4 Abyssal Specter
4 Bone Shredder
4 Flametongue Kavu
4 Ghitu Slinger
2 Thrashing Wumpus
4 Void Maw
4 Incinerate
3 Earthquake
4 Living Death
2 Pyroclasm
9 Mountain
11 Swamp
4 Urborg Volcano
1 Volrath's Stronghold |
  Look
Maw, No Hands!
Description of deck by it's author
(quoted):
Void Maw. It’s a 4/5 creature with trample in
Black. That means it has some heft and can be a decent creature all on
its own. With a five defense, it becomes hard to burn away. It has the
ability to prevent any creatures from going to the graveyard, almost
like a Planar Void for creatures. This is a fine adjunct ability, as it
stops graveyard recursion at your table. There’s always somebody using
Volrath’s Stronghold to recur their Etched Oracle over and over again
(fill in another creature and recursion method, but you get the idea).
Void Maw tells them to knock it off.
Void Maw can take these creatures that have been removed
from the game, and put one back into the graveyard in order to pump the
Maw - which already has trample and already is a 4/5 - granting +2/+2
until the end of the turn. Ah, the power of this card. My first point was
that you could put creatures in your graveyard while keeping them out of
other’s yards. That’s a nice bonus. In multiplayer, I also noticed that
you might get a big enough Maw to kill a player in one hit. That’s a nice
bonus too.
This deck uses a variety of removal options to keep
creatures dying. Dying creatures are removed from the game by the Void Maw
and saved for eating. The deck has several mass removal spells, like
Living Death, Pyroclasm, and Earthquake, plus Thrashing Wumpus can add
some mass removal too. Earthquake can only deal up to four damage if you
want to keep a Maw alive. Of course, you can use the Maw’s pump ability if
you want to ‘Quake for more. Pyroclasm will kill several of your
creatures, but all of them should kill something when they come into play,
so they will already have been of service. With your reanimation and
Maw-pumping, dead creatures on your side of the board are fine and dandy.
Note, however, that that Abyssal Specters are immune to death both by
Pyroclasm and by Earthquake. I tossed in a quartet of Incinerates as an
adjunct to the burn. They’ll take out annoying regenerators, which seem to
get a decent amount of play in some multiplayer circles.
Ideally, you want to use your removal to clean a lot of
the board when you have a Maw out. Then you can swing and deal a lot of
damage to a player, possibly killing him, by using just the creatures of
yours that died, and if you need to, you can also use that player’s
creatures too. Since you are killing that player, you might as well. Then
you want to cast Living Death, getting back all of your creatures while
other players have many removed permanently from the game. Some of your
187 creatures will kill off the few creatures that made it past your Maw,
and you’ll have a very dominant board position. You can even pump up
another Maw by getting one into play with the Living Death, and when your
Bone Shredder kills another creature, the new Maw stores it. The dying,
non-Echoed Bone Shredder will soon follow.
The net result of all of this mass removal and Maw and
recursion is that you’ll likely be the deck with a lot of creatures at the
table while everybody else has very little. Note that if mass removal,
such as your Living Death or an opponent’s Wrath of God, is played while
you have a Maw in play, the Maw will still remove creatures from the game
that die to said mass removal. This is a permanent answer to even the
worst problems, like Akroma.
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