3 Honden of Cleansing Fire
3 Honden of Infinite Rage
3 Honden of Night’s reach
3 Honden of Seeing Winds
4 Honden of Life’s Web
3 Graceful Adept
2 Heart of Light
2 Gale Force
3 Mirror Gallery
3 Unsummon
3 Holy Day
6 Plains
6 Island
5 Swamp
5 Mountain
6 Forest |
 Honden
Honden Honden.
Description of deck by it's author
(quoted):
I must admit I have ordinarily had terrible
luck in the drafting business. I call it a business but really only one
transaction was being made: me giving away my money. One faithful draft
I managed to get both a Honden of infinite rage and Honden of life’s
web. I had never even seen shrines before and decided to see if they
could really be useful, and to my surprise everyone was turned into
dust. My drafting deck included many smaller creatures to distract the
opposition while I spit lands out and eventually got out my shrines. By
then, dealing 2 damage per turn and creating two creatures per turn was
just too much to handle against the small arsenal drafting provided my
opponent. After the match I decided to see if shrines could really put
up a match against another deck, and made a simple one with one shrine
of each color, nothing fancy. I did horrible, I think I went about 1/9
in my first 10 matches. I did some buying, some trading, and this is
what I came up with (see deck).
How to play effectively: a lot of people hate to
mulligan, no one wants to lose that card in your hand, because they can be
very important, that’s one more card to deal with your opponent. In this
deck you have to get used to taking a mulligan here and there, early
shrines are vital. If you get say a Red and White shrine, but two islands,
take it. This deck is almost 50% lands, you will get land, a lot of land.
By the time you have the chance to get the shrines out, you will most
likely have land of that color, if not, just keep them at bay with all
those Holy Days, Unsummons’, etc.
When you have more than 1 of each shrine out, make sure
you can keep two or more mirror galleries out. I’ve had a lot of people
criticize me for having two of the same exact cards on the board, but if
they had destroyed the one I had out, the shrines would destroy each other
and my deck would be useless, as most of my shrines just took a dive into
the graveyard. The same principle relates with the Graceful Adepts, if you
have 15 cards in your hand make sure you keep them out of danger, and try
to keep more than one on the board, as noted above. The latter should be
obvious, but just making sure to cover it.
A few ideas to ponder on where to take this card to
next: there is a card named Student of the Elements, it starts out as
“When Student of the Elements has flying, flip it”, after you give it
flying (any enchantment that will give him flying) it gives all your
creatures flying. As you can imagine, having 10 1/1 flying creatures is
pretty overwhelming, and gives you quite the heads up, and this is only an
uncommon card as well, so it’s easily obtainable. Another card that would
be wonderful is Overrun, which is in Tempest and Odyssey, while not as
easily obtainable, they would obviously pretty much give you the game.
Pros to this deck: very cheap, the most expensive card
in this deck is Mirror Gallery which you can easily find online for two
tickets at the time of this, the Hondens can be found 4 or 5 for 1 ticket
if you shop around, and most of the other cards are commons. This can be a
great “starter” deck if you don’t want to spend much money at one time,
but you can spend a few bucks here and there to tweak it as you see fit.
Once you get all five shrines out you can deal with nearly everything an
opponent can dish out. You discard their hand so no more stockpiling those
sorceries and arcanes against you, you can deal with any creature 5 power
or less, and you’re spitting out creatures at an alarming rate.
Cons: there are a few cards which do take quite a toll
on this deck, cards that destroy all cards of the same type for one, will
kill all your spirit 1/1 creatures, and there is a black card, the name
escapes me, which makes you sacrifice either a land or a creature for each
creature you bring into play, that will kill all your spirits until you
have enough lands in play to start sacrificing, then you can start
whittling away at their life. Another deck I seem to always have trouble
with is the land destroying decks, anything that kills my mana supply
early troubles me, simply because I seem to end up with 3 plains when all
I need is that mountain. |
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