Since its Avatar week and several Vanguard related articles are going around, I decided to share with you some ideas on how to build a Vanguard deck. To do this I chose seven interesting avatars and built several decks around each of them. Since I chose very interesting and unique avatars, you’ll notice that you can do some power things with them. If you need to know about Vanguard I suggest checking out this article on it.

If you’re a Timmy or a Johnny you’ll be in love with these avatars instantly. Spike players will be intrigued in the fact that I’ve taken several popular decks that already exist and meddled with them to empower them with an avatar. Not to mention one deck has about a 19% chance to kill a person on Turn 2. From Astral Slide, Rotlung, Ghost Dad, down to the fast Goblin Tribe and beefy Gruul Zoo, many existing decks were fleshed out to befit an Avatar's embrace. But don’t assume we're only working with existing decks, there are plenty of new original ideas that wouldn’t work without our loveable avatar:

Lyzolda's Burning Sensation

Rakdos' second in command lurks down in Rick Maddi torturing victims and friends alike. Summoning her onto the field will make your opponent quiver and your own creatures scream as they begin to die one by one. As an avatar, Lyzolda is anything but subtle; she goes for the throat and holds nothing back. As far as the disadvantages of the avatar go we have a few things: -1 to health, -1 to starting hand, and the abilities require no cards in hand. Well let’s face it, -1 to health, is nothing. -1 to hand actually helps us in this case, and by picking her we're pretty much guaranteeing we'll be getting empty handed fast. So I'd say as long as we're gearing to play her, she is perfectly suited to destroy our foes.

The reason to play her is for the hellbent abilities. The first one is a personal Furnace of Rath. This is the big ability, and it’s what we are gearing up to use. The second ability is that your opponents discard at the end of your turn. This is a nice ability, but it’s not really necessary, but entirely useful. That’s the beauty of Lyzolda, so evil and we don’t even really care.

As far as decks go there are several obvious options to adopt Lyzolda's play style. We can either play as Rakdos intended and adopt our Rakdos guild mates like Jagged Poppet, or we can play to discard everyone with cards like Delirium Skeins and Last Rites, or we can start a death race and see who wins.

The first deck we'll make to use Lyzolda is a unique burn deck that essentially runs a race between our burns and their creatures. We’re going to abandon all defense, expose ourselves to every attack, and go straight for our jugular. There is nothing more Rakdos than that. To accomplish this we will use low casting burn spells that are aimed at nothing but the face. Since we don’t care about anything but extremely fast destruction, we have no care of the cost.

To play this deck, is different than playing any other burn deck. We want to hold some cards for our hellbent burns, others we want to cast to get nearer to hellbent. Unlike other decks, we'll actually use our X spells early on and use our lower burns when we are hellbent. As a Lyzolda Hellburner we will never hold back. By Rakdos' will alone we shall prevail.

The burns to cast right away are: Chain of Plasma, Firebolt, Lava Spike, Magma Jet, Kaervek's Torch. Chain of Plasma can bait them into burning you back, giving you a free toss away towards hellbent, Firebolt is useful for its flashback, Lava Spike plain hurts, Magma Jet allows us to scry 2 ahead, and the Kaervek’s Torch is generally Mox food or the last card cast before we move in on hellbent.

The burns to hold onto for hellbent are Surging Flame, Demonfire, Sonic Seizure & Fiery Temper. Once we hit hellbent our cards go insane. Surging Flame has potential for 4-16 damage, Demonfire is a massive unpreventable burn, and Sonic Seizure and Fiery Temper interact for a 12 point burn for 2 mana. Barbarian Rings around this time turn into 4 point burns as well

As you can see from the hellbent numbers alone, our opponent won't be standing for long. We’ll most likely do 6-8 damage on the road to hellbent, so we won’t have that much further to go. Howling Mines are thrown in there for added card draw since we can pretty much play 3+ of our burns on any given turn. If you don’t like them, Shock is an obvious addition. Do not under any circumstances add Char, unless you feel like burning yourself for 4. Also they are discarding at the end of your turn, which as I said, is really quite minor of a thing for us. This is a fast, easy deck to play, but your opponents may not like you much afterwards. But hey, isn't that all part of being a Rakdos?

