Bad Deck Workshop: Janky Decks for Janky People. Delversnipe

Welcome to the first installment of Bad Deck Workshop: Janky Decks for Janky People. Do you love jank? Are you pretty much a horrible person, especially when you’re getting your Magic on? Then this is the place for you.

In all seriousness, or as much as I care to muster for a blog intended to be lighter-hearted, and with tongue planted firmly in cheek, this particular column is devoted to decks that most players would look at, then look at you, likely with a concerned expression, and finally, look around for whatever adult is responsible for you, because they’re worried that you aren’t wearing your helmet.

Each week, I’ll showcase a new Bad Deck, talk about the mechanics/theme it’s supposed to revolve around, and strong/weak points. I’ll then proceed to edit the everloving crap out of it, and yammer your ear off regarding the edits. Once it’s done…it’ll go into the Bad Deck Garage, to be trotted out as a supplementary entry  to a day’s normal entry (since I only do this particular column once a week…I don’t want to spend all day everyday doing these) whenever I make noteworthy changes.

Bottom line is, these decks are meant to be FUN. They will contain interactions and combos and cards that you just plain can’t play in competitive Magic because you’ll get roflstomped. This is Kitchen Table Magic. Cards like Azor’s Elocutors and Desecration Demon are fair game.

Finally, please note that just because a deck is here doesn’t mean that I’m saying anyone playing a deck with the same core concept (as you’ll see today) is bad. It just means that the deck isn’t designed to go straight for the throat…it’s designed around a concept, and it’ll probably be pretty inefficient, but through tuning, maybe it’ll become worthy of a FNM someday.

Knowing me, probably not.

Anyway, without further ado, the first victim of DBW:JDfJP is a cute little blue/red monstrosity I’m calling (oh, so INCREDIBLY creatively)…”Delversnipe.”

Anyone want to guess what’s in it? Here’s a hint…there aren’t any Angels or Thragtusks.

Give up? Fine. Here’s the list I’ve started with.

Deck
Creatures 4 Delver of Secrets 1 Snapcaster Mage 2 Guttersnipe 1 Hypersonic Dragon 2 Charmbreaker Devils 1 Niv-Mizzet, Dracogenius Spells 2 Pillar of Flame 2 Street Spasm 3 Syncopate 2 Cyclonic Rift 4 Izzet Charm 1 Mizzium Mortars 2 Thunderbolt 4 Cancel 1 Counterflux 3 Essence Backlash 1 Thunderous Wrath	Land 10 Island 4 Izzet Guildgate 9 Mountain 1 Steam Vents 24 lands

 

I know it’s got funny numbers (a lot of 1 offs and 2 offs, etc) but that’s because this started out life as my contribution to a thread in the MTG Salvation Standard Budget Deck forums. The original thread was intended as a no-rare deck, but my personal spin on it was to feel free to chuck in rares, but only ones I actually owned. I wasn’t buying ANYTHING for round 1 of this deck…which resulted in some odd card counts, but the first iteration of this deck ended up working out decently enough, even if it was far from being Tier 1.

The key to this deck is, obviously, the revolution around instants and sorceries. Nothing ground-breaking…it’s just that there’s some fun cards that can take advantage of these card types. Let’s take a look at the breakdowns.

Creatures

Delver of Secrets – Fairly obvious. They’re cheap, evasive, and a strong early threat. With the number of instants and sorceries in this deck, the ratio of being able to drop a Delver turn 1, and flip him for a 3 point attack turn 2 is fairly high. With the loss of Ponder from standard , Delver isn’t QUITE as powerful as he was prior to rotation, but it’s still a fairly potent card.

Snapcaster Mage – Flashback in this deck is just plain gravy. There’s really no shortage of targets for Snappy to hit. There’s a reason this is looking to be one of the cards to make the shift to the formats with larger card pools. Now if I’d only pulled more than one. I HATE buying singles. Time to order some more boxes, I guess. (Yes, I know how horribly inefficient that is.)

Guttersnipe – One of the absolute keys to this deck. These guys give all of your counters some bite. Instead of playing purely defensively and turtling up…you’re kicking your opponent in the crotch at the same time.

