Magic Deck Vortex: Ravnica: City of Guilds

At last, a fun competition finally finished! I loved testing these decks, and the help from all the other members of MDV who helped me test made this project much more enjoyable.

Thanks always to Streetz, the webmaster and owner of Magic Deck Vortex for letting me be a part of this awesome community, for letting me write Raiding the Dollar Bins, and do these crazy contests. I can’t stress enough how much his encouragement, sage advice, and companionship have helped me through the writing process and every day life.

The decks are introduced in random order. There were 15 contestants this time around, and I hope to see even more next time. Again, congrats to all the winners, and thank you to all for sending in your entries! I really enjoyed working with them, and I enjoyed playing with them! Please make sure to send in your entries for my next competition... not sure what it’s going to be about yet, but I’ll be sure to cook something up!

That being said, let’s look at the criteria for the contest, since it’s been an age and a half since it was over:

The Ravnica: City of Guilds
Deck Building Competition

Criteria:
The deck you create must be turned in by (1 week after initial posting) All decks must be sent to deathbybeebles@yahoo.com . A deck that is late will be disqualified from the competition. All decks must have an original name that describes in short the deck, or is memorable in some way. Please do this, as it is easier for me to judge since I will know which deck belongs to who.

The deck you will be creating is an Extended deck. That means you are only allowed to use cards from Invasion onward. Decks must be built around a certain card, which will be specified lower in the competition rules. Decks not following these requirements will be disqualified.

Please send with your deck a paragraph or two describing the deck and what it does. Tell me how it works, tell my why it works, tell me combos and synergies. Explaining how your deck works is a surer way to score better in the competition as it helps me play it better during testing.

Decks must be built in one of two fashions. Choose which way you would like to work during this deck building competition and TELL ME IN THE EMAIL YOU SEND ME. This will alleviate confusion for me, and help me get through the grading process quicker.

There are two lists of cards to choose from. From List #1 choose any card, and build a deck around it. This deck will be graded on a scale of 30.

If you so choose, you can decide to not pick a card from List #1, and go to List #2. If you pick any card from list #2, you must build a deck around another card with the same color from List #2 (if you pick a gold card, pick the other gold card). These decks will be graded on a scale of 15, combined together to give you a score on a scale of 30.

The Lists are as follows:

List #1
Blood Funnel
Eye of the Storm
Flickerform
Warp World
Searing Meditation
Bloodletter Quill
Cloudstone Curio

List #2
Necroplasm
Woebringer Demon
Light of Sanction
Twighlight Drover
Cerulian Phoenix
Followed Footsteps
Mindmoil
Molten Sentry
Scion of the Wild
Ursapine
Bloodbond March
Phytohydra
Nullstone Gargoyle
Crown of Convergence

To clarify this once more, you can either build a deck from a card from List #1 graded out of 30, or build two decks with cards from List #2. If you build two decks, your final scores out of 15 on each deck will go together to make your final score.

There will be no modifiers for this competition. Instead, each deck will be judged only on its ability to do well in the 5 categories of scoring, listed below.

Focus: 6/6
Cohesivity: 6/6
Balance: 6/6
Creativity: 6/6
Overall-Playability: 6/6

This competition saw a lot of three different decks: Searing Meditation, Blood Funnel, and Cloudstone Curio, to name them. It’s interesting the different variations that are through the Searing Meditation decks, but really, Curio had decks all over the place, and a lot of them were fun to play.

For the first time in RtDB’s short contest history, we have a tie in the top 3! But who tied, and for what place? You’ll have to find out!

At first, this looks like a pretty good deck, but then you realize that you’ve only got 10 creatures to enchant… and that’s no good. His curve is way too high, and every time I played it I had to aggressively mulligan just to get a creature and an enchantment to go with it. When the deck did work, it worked spectacularly. I wish I had a way though to fetch the Curio, and some small creatures like Kird Ape or Elvish Warrior would really do the trick for this deck. The Root-Kin Ally is a nice touch, but overall it’s a pretty run of the mill Curio deck with a few less creatures than I would hope for.

This deck has a great idea, whittle your life down and then Reverse the Sands your way to victory with the help of Urza’s Rage et al – but no way to execute it. The single biggest problem with this Blood Funnel deck is that there isn’t any way to use Blood Funnel. You’ve got a total of 7creatures with which to do things with, and that is simply not enough. You’ll be countering your own spells because you won’t have any creatures to sacrifice! Each time I played this deck, I just never played Blood Funnel because you couldn’t use it. And, if you’re making a Blood Funnel deck, you need to be playing Blood Funnel. Period.

While this deck is cute, it really doesn’t accomplish much. The idea is that you make Edgewalkers free with the help of Thornscape Familiar and then bounce the Edgewalkers and play them for free forever and ever, using Glimpse of Nature to finally draw you into Tendrils of Agony or Brain Freeze for the win. It’s a four part combo… and it drives me nuts. It’s got enough consistency in the forms of tutoring with Dizzy Spell and Drift of Phantasms, but it takes the better part of forever to get all the pieces you need to win the game. In short… nice try, no cigar.

This deck could have been extremely consistent if the whole Astral Slide/cycling theme was taken out. Astral Slide and Voyager Staff don’t work well with creatures that are holding a Fists of Ironwood or a Flickerform. The “in addition to” supplement is a large chunk of cards that could have been used with cards like Three Dreams or Moldervine Cloak, or possibly Llanowar Elves. This deck need some major acceleration, and the cycle lands don’t help. (Astral Slide decks of old played 28 lands, 8 of which cycled)

Now this is how a Blood Funnel deck should work. Streetz is using Fecundity and Beacon of Creation with two sacrifice outlets (Perilous Forays and Blood Funnel) to draw lots of cards for lots of spells and ultimately, a lot of 1/1 green insect tokens. Savra sweetens the deal, letting you gain life while you ultimately pull every land from your library and win with a huge Beacon of Creation and then either Overrun or Plague Wind to win the game.

