4 Fire Ants
4 Haunted Angel
1 Liege of the Hollows
4 Varchild's War-Riders
4 Afterlife
4 Brand
1 Despotic Scepter
2 Dual Nature
3 Harrow
2 March of Souls
2 Mogg Infestation
1 Path of Peace
3 Simoon
3 Tel-Jilad Stylus
6 Plains
6 Mountain
7 Forest
3 Rith's Grove |
   Brand
Name.
Description of deck by Mark Gottlieb(quoted):
Mike Kioski, a self-described “Johnny to the max” gave me an early
non-denominational winter holiday present. In a recent column, I mocked
the bad card Varchild’s War-Riders for being a bad card. (News flash: It’s
not a good card!) But that just means I love it all the more (that column
used the War-Riders as the centerpiece of a deck), and so does Mike. He
sent me a deck that savagely abuses Rule 200.4a, an obscure bit of text
that says, in part, “A token's owner is the player who controlled the
spell or ability that put it into play.” So all those 1/1 Survivor tokens
the War-Riders chased over to your side of the table? You may control
them, but Mike owns them. He’s just letting you borrow them for a sec,
because when he plays Brand, he gets them all back.
That’s not even the most brutal interaction. Brand steals the tokens
created by Haunted Angel, Afterlife, Liege of the Hollows, March of
Souls... and Mogg Infestation. When Mike follows up Mogg Infestation with
Brand, his opponent has zero creatures while he has 2 1/1 tokens for each
creature his opponent used to have. Plus all the creatures he already had,
of course.
Mike also wants to give a big thanks to the designers, developers, and
templaters of the new Despotic Scepter, Tel-Jilad Stylus. Since it affects
permanents you own—not cards you own, not permanents you control—it’s a
handy way to dispose of self-created enemy tokens when Branding them isn’t
viable. The deck also packs Fire Ants and Simoons as even more 1/1 token
answers. It seems like a fine plan—those War-Riders keep making more and
more tokens each turn!
As with most decks I receive, I
recommend including more lands, especially when some of the lands
already in there are Lairs. But I haven’t played with the deck and
Mike has, so I haven’t changed it from his version. I also recommend
having the relevant section of the Magic Comprehensive Rules available,
because your opponents won’t believe you when you tell them their
Spirit tokens really belong to you! |
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