Hypersonic Dragon – Haste, evasion, a decent amount of power and toughness, but it just wouldn’t fit in this deck if it didn’t have the flash effect for sorceries.

Charmbreaker Devils – More expensive than is really suited for this kind of deck, you’ll rarely be able to drop them…but if you ever do, it means the game is going long, and you’ll be glad they’re there, since you’re probably running low on your counters and direct damage by this point. 5/5 ain’t shabby either.

Niv-Mizzet, Dracogenius – Some direct damage coupled with drawing power. High casting cost, and just plain screams to get removal tossed his was.

Instants/Sorceries

I’m not going to go through these one by one…most of them should be fairly self-evident. I know I’m using some that aren’t quite top tier, but again, this is a janky deck. I’m really pretty fond of Essence Scatter, as expensive as it may be…as is the case in the current Standard environment, if your opponent is playing green…save these for Thragtusks. If you’ve got at least one ‘snipe out, that’s a minimum of 7 damage right there. Zounds! Similar reasoning backs up Cancel…it’s expensive at 1UU, but when you’re playing a form of draw-go, like this deck ends up playing after you’ve gotten a couple of creatures out…it’s not actually too bad.

This Deck SUCKS

So, how can we make it better?

First of all…let’s look at the strong points. It’s VERY synergistic. If you manage to land and stick a delver or two and a snipe or two on the board, odds are, you’re going to be able to knock your opponent out pretty quick. Even if you aren’t tossing out counters and red damage spells to power the Guttersnipe’s ability, you’re still able to attack for five damage every turn.  That’s assuming they don’t have any blockers out, or anything else to blunt your attacks. If they do…then you’re going to be kicking out counters and red direct damage...and blasting damage out at your opponent through GuttersnipeIfeellikeabrokenrecordhere.

So yeah, synergy. So what are the weak points?

Well, other than using a bunch of sub-standard cards, because they’re kinda fun (I want Essence Scatter in a very carnal way after some matches…it’s just SO sexy when it works.) The big problem is the creatures.

This deck has SIX creatures.

Yep. Six. No, I didn’t miscount.

I only included the Delvers and the Snipes. Snappy? He’s really more of an instant. You aren’t going to drop him until you need him for his flashback ability…and even then, 2/1 dies pretty easily. Niv-Mizzet? Pretty much a dead card. If you ever land him, you aren’t untapping with him. *IF* you do…you’re in a situation where you really didn’t need him in the first place. Charmbreakers? Nice, but expensive. Hypersonic Dragon? Expensive…with them, maybe seven creatures.

Since most of your other cards are counters, or creature removal, only some of which doubles as damage that can be done to your opponent…you may find yourself left with very little left to do to finish your opponent off…and eventually, you’re going to run out of counterspells, or removal effective enough to deal with what they’re tossing out. We need to give this deck more teeth.

To start, we need to transform this into less of a budget-based “Ok, here’s what I had around” type deck. No more two or three-offs because that’s what was available. We need to crank the necessities up to four each, and then have a good gameplay reason for why we wouldn’t include four of anything that we decide to reduce numbers on.

So…add two Guttersnipe, three Snapcasters, and three Hypersonic Dragons. Looking MUCH sturdier now…but we’ve got to remove a few things.

Sorry Niv-Mizzet. You’re out. Same with the Charmbreakers. They also don’t play nice with Snappy, since he exiles the spells he interacts with, reducing what they have to send back to your hand. Counterflux is also gone, because it just isn’t as useful as it could be. A non-counterable counter is nice, but having to make sure you’ve got the right colors untapped is a pain, and the secondary ability of countering all spells is just not that useful, due to its situational nature.

That means we still need to clear out three spells, prior to even homogenizing the numbers of the non-creature spells. Let’s try clearing out two overcosted Cancels, and an Izzet Charm, since it’s a nice utility, but will typically be used as a (potentially) weakened Syncopate.

At this stage…there’s a lot more we can do with this deck, but let’s take it out of the shop at this point and do some playtesting, and revisit it in a few weeks. As of right now, I’ll make supplemental entries when I make changes, and bring it all back together when we re-spotlight this deck.

That’s really it…tomorrow we talk about one of my favorite new mechanics.