Cloudstone Curio is an interesting card, and Lionden shows how much fun you can have bouncing creatures back and forth from play to your hand. This deck runs plenty of mana fixing with Civic Wayfarer, Elvish Pioneer, Quirion Trailblazer and Wood Elves, but it seems to have problems finishing the game. Three Overrun will get you the game eventually, but a lot of the time I’d end out stalling the game with too many creatures clogging the board on both sides. The 2-ofs kind of bothered me too. A good deck that uses Cloudstone Curio, but nothing exciting.

Blood Funnel has the power to be real silly, or just be plain stupid (and not stupid in a good kind of way). This deck is one of the later type. I think Raine forgot that Blood Funnel only makes non-creature spells cost 2 less. In all reality, it’s just a really bad Elves deck with black stuff thrown in.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Warp World, and this deck really does the card justice. It boosts its early mana with Fellwar Stone, Talisman of Impulse, all the while dumping more permanents onto the board. Hunted Dragon is a cute trick too, as the Knight tokens your Dragon creates are permanents you own, which ups your own Warp count. The deck does a good job of keeping your opponent’s permanent count low, and the comes into play effects of Anarchist, Flametongue Kavu, and Goretusk Firebeast make the post-Warp board lean heavily in your favor. This deck could be a little more consistent with its creature base, however.

Another interesting Curio deck, this one focuses on cheap red and blue creatures with comes into play effects that you can abuse with Curio. Glitterfang is nice because it gives you a continual bounce effect each turn, which in turn means more and more effect triggering. Drake Familiar is used to get back Galvanic Arcs to replay, which is really the only way the deck can win pre-sideboard. Post sideboard the deck gets much much better, which is almost sad because if he’d had sent me the sideboarded version as the main deck, his score in Playability would have been higher. It’s not a bad deck, it’s fun to play, but it just doesn’t have that oomph that it needs.

When I added Searing Meditation to the list of cards for people to build around, I thought a lot of people would bite. It’s an interesting concept of a card, and I really like the design. Dale has done some pretty cool things with it, like recurring Lightning Helix with Isochron Scepter, using Soul Warden x6 (2 of them are Auriok Champion) and Raise the Alarm to gain a lot of life, and then within all the life gain and Searing Meditation madness, a nice set of alternate wins in Test of Endurance and Exalted Angel. It’s a focused deck, although I’d like to see a little less 2-of, and I’d personally want at least 3 Test of Endurance. Good deck though, and extremely fun to play.

Maleficent, a major poster at the MDV forums, has built another Blood Funnel deck. In explaining the deck to me, Mal says that he’s primarily using it to play Decree of Pain and Biorhythm on the same turn, letting him win the game. This is all very well and good, but even with Blood Funnel, it’s still a whopping 12 mana win condition. Birds of Paradise help speed things up a bit. Skullclamp… wait a minute, Skullclamp is banned in Extended. It’s a fun deck, but it’s illegal. That’s really to bad, as Bloodbond March and Verdant Succession make quite a fun combo.

Another Searing Meditation deck, this one working in quite a different fashion from the other. UnknownKnowned is using a neat little trick with Orcish Artillery and Spirit Link, which effectively nullifies the Artillery’s disadvantage, and makes your Searing Meditation trigger twice, allowing you to tack on a total of 7 damage in one fell swoop. The Ensnaring Bridge allows you to hold off hordes of creatures while you ping and gain your way to victory. Sun Droplet is good for early turns, and it’s a consistent 2 damage each turn with Meditation on the board. Boros Signet works to shore up mana problems, and the deck runs very smoothly.

Terry does another Searing Meditation deck, and this one is mostly like the other two. One major difference is the larger amount of control aspect cards in the main deck. Devouring Light and Disenchant are in the deck to protect against other combos and big creatures. Along with that, this deck splashes green with some of the amazing lands available in Extended, and the Ageless Entities and Loxodon Hierarchs are great additions to this deck. 63 cards does make the focus score go down a little.

Terry again? Yes, Terry sent me two decks, and asked that I judge both, with the exception that I use his Flame of Life deck to rank him. I gladly obliged, since SpawnOgre has to be one of the strangest decks in the competition. It abuses Cloudstone Curio, Spawnbroker (Spawnbroker?!?!?!) and equipment cards to get a temporary boost of power to get a better creature. Cards like Mark of Eviction and Echoing Truth bounce your own creatures back to your hand after your opponent gets their hands on them. Terry again takes full advantage of the dual lands in Extended to make an extremely stable mana base that can do all he wants it to and more. Mausoleum Turnkey is a great choice in this deck because of Curio, and because you can use it to recover from a Kagemaro easier.

This deck tries to abuse token generators and Blood Funnel to cast cards like Promise of Bunrei, Doubling Season and Decree of Justice on the cheap. The opening game is pretty shallow, but if you can survive to make some mana and play some token guys, you do have a pretty explosive late game. Wrath of God seems out of place in this deck, and splashing black just for Blood Funnel seems almost sacrilege. The deck plays well, but it’s pretty difficult to work with unless you log a lot of time with it.

(This is subjective as I pick my favorite 5 decks from the list, no matter how they scored by points, I’m going to pick the ones that I thought were the coolest or most fun:)

Congratulations to all those who placed, and thank you to all other participants for submitting your decks. Next contest, whenever that may be, will have modifiers again, and I’ll try to have it graded within the natural lifespan of a Galapagos tortoise.