Lands:
8 Island
4 River of Tears
1 Shelldock Isle
7 Swamp
4 Terramorphic Expanse
Creatures:
1 Ambassador Laquatus
4 Epochrasite
1 Mournwhelk
4 Mulldrifter
3 Riftwing Cloudskate
4 Shriekmaw
Other Spells:
4 Broken Ambitions
3 Clockspinning
4 Damnation
3 Jace Beleren
3 Liliana Vess
1 Rings of Brighthearth
1 Traumatize |
  Snails
Alive!.
Description of deck by its author
(quoted):
Reader John Y. wrote to me recently to suggest
that one of the combos I wrote about would fit in perfectly with Jace,
Garruk, and company. As he said, "The Clockspinning combo in your Clock
Locket deck combos so well with the planeswalkers. Add in Rings of
Brighthearth and you've got some killer stuff going on. Jace Beleren
mill for 40!"
That deck used Locket of Yesterdays with the intention
of reducing the cost of Clockspinning to a single blue mana. Once you
reach that point, you could do all kinds of crazy things with your
suspend cards (with Reality Strobe, in particular). Note that
Clockspinning can add or remove counters of any type as long as there is
at least one counter of that type on the permanent or suspended card.
Yes, that includes loyalty counters. Under normal circumstances, it
would take at least four turns for Jace Beleren to become fully charged.
With Clockspinning, you can cut your wait-time in half, in thirds, or in
some other fraction, depending on the amount of mana you have available
and the number of cost-reducers you have in play.
James F. had similar thoughts and sent me a deck to
illustrate them. It was a blue-black control deck that aimed to exploit
"the wonderful synergy between Rings of Brighthearth and the new
planeswalker cards." With an assist from Ambassador Laquatus (who is
apparently from Torment), James would only need to have control of the
game for a few turns in order to build up to the likely-lethal "mill you
for 40."
For the deck I'm building right now, I'm going to take
a little from column A and a little from column B. Then I'm going to dip
into another column altogether. We'll call it "column P." That's P for
planeswalkers. As I implied in the intro, this article is all about
matching up one crazy-powerful being with another, a sort of multiversal
eHarmony. The big question is: Who am I going to pair with Jace Beleren?
It didn't take me long to figure that out. Why, Liliana Vess, of course!
I don't think you could ask for a better partner. Seriously, just put
the two of them side by side and check out the synergy:
Let's go row by row. Jace's loyalty-boosting ability
gives your opponent a free card; Liliana's takes it away. Liliana can
tutor for a card and put it on top of your library; Jace can then put it
into your hand. Jace's "finishing move" dumps twenty cards into your
opponent's grumper; Liliana's empties all grumpers of all creatures and
puts them into play under your control. It's a match made in, uh, Rabiah
the Infinite!
I wanted to play with some creatures for Liliana to
return and some board-controlling spells to keep Jace out of harm's way.
I also want some extra things to do with Clockspinning. Since I worked
the Merfolk-milling angle last week, I'll refrain from doing so this
week. With our be-gilled friends out of contention, I chose a number of
evoke creatures (Shriekmaw, Mulldrifter, and Mournwhelk) as well as a
couple of suspend creatures (Epochrasite and Riftwing Cloudskate).
Damnation does a lot of the heavy lifting. If you don't have any of
those, you might try some clash spells like Weed Strangle. Most of the
creatures I just mentioned have artificially high mana costs and Liliana
can stack the top of your library, so it seems like you would have a
decent shot at winning the clash. As it stands, the only clash spell in
the deck is Broken Ambitions, the Power Sink that mills your opponent
for four if you clash and win.
The important question now is: Where do you put your
planeswalkers when you're filling out your decklist? It feels a bit
weird to put them in with the noncreature spells, but that is where they
go. |