 

Friday Topic: Personal History, Part 1

 So…yeah, blogging. Something I’ve thought about for a good long while, but didn’t really ever have a SERIOUS reason to until now. And by serious, I mean serious in the context of a hobby, as serious as that can possibly be.

What hobby, you may ask? And even if you don’t, I’m going to talk about it anyway. I am here to talk about the collectable card game, Magic: The Gathering. 

Since it’s my first blog post here, how about a bit of history? Or, since I tend to be rather verbose…a LOT of history. I should note, after reaching a good stopping point here, I’ve read back over it and thought to myself “Hmmm. Damn. Well, I’ve really glossed over this, and didn’t say a lot of the things I wanted to. Oh well, fuck it.” *post to blog* 

So, knowing that…I’ll be revisiting this era, and likely, any others where I start out with a high level view, and drilling down into specifics in future posts. So don’t worry…I’m egotistical enough to believe that everyone wants to read ALL the sad little details of my cardboard fetishizing life…so it’ll all come out eventually.

I first encountered Magic in eighth grade. I won’t say exactly when that was because; first of all…I’d have to figure it out. And secondly, I’ll date myself enough by saying that Unlimited was the current base set, but was about to give way to Revised. There…if you’re really curious, you can figure out the time period. No…I didn’t ever get any Power Nine. I was in eighth grade, I wasn’t burdened down by gobs and gobs of disposable income. 

A new classmate of mine showed me the game, and I showed him…I don’t know what. I think it was D&D. The funny thing there is that within about six months, I really gave up D&D and went whole hog on Magic (still played D&D on occasion, but it wasn’t my gaming passion anymore) and he gave up Magic, and picked up D&D in a similar manner. He’d keep a deck around for random duels, but didn’t obsess about it the way I began to.

And obsess I did.  Slinging spells by way of turning some rectangular pieces of cardboard sideways, then putting other rectangular pieces of cardboard from my hand onto the table began to be one of the big things people knew about me. And in a small private school like mine…that meant EVERYONE knew. Since I was pretty young though, I didn’t mind. Yet, anyway. But let’s not skip ahead.

Or, let’s. For the next few years, I played, and played. It was my “thing.” I was known around my (again, small) school as, if not “the” Magic player, than at least one of the more well-known Magic players. I’m not saying that to boast…this was jr. high and high school. Playing Magic was even less cool then than it is today. Spending my lunch period tapping mana wasn’t getting me a ton of dates. After awhile, I started being FAR more quiet about Magic, and then…for a period of a time, I stopped completely. I remember getting back into it in my junior year, so I couldn’t have skipped more than a year, maybe two. That was quite some time ago, but I DO remember heading over to the LGS after lacrosse practice to de-jock-ify.

This continued for a bit, I made some good friends in that particular metagroup, most of whom were younger than me, and teased me about tapping my lands to produce “monna,” when they all said “mah-na.” I finally caved, and to this day, use a hard “a” when I say mana. But, alas and anon, I was not long for the Magic world at this point, and the last major event I remember participating in was the Exodus pre-release…where I had my typical poor showing, and was eliminated early. If I remember correctly (no guarantee there,) it wasn’t Swiss rounds, but rather, double-elimination. I was unable to completely abandon the mindset of my red/green constructed deck, which I’ll have to describe sometime, and I believe I went with some red/blue monstrosity, mostly because I wasn’t comfortable completely getting away from burn…and it sucked ass. I was a total Timmy in those days, and I’d NEVER done a sealed event, so I was hopelessly lost. I also remember being a little irked that I didn’t pull an Ertai, Wizard Adept, and a guy two seats down from me did. I’ve never had great luck with pulls, but I’m an eternal optimist. 

So, soon after that event, I must have let Magic fade from my life. It wasn’t due to my poor showing, or the tournament at all…I just remember things in my life changing, and Magic didn’t have a place anymore. But, I’ll delve deeper into that, and the move forward in my next History/Random Thoughts entry, which will show up on Fridays. Next Mon, my first “Bad Deck Workshop: Janky Decks for Janky People” entry.

I know you’re all waiting with baited breath. Don't rain on my parade and hurt my fragile little ego to tell me otherwise, you jerks.