Lands:
14 Forest
2 Ghost Quarter
1 Miren, the Moaning Well
6 Plains
Creatures:
4 Aven Mindcensor
4 Baru, Fist of Krosa
4 Eternal Witness
2 Genesis
4 Oriss, Samite Guardian
3 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Veteran Explorer
1 Wild Mongrel
Other Spells:
4 Eladamri's Call
4 New Frontiers
3 Weird Harvest |
  Weird
Chant.
Description of deck by it's author
(quoted):
White is famous for its love of law and order.
You get a bunch of sentient cats and elephants together, and they just
can't stop themselves from drafting up some new laws. Just look at all
of white's Ninth Edition rares. Talk about rules-setting! Some rules are
harsher than others, of course. Wrath of God says, "You're not allowed
to have creatures! Until you play another one!" Marble Titan says, "Feel
free to clobber with weenies for the next little while." Maybe I'm just
a, uh, rebel, but I'm not usually all that keen on these hosers of the
great white colour of Magic. There's just isn't much you can do with
them. They're nice to have against specific decks, but a card like Ivory
Mask doesn't exactly get my Johnny-sense a-tingling.
That said, I am about to make an exception for the
latest of white's rules-setting creatures, Aven Mindcensor, a card that
puts a damper on your opponent's ability to search through libraries. It's
like the exact opposite of the Dewey decimal system. Unlike No-Fun-Nellies
True Believer, Voidstone Gargoyle, and Hokori, Dust Drinker (among
others), the Mindcensor doesn't quite deliver an outright "No!" to your
beleaguered opponent. It's more like a, "Maybe... If you're lucky."
The main thing, though, is that this particular Bird
Wizard allows you to be proactive, and use otherwise symmetrical abilities
to great effect. With a Mindcensor in play, you can freely search
libraries but your opponent can only look through the top four cards of
whatever library he or she is searching through. This is a very nice rule
to set right before you play, say, Weird Harvest or New Frontiers. I hope
you have something good in those top four, because I know I have something
good in my top forty, and it ain't a song by Hilary Duff.
Now, you don't want to rely entirely on Aven Mindcensor
to keep your X-spells from backfiring. As those Heartbeat of Spring decks
from the days of yore proved, one way to come out on top with Weird
Harvest is to win the game on the spot. While this deck can't do that,
exactly, you can do the next best thing by fetching Genesis and multiples
of Oriss, Samite Guardian. Get the Incarnation in the bin and Oriss One on
the board, then dump Oriss Two to Oriss One's grandeur ability. It's a
slightly more unwieldy and fragile version of the old Isochron Scepter +
Orim's Chant lock, relying as it does on keeping a smallish creature in
play.
While Oriss is good times, all of the other timeshifted
Legends like to be Harvested in Weird ways just as much. You want doubles,
Harvest will give you doubles. Since we're in green already, I'm going to
use one of new favourite cards, Baru, Fist of Krosa. His grandeur ability
lets you make X/X wurm tokens, where X is the number of lands you control.
What a coincidence! I already want to use land-lubbing New Frontiers (and,
to a lesser extent, land-liking Veteran Explorer). You will quickly be
able to make some pretty fat wurms, and with Genesis doing its thing, you
can just go on making them for as long as you like.
Other cards that go well with the Mindcensor include
Oath of Lieges and Natural Balance. Since Future Sight has been referred
to as an Un-set due to its wackiness-density, I feel like I should mention
the most hilarious Aven Mindcensor combo: Aven Mindcensor + Unglued's
Incoming!! Getting up to four free permanents has never seemed so
pathetic. |
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