you cast more Calls, or getting all of your removal spells back. Pretty good for only two slots in the deck. The Seal of Cleansing speaks for itself. The Swords and Wraths help you disrupt just about any creature based win around. The Swords can also let you gain some life from your own creatures if you are facing being killed by an Illusions (which are also very popular).

Looking over the sideboard, you should notice that this deck will be able to put up quite a fight against creature decks, namely Sligh. The Call of the Herd makes two more 3/3 bodies to stop their guys (which is also quite nice against other control decks). The CoP: Red lets you walk all over Sligh and Ponza, as do the Hydroblasts and Powder Kegs. The Kegs are also good against decks like White Weenie and Stompy. The extra Intuition will help you find all of your removal and extra sideboard cards along with more Calls. The Rootwater Thieves and the Seal of Cleansing are there to stop more combo decks such as Life, Trix, and (yes people do play it) Battle of Wits.

The deck will start out playing as a control deck until the late game where the Call of the Herds and Morphling will beat on your opponent. Don’t be afraid to cast a Call or two early to get those fast beats in or use as blockers until you can find a Sword or Wrath. If things go as planned, these may be all you need to finish them off. As I said earlier, this deck should be able to beat just about every creature deck around (Fish might give it a little trouble). With things like Call, Wrath, and Swords in abundance in the deck, you should be able to stave off your opponent long enough to let your elephants do their thing.

The big thing to watch out for while playing the deck is multiple Powder Kegs. One isn’t too hard to recover from but the second one might give you fits, depending on how you’ve played the game up to that point. Just try to keep Shadowmage Infiltrators, Lightning Angels, and the like off of the board and you should be ok.

Well, that will do it for this time around, all though it did seem pretty short compared to the other articles I’ve wrote. I think next time I’m going to have a look at either Kai’s Donate or on of the Reanimator decks.

Until next time, keep ‘em legal

Robby  
robblytuff@yahoo.com 

P.S. If anybody needs deck help, drop me a line and I'll see what I can do.