An Army of Destiny

Now let’s aim for something else with Lyzolda, let’s even the field by making everyone hellbent. Why not? If we have zero cards shouldn’t everyone else? It’s the fair thing to do right? To accomplish mutual hand destruction, we'll be using cards that force everyone to discard. Think of it as the opposite of an Owling Mine deck. We have a few obvious choices: Delirium Skeins, Last Rites, Chain of Smog, Noxious Vapors.

Now we need to choose how to use discarding to our advantage. The obvious choice is Megrim and the Rack type cads. Madness, Flashback, and re-animators are also fairly good choices. Since we are playing Black obviously the next choice is to pick its friend. In this case, it'll Red and/or Green.

Green offers us a few friendly cards such as Life from the Loam, Roar of the Wurm, as well as Recollect type cards. Red gives us the full arsenal of the Rakdos and allows us to make an army, so for now we’ll go with a tri-color deck - Red, Black, and Green. Our army will be a giant will be composed of graveyard dwellers and Rakdos’ minions.

So in the end, Red didn't bring much, but the few things it did bring are nice. An Anger in the grave is a face waiting to be smashed. It's one thing to Roar of the Wurm on turn 4, but to have it hasted and/or trampling with hellbent double damage...well that's just evil. Fiery Temper can be a cheap 3 or 6 damage, while the Jagged Poppet and Augermage keep everyone hellbent like Rakdos willed.

How to play this is dependant on our staring hand, but the ideal play is from the get go to unleash a full blast Last Rites or a slightly more deviant Delirium Skeins. Don't be scared to discard, it's what we set out to do, and by doing so we empower ourselves. The goal is to get both hands down as soon as possible, stalling to play things out will give your opponent more time to establish tempo. It should be fairly obvious what to discard in most cases, and the deck is highly moddable with dredge and reanimation cards replacing cards you don't have or like. Of course if you see Leyline of the Void drop you'll be at a serious disadvantage.

Once we establish our hellbent and ruin our opponent’s hand, it’s merely a matter of getting our creatures out of the graveyard or into play. We have the advantage though, because they will be able to not play cards, and we’ll do double damage. This is why it's important that we sacrifice our hand regardless of the cost, because we will be able to recover from the blow much faster than our opponent.

Well that's it for Lyzolda. Hopefully you got some ideas on how to use her. She's perfect for decks like Ire of Kaminari, Rakdos guild decks, and of course a faster Megrim deck. The most important thing is if you use Lyzolda, is that you play out your hand as fast as possible. Without hellbent, we might as well not even be playing with an avatar.

One's Decree

As a card, Oni of the Wild Places hasn't seen much play. However when you choose him as your avatar, you’ll empower any aggro deck into new found heights. By playing this guy we get +1 to our hand which is very good, -2 to our life which isn't that bad, and all our creatures get haste. The result of these abilities all together is it can turn any card into a makeshift Glitterfang or Viashino Sandstalker, which is both a blessing and a curse. The one difference between our “Glitterfangs” is that they will return at the beginning our upkeep instead of the end of our turn.

Because of the timing we can't exploit cards like Spark Elementals or Ball Lightning, but we can definitely abuse upkeep and untap costs. The other obvious choice for creatures to return back to our hand is creatures that do things as they are played. These basic things at a glance bring several cards to mind: Phyrexian Colossus, Ravenous Rats, Duplicant, Sheltering Ancient.

To play Oni is to guarantee you play an aggro deck. The other option is that we play a control – aggro deck that uses things like the Battlemages. The first style of Oni we're going to go with is exploiting creatures that unleash abilities as they come into play. There's all kinds of ways we could do this, but I feel like there's one card that can't be ignored: Eternal Witness.

The second step is to identify what colors to play. In this case, we're going with all 5, since every color has something powerful to offer to us. The basic deck we are creating is a hybrid of a two-headed giant generic deck. We will be using cards that are essentially fillers to stall and delay until we hit our win condition. This deck is pricy, so you may find it unplayable for your needs.

