4 Ashen-Skin Zubera
4 Wicked Akuba
3 Kami of the Waning Moon
4 Thief of Hope
3 Gutwrencher Oni
4 Distress
4 Waking Nightmare
4 Jade Idol
4 Hideous Laughter
3 Rend Flesh
23 Swamp |
 The
Dark Side.
Description of deck by it's author
(quoted):
This deck plays out by casting some early
creatures or discard spells, whichever are available at the time. If you
have a choice between creatures or discard, go with Distress first, then
creatures, and then Waking Nightmare. The reason for this is that you
want to take the most relevant thing with Distress before it hurts you,
and you want to wait as long as possible before casting the Waking
Nightmare, hopefully catching them off guard and getting two good spells
when the opponent doesn't have other cards to pitch instead.
The smaller creatures are more used as a distraction for
your opponent's removal, while the real damage is done by Jade Idol and
Gutwrencher Oni. You have some creature removal in the form of Rend Flesh
and Hideous Laughter. Don't expect to splice the laughter onto other cards
much, but hard-casting it will do plenty of damage at the appropriate
times. The basic play of this deck is fairly simple - capitalize on
opportunities and distract your opponent with little men until they have a
near-empty hand and your heavy hitters can finish the game.
Tips On Playing the Deck
Use Distress to take the biggest long-term threat in their hand, unless
you think they won't find enough land to cast it before Waking Nightmare
will hit it.
Ashen-Skin Zubera is very useful. Don't bother trying to get tricky with
double-Zubera blocking. It rarely works out. Think of these as chump
blockers that will buy you time and help empty their hand.
You can pull off a nasty defensive maneuver with Rend Flesh, killing one
of their attackers and activating your Idol to block and kill a second
attacker. The same thing goes with Hideous Laughter, but keep in mind that
the Laughter will also shrink your Idol. Since the Idol triggers when you
have the spell on the stack, there is no way around this.
If you don't have many spells in your hand to trigger Thief of Hope, don't
be afraid to trade it in combat when the need arises, allowing you to
retrieve one of your other spirits via soulshift and further enabling your
Idol.
Adding More Money to the Deck
This deck can go a more controlling route with access to more expensive
cards. Cards like Cranial Extraction and Nezumi Shortfang would help the
discard theme a lot. You could also make great use of Genju of the Fens
when Betrayers is online legal. All of the Genju are really powerful, and
I am sure you will be seeing a lot of them in my budget decks over the
next few months. Also, with Genju and Idol, you can add Blinkmoth Nexus
and have a well-rounded creature base that evades removal spells like
Barter in Blood, Hideous Laughter, and the like. Given the opportunity, at
that point you might want to consider taking it to the light side with the
white Genju, Jade Idol, Nexus, and the various Wrath of God effects that
are always available in White. However, if you are just looking to add a
small amount of money to this deck, you can use Kiku, Night's Flower. It
is a nice controlling card that will give your opponent another tough
target while evading discard spells. |
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