Today we have a special treat for all you casual gamers. Potatobrain has put together another article for the Writer's Guild, notching another score in what we hope will be a long and prosperous career. Join him while he takes you through his deckbuilding process and let him know how you feel in the forums. Enjoy!

Hey guys, and welcome to the column! I am the almighty Potatobrain, and it is my pleasure to invite you into my wonderful world of wacky deck building. In this week’s column, I have decided to showcase two decks that I am very fond of. The first is a mono-green tribal deck that I built years ago, put aside for a little while, and then recently revived in honor of some amazing new additions. It’s interesting because it will give you some insight as to how I evolve decks that don’t work properly. Also, it lets me reference Spaceballs whenever I talk about it (yes, Spaceballs is a great movie; if you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself a favor and go rent it now). The second deck is a completely different story. It is the only deck I have ever built that worked perfectly on the first try. I’m very proud of it, and hope you will enjoy its non-traditional semi-tribalism.

So let’s get started. Any idea what the first tribe is? No? Allow me to give you a hint:
in Spaceballs, Lone Starr and Barf rescue the princess of which planet?

“Planet Druidia's in sight, sir.”

That’s right kiddies, this first mono-green deck is a tribal Druid deck; but I’m getting ahead of myself. The story actually begins five years ago at the height of the Onslaught block. The Tribal theme was making me very excited: goblins, elves, zombies, mistforms… Ah, what a great time! I started becoming very interested in creature types and began to pay attention to any card that mentioned them. One day, while looking through a friend’s binder, I came across Seton, Krosan Protector. I remember thinking about how nifty Seton was. Essentially, due to his wording, the ability he had was:

“All druids gain {tap}: add G to your mana pool. You may play this ability as though your druids have haste”

I knew then and there that it was time to build a druid deck to take advantage of such an amazing ability. With this goal in mind, I ran searches online and went through some card lists to find as many druids as I could (remember, dear reader, this was in the Before Time, when Gatherer did not exist). I ended up with a nice list of cards. I had Elvish Pioneer for turn one mana acceleration, Werebear for turn two acceleration, Seton’s Scout to block fliers, Nantuko Vigilante as my Naturalize guy, and Kamahl, Fist of Krosa as a finisher. An additional bonus was that once I achieved Threshold (you have Threshold as long as seven or more cards are in your graveyard), my Werebear and Seton’s Scout would go from a 1/1 and 2/1 to a 4/4 and 4/3 respectively. The list seemed solid, but unfortunately my deckbuilding process was not. I simply filled the deck with druids, threw in some Steely Resolve's to protect them, and that was that. Needless to say, the deck sucked. I would play tons of guys, and then stall on turn 4 because I had no hand. A single Wrath of God would destroy everything, and then I would have nothing on the board but lands. I realized then that the deck needed card draw. Hmmm, what cards would let me draw tons of cards if I have lots of creatures?

Answer: Slate of Ancestry!

The final deck looked something like this:

The deck was pretty good. A common opening looked like this:

Turn 1: Elvish Pioneer and two forests.
Turn 2: Forest, Seton, tap him and the pioneer to play Seton’s Scout.
Turn 3: Kamahl.
Turn 4: Attack with a trampling 7/6 and 5/4.

The deck had trouble against spot removal on my Seton, Krosan Protector and Kamahl, Fist of Krosa, as well as global death like Wrath of God or Pyroclasm. To counter this, I would usually activate the Slate of Ancestry as soon as I could, play out all my lands, and keep a hand full of creatures. That way if my opponent wiped the board, I could just replay my creatures all over again, reactivate the slate and come back from nothing in one turn. It was a golden age of prosperity, and Druidia was at peace.

Then my friends started playing with Worship, and everything went to hell. I repeatedly lost to Worship plus a 1/1 creature. What was I supposed to do? Green didn’t have the spot removal that I needed to defeat my evil friends (well, technically it did, but I thought Desert Twister was crap at the time). I figured Nantuko Vigilante would be enough to destroy Worship, but whenever I needed him to kill my opponent’s enchantments, he was stopped by a Counterspell. Brokenhearted, I laid the druids aside, waiting for the day a new and awesome card would come and help me restore Druidia to its former glory.

“Funny, she doesn't look Druish.”

Four years later, a new card made me want to revive Druidia. Her name was Gilt-Leaf Archdruid. Description? Five mana for a 3/3 that let me draw a card EVERY TIME I PLAYED A DRUID! Not only that, but I could also play those druids and tap them for mana right away to play EVEN MORE DRUIDS! No more Slate of Ancestry for me. I built up a new deck that looked something like this:

This was my time to shine! The druids were finally back for revenge! With their new lord, they were unstoppable! I shuffled up and played a first game that looked something like this:

Turn 1: Forest, Elvish Pioneer add a Forest.
Turn 2: Forest, Seton, tap him and the Pioneer to play Seton’s Scout.
Turn 3: Kamahl.
Turn 4: Attack with a trampling 7/6 and 5/4.

“Hahahahah! What are you going to do now, Mr. Osborne?!” I exclaimed, feverishly delirious.