This can be a really hard deck to make if you don't have the cards. Fortunately we can economize if necessary – Nekrataal is an economy Duplicant, Decree of Justice can be subbed out for a Storm Herd, Diabolic Tutors or transmutes for Gifts, Sakura-Tribe Elders for Solemn, etc. The only really important card is Mirari's Wake as it's one-sided and allows you to play the huge cost of the spells faster. I guess a Heartbeat of Spring could work if you had to.

Early on Oni will allow you to return Elves and Solemn for more land. As the game progresses and Wake is kept in play, Duplicants and Kavus will keep down creatures, until the Decree of Justice finishes the job. Eternal Witness of course will be the bane of your opponents existence bringing back non-stop the toolbox cards you need. With Oni of the Wild Places as our avatar, the Storm Herd or Justice-tokens have haste and will be very difficult to handle without dieing.

This is an amazing deck for multiplayer and unless your opponent is playing a weenie speed kill deck can hang 1 v 1.

Wild Goblin Siege

The next deck we'll experiment with is a deck that already exists as well and is extremely popular by casual gamers and pros alike. If you like Tribal decks its also a deck you may already have the pieces for, it’s the goblin tribe.

Sure Goblins are fast and a lot have haste already, but Oni brings a few things to the table that help to eliminate the goblin drawback - a board wipe. Oni goblins return to the hand and thus a few cards can keep the Goblin onslaught going. A goblin onslaught is a horrible thing to face, but with Oni, we have two onslaughts – one in the hand, the other in the field.

Wow, okay, that's a whole lot of goblins. First thing you'll notice is usual suspects are gone. There are no goblins with haste, since all our creatures already have haste, we don't need them. Second thing you'll notice is we're running light on land, and virtually no spells. This is because we generally regard land as a bad draw, we need 3 mana to do everything we need to do.

Our goal is the same as with all goblin decks. We want them dead before Wrath of God or Evacuation is even playable. However if the dreaded board wipe does hit, we will always have a Recruiter or Ringleader in our hand. It’s our insurance policy, and it’s the obvious card to return to our hand. We also have some new top goblins that normally aren’t that useful.

With every single goblin being hasted here's our new Top 5 Oni Goblins:

5. Goblin Cohort - A 2/2 for 1 mana. Since we always return a creature, we always have one to cast, so our cohort can almost always attack. Savannah Lions eat your heart out.

4. Goblin Recruiter - Why draw a mountain after we have 3 or 4? Let's set up the nastiest casting order we can come up with. Once we set it up, we’ll return him back to our hand next turn to ensure we can reorder if the situation changes. For 2 mana, he’s an all powerful draw organizer.

3. Goblin Warchief - Sure we already have haste, but we need the less cost to cast. To ensure our Recruiters are doing their job at economy prices. The more Warchiefs we have out, the more goblins we can cast each turn.

2. Goblin Ringleader - While normally Ringleaders mean you'll probably get 1 or 2 goblins, in this case we're most likely getting 3, and an amazing chance at getting 4. Just as with the Recruiter, we always want one in our hand, so once we cast one, we’ll return him back on the next turn. Nothing like a WoG-insurance policy.

1. Goblin Lackey - If he's in your starting hand, you instantly double your goblin count on turn 1. If you have a Siege-Gang Commander and him in your starting hand, we’ll have so many goblins that the game will be over as soon as it started. The sheer power of this guy to accelerate an extremely fast deck makes him the #1 goblin.

Just to give you an example of how powerful this goblin deck is, enjoy the following starting hand:
Mountain – Mountain – Mountain - Goblin Lackey – Seige-Gang Commander – Goblin Cohort – Goblin Piledriver – Brightstone Ritual

Turn 1:
Goblin Lackey attacks.
Goblin Siege Commander & 3 tokens come into play.
1 Damage Total.

Turn 2:
Draw Ringleader
Goblin Siege Commander returns to hand.
Brightstone Ritual for 4 mana cast the Cohort, Piledriver, Ringleader
Attack for Lackey (1), Cohort (2), 3 Tokens (3), Ringleader (1), Piledriver (13)
20 Damage total
Put Siege Gang into play again for 3 more tokens.

