Congratulations to Tom Eckersley-Waites, the winner of October's
Contest (Three Sets, One Deck). His deck, which I am
titling Scrapheap, won by less than a point. First I am going to
detail what the guidelines were for the contest, and then I am going
to give you the rating system. After that, I will will show you his
deck and explain some of the details of it for you (as well as give
you his original description). All of the decks entered for the
contest were good. Some of the entries were penalized because
they didn't have all of the requirements.
The requirements for the contest
included:
- You can only use cards from
three sets: Onslaught, Alliances and Urza's Legacy.
- You have to use at least two
cards from each set. (a -2 penalty for not)
- The deck has to be 60 cards (no
less, no more).
- You must include at least one
Legendary card (a -2 penalty)
  While
the above seem like easy requirements, it forced a lot of thinking on
the deck creators' part and thus proved to be a great challenge.
For instance, one person said, "..anything but Alliances would
have been much easier." In response, that is why I chose that
set. There are some great cards in Alliances that provide and
nearly force originality in deck creation. Unfortunately (for
me), almost all of the decks used the cards
FORCE
OF WILL and RANCOR.
I, honestly, was not surprised (maybe because both of those
cards were pictured in the banner for the contest). I
expected to see cards like those and others including
Faerie
Conclave, Thawing
Glaciers, Treetop
Village, Deranged
Hermit and Kaysa.
Anyway, moving on to the rating system.
Since there were many more entries
for this contest than the previous, I needed a way to quickly review
the decks and score them. The last contest I simply looked at each one
and decided which one was better. I rated the decks on the following
five categories: Focus, Cohesiveness, Balance, Creativity, and Overall
Playability. Each
category could score you up to 5 points thus giving you a possible
maximum score of 25. The winning deck scored 21.5/25.0. Second place
scored 21.2 and third place scored 20.5. As you can see the top three
were very close.
Focus
was based on card variety. Did the entry have a good choice of cards
to have four of and to have one of? Or, did the entry have more than
four cards with a quantity of one or two? Also, by looking at the
cards was it clear what the deck main style or use is? A deck with a
good focus should have its goal and combos jump out at me without me
having to look at the cards in it for three hours to tell.
Cohesivity
was based on how well I thought the cards worked together. If the deck
had all elf creatures and Heedless
one, that is pretty much an easy 5 of 5. On the other hand, if a
deck had NO goblins or goblin potentials and the
Goblin
Skirk Fire Marshall it would be be scored a one. You get the idea.
Balance
was something I didn't really want to use in the rating process but I
did anyway. I guess I find it controversial because focus is not
always necessary in a deck that uses only certain cards to finish or
protect a combo. For instance, one of the submissions from last week (The
Attack of the Goblins) has no balance. It would be scored a one in
BALANCE. But, the deck is good (and thus it was added to the
database). For the purposes of a good deck with mana efficiency
balance is usually important and this is why I decided to include it
in the rating process.
 Creativity
is based on making an original deck or using original (under-abused)
combos. Using Scrapheap
in Tom's deck scored him a five. Of
all of the decks, only two scored a 5 in this category. I wanted to
see originality and the fact that Tom was able to create a deck
actually using the Scrapheap
card from Urza's Legacy was a plus.
Scrapheap,
as a artifact, was probably the worst card from the set (as I recall
seeing it as this in a past INQUEST magazine article). Making
an all goblin or elf deck does not score high in creativity (unless
you have a few curveballs in the deck). There was one submission that
was scored a two because, well, they really did use all elves. I
thought it wasn't too original.
Overall playability
is much like the general rating for the decks you see on the decks
page. Most casual decks score between two and 3.5. A
deck that rates 4 or more is usually tournament worthy or has near
maximum potential to win. For the purposes of this contest, a 4
would normally be a 3.5 (in my decks section) so the scoring is a
little higher than normal.
Okay, with all of that out of the
way, let's get onto what the winning deck scores.
FOCUS: 4
A deck with a five would
basically be all 4 quantities with exception to power nine cards and
cards like Regrowth
or Legendary cards. Scrapheap had a few cards that could have been
deleted or added to limit the amount of twosies and onesies it had.
COHESIVITY: 4.5
With
Goblin
Welder and almost
all artifacts he is scoring high but there was a slight possibility
that some of the cards could have been replaced to be more cohesive.
For instance, I would have replaced the
Iron
Maiden and Wheel of Torture cards with something like
Helm
of Obedience or Shield
Sphere. Shield
Sphere is early protection against early weenie decks.
Helm
of Obedience is a nice creature advantage card that only costs
one more than the Maiden and Torture cards. However, all of the
cards did have cohesiveness with exception to those.
BALANCE: 4
This is that category
that is cruel to a good deck. Scrapheap is a good deck but uses a
minimal amount of red (for the
Goblin
Welders). This is why he scored a 4.
CREATIVITY: 5
Did I mention he used
the Scrapheap
card effectively? Hey, this by itself is worthy of a five rating.
Using clone to clone an opponent's creature of another
Goblin
Welder is just as creative.
Ticking
Gnomes and Tinker?
Nice. Actually, all of his deck is original and high quality
creativeness.
OVERALL PLAYABILITY: 4
Second place deck (R/G
BEATDOWN) has the highest score in this category (4.2). This deck is
very playable but a five would mean it would win the local tourney
(if there was ever a tourney type that played only these three
sets). Four is still a very high rating.
TOTAL: 21.5 out of 25
Just for the record, here are the
top five decks of all that were submitted. The ratings are in the same
order as above:
#1 Scrapheap: 4. 4.5, 4, 5, 4
- 21.5
#2 R/G Beatdown: 4, 4, 4.5, 4.5, 4.2 - 21.2
#3 (Trenton's Crawlspace): 5, 4, 4.8, 3.2, 3.5 - 20.5
#4 Full-automated Assault: 4, 4, 4, 5, 3 - 20
#5 (Awesome Silvos): 5, 2, 4, 4, 2.5 - 17.5
And now for the
deck that won October's Contest:
 (SCRAPHEAP)
by Tom Eckersley-Waites
UNIQUE - Scrapheap /
Goblin Welder
4 Clone
4 Tinker
4 Force of Will
4 Goblin Welder
4 Scrapheap
4 Ring of Gix
1 Urza's Blueprints
2 Iron Maiden
2 Torture Wheel
4 Ticking Gnomes
2 Thran Weaponry
1 Lord of Tresserhorn
4 Grand
Coliseum
4 Mountain
16 Island
Tom's description: Basically,
the deck wins by using Tinker, Clone and Goblin Welder on the Ticking
Gnomes to damage them enough along with the Iron Maiden and Torture
Wheel. The Scrapheap ensures that I stay alive - the Force of Will is
there to protect the Welders mainly, as is the Thran Weaponry. The
Lord of Tresserhorn is only in there as I have to have a Legend
somewhere - useful cannon fodder to the force of will, or if played
with the weaponry [Tresserhorn] can be quite a threat.
Note: the green
highlighted cards in the SCRAPHEAP deck are cards from Onslaught.
The cards highlighted in the lighter color are from Alliances.
All other cards are from Urza's Legacy.
Well, congratulations on the win,
Tom. I suppose I have already given a good detail of the deck's
capabilities. Thank you to everyone who entered the contest. For
those of you that submitted but did not win, you will be seeing you
decks on the submissions page most likely for this upcoming week
(11/4/02).
Ghilias
Webmaster of Magic Deck Vortex
P.S. Don't forget to send in your
entry for the next content (November's) called WIZARDRY 2002.
Click here to see the guideline page. |
