Lands:
9 Snow-Covered Swamp
8 Snow-Covered Mountain
4 Sulfurous Springs
2 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
Creatures:
4 Korlash, Heir to Blackblade
4 Dimir House Guard
1 Magus of the Mirror
1 Herald of Leshrac
1 Kaervek the Merciless
Other Spells:
4 Dead // Gone
4 Skred
4 Circle of Affliction
4 Pooling Venom
4 Tendrils of Corruption
4 Manabarbs
1 Pyrohemia
1 Soul Spike |
  Hecatomb
Redux.
Description of deck by it's author
(quoted):
While I've never used Sphere of Law with
Manabarbs, I have used it with Overabundance, Invasion's answer to the
question, "What happens when you cross Mana Flare with Manabarbs?" That
was a very fun but not very good multiplayer deck that used all kinds of
"plankton" cards like New Frontiers and Veteran Explorer, before
ultimately killing with my lands courtesy of Natural Emergence. Urza's
Armor is another good partner for Manabarbs. Feel free to squeeze either
one of those cards into the above decks.
Since I want to branch out a bit from the white and red
decks, I decided to look elsewhere for inspiration. Luckily, I didn't have
to look far. Dang astigmatism. There's a card in Planar Chaos that is the
ideal match for Manabarbs: Circle of Affliction. It's black's
alternate-reality Circle of Protection. You get to choose a colour and
fire off a one-mana Last Caress whenever you are dealt damage by a source
of that colour. Contrary to what one might expect, or at least what I
might expect, the player you target doesn't have to be the controller of
the source that dealt damage to you. What this means is that you can
damage yourself, with, I don't know, Manabarbs, and then ping your
opponent for one. The beauty of it is, you can use the one mana that
caused Manabarbs to ping you to pay for the Circle of Affliction trigger.
Effectively, you can now tap a land to cause your opponent to lose one
life. Since you gain life with Circle of Affliction, you are basically
immune from Manabarbs as long as you are spending your mana this way.
Ideally, you'll want to have a lot of lands in play when
you play out the combo, so to that end I included Korlash, Heir to
Blackblade and, to a lesser extent, Herald of Leshrac. Since Korlash,
Manabarbs, and two other cards I wanted to use (Tendrils of Corruption and
Pyrohemia) all cost four mana, I added a set of Dimir House Guards. The
rest of the deck is made up of cheap removal (Dead // Gone, Skred, even
Soul Spike) and some cards that further the "it hurts to play your spells"
theme (Pooling Venom and Kaervek the Merciless). I also added a Magus of
the Mirror for kicks, because Manabarbs gives you the ability to lower
your life total at will. |
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