That’s turn 2. We have done 21 damage if they have no blockers. Do you see the potential for the Oni Goblins yet? Hopefully not everyone will bring this to the Vanguard tournament this Saturday.

Oni One More...

Gruul-type Zoo decks are already notorious for how fast the creatures come out and how big they are. Oni of the Wild Places however brings us to a whole new level, beyond the obvious ouchiness of haste. There is the simple fact that we can avoid negative effects of certain creatures with our big red Oni.

Well here's the thing. It looks like a standard Gruul deck except a few special things. There are 2 massive cards you don't see played often: Sheltering Ancient and Cosmic Larva. Due to their horrid upkeeps, most people stay away from them, however we have no plans on paying any upkeeps today. Since we can bounce them before we have to pay the upkeep they are our Glitterfangs and Sandstalkers on crack. Think about it a second and let it sink in. Sheltering Ancient is a 1G - 5/5 hasted trampler and Cosmic Larva is a RR1 7/6 hasted trampler. Ouch is the only word.

This deck plays differently then Gruul in that your opponent never knows what to expect. Will you cast creatures to keep or will you throw a massive trampler into the fold? Once you have 4 mana or more you all of a sudden begin playing your Gruul creatures along with your trample masses.

The other unique card here is the Stoneshaker Shaman, since our mana is tied up recasting creatures and throwing down new ones. We force our opponents to do it as well. This helps keep counter decks at bay and can force a lot of damage from self-inflicted mana burn.

That does it for Oni of the Wild Places. As you can see he brings a unique aspect to creature based damage. While an unprepared deck may see the return to hand aspect as a major downside, good planning can turn it into something beyond compare. If you're looking to empower your creature aggro decks look no further than Oni as your Vanguard.

Higure the leader of the ninjas is a card that represents ultimate frustration. As ninjas go, they bounce in and out of play, are hard to deal with, and Higure keeps them coming and coming. As an avatar, he's definitely unique, and with planning, extremely powerful. Sure it’s a random choice, but if there are no bad creatures in the deck there’s no bad random choice.

The obvious note here is we have to deal combat damage. The easiest method of course will be to take advantage of evasion on low cost creatures. Since he's the ninja lord, the first deck we use will be a popular new tribe – ninjas.

Okay, ninjas do what ninjas do. They come in from the early game evaders, and create a fast tempo for you, while slowing down your opponent’s tempo. Ninjas are very adept at avoiding damage and keeping opponents at bay while here every hit is bringing us an effect and a creature. This non-stop weenie assault will keep the opponent replaying his cards and dealing with ninja after ninja. The first Ornithopter or Infiltrator making it across is vital, but after that it's just a matter of flooding him out of cards, creatures, and the game.

We also have one utility spell at our command – Recoil. It’s my absolute favorite bounce ever, as it bounces and forces a discard. This card is useful if he gets up a blocker we need to get around. Bounce it, attack, return to ninja business. If you don’t like Recoil or the Ronin Warclub, add whatever you want; the core of our deck is the creature tempo.

Shadowmancer.

Next up for Higure, we'll experiment with a mechanic many people have loathed, and which will see a return after Time Spiral hits - Shadow.

While not available in MTGO, you can however take advantage of it in paper and other online services. The deck premise is simple. If we play with all shadow creatures, we will most likely be hitting every single turn every single time, which means we'll be flooding more and more with creatures. The only thing that can hold us back is our mana. To deal with this we can either go mono black with Cabal Coffers for acceleration, or go black and white for the control.

Shadow creatures do have a weakness though – they have absolutely no toughness. With a 1 toughness a single Goblin Sharpshooter or Screams from Within, can have a picnic on our army in a single turn. We can either augment with Glorious Anthems, or just roll the dice that they won't have a wiper. We will however bring wipe insurance since our army is our sole offense.

