Well people, here we are for the second part of my vanguard article. Hopefully you managed to read through the first article. If not I suggest you go back and read it. There were some fairly good decks in there! But enough about the past, on to the future!

So at the trade of a huge amount of health, we kill anything that hits us. Well we can’t force a creature to strike us easily, but we can make it the only option open to our opponent. But with such a low life total, we can’t take that many hits; so we need to make the hits weaker or force the opponent to use very few creatures. The aim of this deck appears to be board control or lockdown. But which one, what would be easier to construct and hold?

This deck is lockdowns your opponent and gives them very little option one what they’re going to do. With only one creature being able to attack and block each turn, and all creatures with power three and above being tapped down permanently thanks to the Meekstone, they cannot pull their Colossuses or Rhodes on you. But wait; isn’t our own beat stick, Iridescent Angel over three power? No problem; thanks to Puppeteer, we can untap him at the end of turn, so that we have the perfect blocker and an attacker that can’t be blocked due to protection from all colours. And if you pull a privileged position out, then most opponents will concede if they know what’s good for them! And to make matters worst, with a combination of propaganda and ghostly prisons they will have to play to even strike you with their one creature. When I last played this deck against one of my friends, he used one word to describe this deck: Nasty!

Sacrifice a permanent to return a creature to its controller’s hand; effectively everything you control is an Unsummon on legs! But we need spare permanents to take advantage of this fact, and we need to produce them in large quantities. I’m sure by now most of you have come to the same conclusion I have: this is going to be a token deck. The question is; what tokens are we going to produce. Which one can be produced at an amazing rate? Well, I’m going to show many of you out there and create a deck in standard that will produce an immense amount of our favourite little green token. That’s right; we’re going for a saproling token deck!

I’ll give you a minute; let you consider this deck….Okay! Can’t wait anymore, this deck is sweet when it gets going; it just produces too many token that normally you wouldn’t have any use for them. Thanks to Barrin, all those little guys become the answer to any creature you opponent plays unless it is Untargetable, not naming one annoying spider in standard. The combo pieces are the drover, the wings, doubling season and the curio; Drover flies over and hits for two, producing four tokens. You then trigger the curio, bouncing all four tokens out of play and place eight +1/+1 tokens on the drover. Repeat until your opponent cannot take it anymore. And the wonderful thing is; say you have pulled the wings but no creature to play with, just stick it on your opponent’s creature! You still get the tokens, which you can use to mob your opponent. The fists and armors are present to give the token engine a real kick start; a flying trampler that gets +1/+1 for each forest you control; which produces one token (or more) for each point of damage and then can (possibly) get bigger for each one of those tokens is a supreme being in my mind.

Damage anything, gain life; a wonderful little ability really. The truth is, this man could be used with the above deck with a great match up but that would very boring and a cop out, some we need a new deck idea that can deal damage all over the place with creatures, and then takes advantage of our gained life. People, I now sink to the tactic that I hate the most; white weenies.

We’re going for one thing here people; life gain. With the ability to drop large numbers of little creatures you can start the life gain fairly quickly, so that when you drop the Test of Endurance you’ll be most if not all the way to your fifty target. The Martyr’s are beautiful cards and the white one makes a brilliant choice for this deck, with the ability to net you a max of 27 life in one go, just over half your target total. And in the unfortunate event your opponent drags you into a creature battle, you have the ability to fight it; thanks to Glorious Anthem and Knighthood. You can even turn their attack against them with Blessed Reversal, and then sacrifice a Kami of False Hope. End result, they have given you two life for each creature that attacked!

We have become the shield for our creatures, a reversal of roles thanks to this guy. But he gives you the bonus life to make it work, and then some! So we can save our creatures from damage, but they can still be destroyed or removed from play. I feel we need to take advantage of this life total, rather than the ability itself; though it may come in handy as a backup plan. So we want to take advantage of life again, but not in the same way; too boring if we did.

The main play in this deck is the Phyrexian Processor, by using your life you make a big, bad as can be minion which if it’s going to be destroyed or removed, you can sacrifice with the chisel. And with so many nice legendary minion creatures, our ability comes to the rescue as we can save them from being burned or pinged out of play. But just because we have a huge life total doesn’t mean we can mess around, go for the jugular as soon as possible, else you’ll find yourself running out of means to kill your opponent.

So we can keep returning creatures from our graveyard to our hand, at a cost of three mana a go. So we need to take advantage of creatures going to our graveyard, so sacrificing seems to be the overall theme here doesn’t it? So we’re going to be sacrificing creature in order to gain some kind of advantage.

The principle of this deck is really simple, sacrifice creatures through the Rusalka to ping them for damage with the Stalking Vengeance. The Braid of Fire and Captive Flame fuels the mechanic; and the Braid of Fire allows you to gather the power needed to return those creatures. The Zubera’s work wonders in the mechanic as well, and because you can just keep recycling them, the numbers that disappear in one turn could be more than four. The mox’s and rites are there to help you pull the deck out with speed, before your opponent can pull out his Ivory Mask or Life Gaining Mechanic hopefully.

Creature hate to the max, but remember that bury is an old term for destroy so indestructible creatures are safe. We can surely take advantage of this fact, and ruin our opponents’ creature features. Maybe we can use the ability beyond its normal capacity; we can change things into creatures then kill them.

This card screamed ‘ping’ at me, as it didn’t specify combat damage. And with eight cards to untap all creatures you control, there is going to be a lot of pinging going on. And we don’t need to worry about them hitting us, what with eight cards to stop the damage being dealt to you, just sit back and relax. But possibly the most important combo to point out is with Jolrael; by turning your opponents’ lands into creatures you can forever keep tabs on their mana pool. It’s a form of control without a single Counterspell in sight! And just for the annoyance factor, you have four Breaking Wave’s to hold up your opponent; though the cost is quite high it can come through in a pinch.

All my spells are cheaper by one; it’s like an improved version of Helm of Awakening! So we can play out our deck slightly faster, but how to benefit from this? I’m thinking back a while now, when there was a big discuss on the forum about Vampire, Angel and Demon tribal decks; could they be achieved? Maybe with the help of this Vanguard card they can be. After all, Vanguard is an enhancer as well as a stand alone format; you can play Tribal Vanguard, or even Prismatic Vanguard.

With the aid of our vanguard card, tithe and the pearl medallions; we are able to play angels incredible fast. We also have eight cards to hold up our opponents creatures, and there is a nice little angel only combo in this deck; Fallen Angel + Angel of Despair + Reya Dawnbringer. All you do is attack with the Fallen Angel, sacrificing the Angel of Despair to it. Next upkeep, you pull the Angel of Despair out of your graveyard into play with Reya, and then simply repeat until you killed out all your opponents’ options. But say your opponents playing a Counterspell deck, how do we overcome that? Thanks to the wording of both the Cryptic Gateway and Dragon Arch, our creatures aren’t cast and so cannot be countered!

Unless your opponent is playing with shadow creatures, this essentially says ‘All creatures you control are unblockable’. Unblockable creatures make for fun party tricks, allows us to trigger a large number of cool effect. Please allow me to demonstrate….

You’ll notice each creature has an ability that triggers when they hit an opponent, save the Ornithopter. And here comes the question; why even run the Ornithopter? Well my friends on turn one you drop your free Ornithopter and a swamp, and then play culling the weak. Suddenly you have four mana on turn one to play with, more if your holding onto either of the other rituals. You can’t ask for more speed than that!

Well, I think we need another break here people; I can see a few of you falling asleep at the back. Till next time folks, this is Luthervamplord; signing off.

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