The deck plays simple, and explodes massively. The chance of your opponent being able to block your shadow onslaught is low, and if you drop Coffers down you should be able to play out more creatures than your opponent can handle after turn 5. Leyline of the Void and Patriarch’s Bidding will be your anti-Wrath of God, and will also make the discarded creatures (and you will have to discard due to the sheer amount of creatures you get) beneficial. Your strategy is to attack non-stop with ever multiplying unblockable attackers.

Up the Yin Yang...

However, as unsubtle as the Black version is, its rage can be subdued. A simple Ghostly Prison or Arcane Laboratory can slow your horde of shadow down. That's the drawback to mono-black shadow. However if we splash White we all of a sudden double our creature pool as well as getting some control of our own.

It essentially plays the same as the other deck. Second Sunrise will protect your board, and you now have 10 ways to handle enchantments and artifacts. What you gain in control however, you lose in explosive power. Granted you keep laying down creatures each turn, but you definitely aren't going to be dropping down as many as you will in mono-black. But that’s the trade off, you trade sheer aggro driven tempo, for protection of the very same tempo.  

That's it for Higure. I gave you two different ideas and 3 different decks to work off for him. He can empower any creature deck to new heights, but without some kind of catch may not be able to keep up with the sheer speed of Oni of the Wild Places in terms of aggression. It’s hard to say who handles aggro decks better – Oni or Higure, but both bring some definitely advantages to the table.

It's hard of what to make of Sakashima. It's a Clone, yet not a Clone, a Doppelganger, but not quite. The avatar is the same way, any of our creatures can become any creature on the board, but not really. This has amazing potential and few limitations. Our hand and life changes aren't anything of note, so as usual our only concern is the ability itself.

The first concept we'll be working on with Sakashima is a standard deck that is making rounds casually and in tournaments. Ghazi-Glare.

Why Ghazi-Glare?

The obvious is the sheer amount of creatures that get created and the amount of mana it has extra. Since Sakashima can affect tokens and legends, we can do just about whatever we want. With Ghazi-Glare we can transform the countless tokens into something more viable.

This plays like a Ghazi-Glare deck using Subdual to control as necessary, but where it differs is that all our tokens are going to become our big boys. Its one thing to play a Yosei it’s another to play it and clone it 5 times. Because we can clone legends, since names remain the same, we can have multiple copies of them. Beyond that, we can transform our tokens into Verdant Forces which create more tokens, which create more Verdant Forces which … Also Plated Slagwurm can be copied to make them untargetable, as well as 8/8.

Mana isn't a problem as we have the Lawnmower Elves and 2 different land fetchers. The land fetchers can transform into the Lawnmowers after they've done their job. While Seedborn Muse assures we have our opponent’s turn as well to do our transforming. Assuming a good hand we can easily have 6+ mana available for us on turn 4. With such a mana supply it’s only a few turns before we can start transforming our creatures into juggernauts.

We want an Evolution!

The next way we'll use Sakashima is to take the biomancers of the Simic Guild and teach them how to really evolve their creatures. By abusing the Graft mechanic with Sakashima, we'll learn why Graft is to be feared when used properly.

The biggest thing about the Simic Guild is that its creatures come into play as 0/0's with +1/+1 counters. Here's the question though. What happens when we transmute those creatures into non-Simic creatures? We retain the +1/+1 counters and get the new creatures power and toughness. The obvious abuse situation here is to transmute the non-combat Vigean Hydropon into something like a Silhana Ledgewalker for a 6/6 with evasion.

Two other transform choices we have that are interesting are the Phantom Tiger and the Vinelasher Kudzu. Phantom Tiger will make our creatures degenerate when hit, but will make them live longer. Kudzu will make them grow even further whenever a land comes into play. The non-Simic and Simic creatures you choose are up to you, but you can see how to do it, the key is to leave open mana to be casting and transmforming. You also can use the Ledgewalker to abuse the stack. Read up on abusing the stack here: CV: Sack the Rack on the Stack

Also it’s important to note that we don't have to limit ourselves to our creatures only. Any creature on the board is fair game. If they drop a Rumbling Slum, turn our counter hoarding creatures into a Slum with +1/+1 counters.

Bring it On!

The next way we'll abuse Sakashima is to build on two ideas we've already hit on. The idea we are taking on from the first deck is that we can transform tokens into token generators creating an exponential explosion of large creatures. The second idea we will use is that will abuse certain mechanics to help protect or empower our creatures. The shenanigans that we enlist here will be beyond compare. We're going to go all over with this one, but most importantly we're going to bring it.

This deck is 5 colors with a focus on basic lands and the Forest duals of Ravinca. The game plan is to accelerate mana early on, and then wipe the board. All our early casts can chump block or transform later on. Once we get a few cards out that produce tokens we begin the process of exponentially accelerating creature production. In other decks, we wanted to preserve our creatures to transform them up; in this case we want to preserve our life total so we don’t get annihilated before we even begin to play.

We have 3 different token producers. Bringer of the Green Dawn creates a single token for us each turn, Verdant Force creates 1 each and every turn, and Hazezon puts out a ton of tokens. By making our tokens into their daddies we are amassing a giant army at a mere 2 colorless a piece. The biggest thing is to survive until we can amass this self replicating force.

Sakashima is a very fun avatar to play with. He has a lot of tricks up his devious sleeves, and lets face it some of the abuses I showed you are quite powerful. There is one important thing to remember when playing as Sakashima. The name is retained on cloned creatures allowing you to skate by the legend rule. If, for instance, you have 2 Kird Apes and you copy a Yosei with one Kird Ape it won’t die to the legend rule. However, if you then transform the other Kird Ape into the Yosei, both of the Kird Apes will die to the legend rule, but not the original Yosei.

And another final warning about Sakashima, don’t transform a creature you want to be able to transform back into. If you have a Royal Assassin and a Craw Wurm and want to make your Assassin beefy, you won’t be able to transform back into the Assassin unless there’s another Assassin in play. Even though names are retained, once the card becomes a copy of a card it’s that card minus the name. So if you try to copy a Royal Assassin that is a copy of a Craw Wurm, you end up with a Craw Wurm, not an Assassin. Confused yet? Good.

Okay, the first thing is - Huh? Are you confused after reading that? I was at first. It seems to contradict itself. Well it doesn't - any creature you have anywhere is of the chosen additional type. That means you have a tribe that is unified despite having possibly nothing in common.

Is your creature ever not of the chosen type? Yes.

1. If it’s removed from the game, it loses the additional type.
2. If an opponent controls it, it loses the additional type.
3. It’s on the stack as something besides a spell. (for instance returning to play after an Astral Slide)

The obvious usage of this card is to take advantage of creature type specific spells such as Goblin King and Soulless One on non-tribe creatures. This is the obvious and best idea as well. So basically the plan will be to find a good tribe and augment it with non-tribe cards. The obvious tribes are goblins, elves, and zombies. However, these tribes don’t really need much help. They are quite capable on their own, without support.

The tribe we will empower instead of zombies will be clerics, because they are strong, but they could always use a boost. However, instead of augmenting them with non-cleric cards, we’re going to use the standard cleric fare. That’s right we’re playing clerics, naming the cleric tribe, and playing almost entirely cleric cards. Seems like a waste? Watch and see.

First off, I know what you're saying; this looks like pretty standard cleric tribe. However, I said we were going to empower it, not revolutionize it. By choosing cleric as our type we have a few key things happen:

1. Rotlung Reanimator creates zombie clerics
2. All our cycle creatures are clerics in the yard.
3. Any card Scion of Darkness brings to us is a cleric

So now, if a Rotlung token dies it comes back as another token. If we have 2 Rotlungs out, we get 2 tokens. Rotlung was a pain before, now it's a truly unstoppable force. The second play style we are doing is we are cycling a lot. This is to load our graveyard and mana accelerate. Why? We want to Decree and we want to use Patriarch’s Bidding. Since everything we have a cleric, everything comes back when we choose cleric, this means the Eternal Dragon, Scion of Darkness, and Twisted Abomination as well. Choosing cleric still sound stupid?

This is another deck that can be modded as you deem necessary. If you have a favorite cleric that didn't make it there are obvious choices to replace. You can also bring in other things that aren't clerics, and still have them be clerics if you really want. The biggest card to make the deck nasty is Rotlung Reanimator, without it we lose a lot of the appeal clerics and Seshiro Avatar bring each other.

Flux Capacitor...

Now we will revolutionize a deck, but we're going to start where we just came from. There was a powerful thing about the cleric tribe that we will bring to our new tribe - The cycling into the graveyard. We’re going to draw cards, we’re going to get lots of mana, and we’re going to have a massive creature filled graveyard. We’re also going to do it for free with Fluctuator.

The first thing you'll notice is we're relying on two cards. Fluctuator and Patriarch’s Bidding to make our deck explode. Do we absolutely have to have them? No, but it'll be a battle without them. It's very important to pray that they aren't Cranial Extract or Meddling Mage them out of play. If we do lose Fluctuator and Patriarch’s Bidding, you’ll have to hard cast the creatures.

When the deck does work it works fast and hard. Once Fluctuator is down, we can essentially cycle straight into a Bidding and cast it almost immediately. The tribe you choose is up to you, because it doesn’t matter. We just want them unified as a single tribe for the Bidding, and the Bidding alone. So choose chicken or sheep for hilarity if you want.

The dual lands aren't necessary, but are helpful since you really need to get 2 Black mana to cast Bidding. So keep that in mind when you start economizing your deck. If you go 4 of each basic land you risk getting stuck with no Swamps. So the more Black producers you remove, the more you risky not being able to bid.

Beastly Seshiro.

The last way we'll use Seshiro is to empower one of the weakest tribes. We won't be playing as the tribe, but instead using cards associated with it to go insane. The tribe we will use are the beasts. Beasts have been used to some success in the past, however they lack anything but girth and generally are too slow to be completive.

Since we are going beasts, it’s important to choose the right colors - Red and Green. Even though we won't use a whole lot of beasts, we will need their enable cards to make our new Meta-Tribe work. By playing outside of the tribe we will hope speed up the beasts and give them the speed and ability they are lacking.

What can I say about this deck besides it should appeal to Johnny players. It's a giant combo. Every card interacts with another in some way, there are very few "just for the heck of it"s. Imagine the power of Words of Wilding and Wirewood Savage. You can create as many 2/2 beasts for each mana you have. If you have Aether Flash you're nuking for 4 damage each and every single time you put one of them into play.

Ulasht, Firecat Blitz, and One Dozen Eyes are beast makers that also act as massive nukes and card draws with the right cards out. Baloth can eat any creature, any time for 4 life. How do beasts look now? They're leaner, they're faster, and they're definitely meaner. It'll definitely surprise anyone it encounters, and if any one of the combos goes off your opponent will be decimated before they can react.

Well that's it for Seshiro, there are a few other things I didn't cover, but use your imagination, you've seen the potential to put existing tribes into overdrive, create a meta-tribe, and to empower a weaker tribe. There is one tribe I would like to cover, but I'm afraid I wouldn't give it justice. Imagine slivers and spikes unified. Shiver. Hold yourself, and try to make the nastiest sliver-spike deck you can.

When Coldsnap came out, people looked for decent cards in the mix, many agreed the most interesting and perhaps useful card was Haakon. He took an already popular creature type and made it much more interesting. The trick of course was getting him into the graveyard. While playing as Haakon, we have a distinct advantage. All our creatures have two lives before dieing, and we don’t have to get Haakon into the graveyard.

There is a -3 to life and to play a graveyard creature costs a life, so our life total will dip low very fast. This is something we haven’t had to consider before, but will take into account now. The hand is the same, and the ability is powerful, so lets try to figure something out. The first thing we want to do is figure out how we can abuse the double life, besides the general annoyance of recursion.

The first way we’ll attempt to use Haakon is by using creatures that tend to kill themselves. They are generally cheap, fun, and have powerful effects since the cost is their own life. However, there is a deck doing that right now. So here we go:

Okay, what we have here is the first really standard legal deck I’ve offered you. This means it can be empowered by extended cards if you choose such as Sengir Autocrat. However, it is a fusion of Nantuko Husk and Ghost Dad. The reason for this is, with all the sacrificing we are doing, and with Haakon’s recursion of creatures, there is ample food.

We have a major concern though. Our ability costs us a life and we’re already starting at 17. Add in Bob’s hits, and we need the extra life gain. Soul Warden, Thief of Hope, and Ghost Council will help with this, but if you find this gradual death tick too much, remove Dark Confidant and move in Belfry Spirit.

Scourge or what?

The next deck we will take advantage of is a mill deck. Since we can return from the graveyard all of our creatures essentially have flashback. We are going to do some very hard and very furious milling on both sides. This will frustrate our opponent, but for us, we’ll have the smile of a long dead zombie knight.

Here's the thing: we want to get Mesmeric Orb and Dreamborn Muse out as soon as possible.

Once these are in play, our graveyard accelerates and we have so much tempo they won’t be able to keep up. Eternal Witness, Moriok Scavengers, and Loaming Shaman give us the ultimate in protection and retrieval. We have two ways to kill, either they mill out, which will be fast with multiple Muses and Orbs, or our Vulturous Zombie returns from the dead to grow to massive proportions.
 

The last deck we’ll have is inspired by none other than Michael Jackson himself. It's thriller time.

Who likes zombies dancing? I know I do. It's hilarious.

So I bring you:

It's basically an Astral Slide deck that focuses more on creature cycles than other cycle spells. By putting cycling creatures into the yard, we can easily cast them when we have the mana. Also, a nifty part of Astral Slide is that we can use it on our own creatures to wipe away that nasty zombie knight status that would otherwise erase them from existence on death.

Hence the Haakon Slide. We're dancing around the negative aspects of Haakon using a fun deck many already play. If anything, you can take out the Krosan Colossus and Silent Specter to swap in Akroma’s Vengeance and Wrath of God.

Okay, the final avatar we will play with is the weirdest, and as such we'll build the weirdest deck we can around it. The hand size is only 6 which hurts, but we get 28 life which is going to be very useful. The deck I will share with you for Karona takes her essence and makes it true - a confused lost being not knowing what or who she is; we will bring her forth into the world as this truly confused being.

I'll be very honest: we're not playing to win. We're playing to laugh. We're playing to frustrate and confuse everyone even ourselves. This is best if we bring it to a FFA deck to maximize the chaos Karona brings. We want everyone to hate us, because that's what makes Karona fun, the sheer inability to accomplish anything. The utter chaos.

As you can see nothing is safe in this deck. We're going to keep hands constantly changing, permanents dying randomly, targets changing non-stop, and creatures swapping around. We're even going to attack the turn order itself. There are no calculated plans against or in this deck, merely rolls of the dice. You may do what you wanted, or you may end up doing something completely opposite.

And that's how Karona likes it. Unable to grip what exactly she is, we're going to share that frustration with everyone else. Sure we'll be targeted hard in any game we play, but we'll go out with a smile on our face knowing everyone was unhappy with us being there. You can try to make Karona a powerhouse avatar if you want, but it's just not as fun.

That does it for the Vanguard decks. Hopefully you see some basic and advanced ways to use the Avatars to your advantage. I only covered 7 of the avatars. There are so many more out there, and each new set gives us 2 more. I look forward to seeing the results of the Vanguard tournament - someone play my Oni Goblins for me as I’ll be out of town, I'm interested if anything can stop them.

P.S. Don't forget to sign up for the Vanguard Tournament being held this Saturday.  Linked to the right.

~Cashew~

You can discuss this article in the MDV forums here.

Articles Spotlights from 2006
The Games People Play - Tactical Magic.
If I worked at R&D
The Beginner’s Guide to Rogue
Druid Week Primer
Opting In: Ravnica
MDV Idol: Finale!
Avatar Week Primer
Delusions of Mediocrity: Getting Stuffy in Here.
Raiding Ravnica: Guildmages and You!
Lands-More than Mana: Part One