Mr. Osborne said nothing. He merely tapped three mana, played Seething Song and Rogue Thief. I picked up the Rogue, read it, and proceeded to spew forth an insane amount of profanity. How the heck could this be happening again?! I modified the deck so that I wouldn’t lose to any more stupid Worships or its friends, how could I lose to the same thing I lost to five years ago? What? You mean I didn’t put any spot removal in the deck? Oh yea, you’re right. I didn’t. No wonder I lost to the same thing. Luckily for me, some new cards had been printed that tickled me in wonderful ways. So then I modified the deck, and ended up with the following final version:

In this new version, I have finally addressed all of the problems that were caused by Wrath of God and friends in the form of Pattern of Rebirth. Pattern of Rebirth fights Wrath of God by letting me fetch my best creature when the creature it’s enchanting goes to the graveyard. It also helps me get guys into play faster by chump blocking with an enchanted Elvish Pioneer. Tower Above is my spot removal. It’s just amazing when you turn a 1/1 vanilla creature into a 5/5 beater that forces a creature to block. No more losing to Rogue Thief and/or Worship+Creature! You’ve already met my card drawing Druish Princess Gilt-Leaf Archdruid. She doubles as an awesome late-game finisher when combined with Kamahl: you just steal the opponent’s lands and attack with them. She also ensures that you won’t get Wrathed once you get seven druids out simply because your opponent won’t have 4 mana. Finally, last but not least, the two Llanowar Elves are there to ensure a consistent turn two Seton, Krosan Protector. This is now possible because Llanowar Elves became a druid in 9th edition!

Well, that covers the first mini-tribe. Not amazing, but pretty fun and exciting nonetheless. Let’s move on…

You know what I like the most?

Batties.

This next deck didn’t need much tweaking. In fact, I built it perfectly the first time. It was kind of awkward, not having to modify it. I always feel like I should clean up the decks a little after playtesting them for a while. Anyway, here’s how the deck got built: I was reading the Guildpact spoiler around the time of Ravnica block, and I discovered a card that needed many bats in play, a Batlord if you will. That card was Skeletal Vampire.

Skeletal Vampire does three things with bats

1. It puts two of them into play when it comes into play.
2. It sacrifices one bat to put two bats into play.
3. It sacrifices one bat to regenerate itself.

Although it doesn’t have the traditional +1/+1 granting ability that most lords have, it does have 3 other abilities that make it “lord” worthy.

So, I read the Skeletal Vampire's abilities and I thought to myself, “Hey, he needs bats in play. I know, I’ll build a bat deck!”. I went through the Gatherer spoiler, and these are the bats that I felt were worthy of being included in my deck:

1. Grimclaw Bats. It makes for a good finisher, and can stay alive in exchange for life and mana.
2. Blind Hunter. Because of its life gain haunt ability.

That was it. Pretty lame, isn’t it? What kind of useless tribe only has two good members? It appeared as though I was going to have to improvise. I ran a search again, this time for “bat creature token,” and I came up with Belfry Spirit. I now had four bat or bat-creating cards, which was hardly ideal grounds for a good deck. At this point, I did what I always do when I have a gap in my creatures: I added some utility.

It was quite clear that I was playing Black-White, so I began to add Black and White utility cards:

• Mortify, to get rid of enchantments and creatures.
• Vindicate, because I had a playset that I had gotten for cheap back in the Apocalypse era but never used.
• Night’s Whisper for cheap card-drawing, which also interacted well with Blind Hunter because of his life gain.

I had three more slots to fill. I hadn’t played much Black-White before, so I decided to go through the Guildpact spoiler again. I came upon two more little gems:

• Orzhov Pontiff, which either popped all of my opponent’s 1/1 critters or boosted all of mine (and with the quantity of bat tokens I was hoping to churn out, it would be a large boost).
• Teysa, Orzhov Scion, which was INSANE when combined with my Black token generating abilities. With Teysa in play, the Skeletal Vampire’s bat generating ability became “3BB, Sacrifice a Bat: Put two 1/1 Black Bat creature tokens with flying into play and a 1/1 White Spirit creature token with flying into play”. In other words, pay five mana and sacrifice a bat to put three tokens into play.

So, all of my tokens and creatures started off as Black, and when they died, I received White ones to replace them. Nice! The deck was pretty much ready at this point; it just needed a tiny bit more tweaking.

First off, the Orzhov Scion’s ability was awesome, but if I didn’t draw him, all of my creatures would be 1/1's, so I decided to include three Glorious Anthem to double up on his ability. Second, I wanted more tokens, so I included the ever amazing Raise the Alarm in the deck. A turn two Raise the Alarm into a turn 3 Glorious Anthem/Orzhov Scion will yield a very respectable four damage that people rarely want to block. Third, I had to remove the Mortify, because I had too many cards.

The end result was the following:

The deck is one of my favorites. It’s fast, consistent, gains life, gets around Worship (that’s right, Blind Hunter’s “loss of life” effect isn’t damage), plays tons of tokens, survives Wrath of God (Teysa’s ability will trigger even as she dies, so all of your Black creatures except for her get replaced by 1/1 fliers), removes creatures from the game, can Vindicate any problematic permanent, can play creatures as an instant when facing off against a Counterspell happy player thanks to Raise the Alarm, and best of all - it's full of Batties.

Oh, and the single Mortify is in there so that you almost have five Vindicates.

If you’re strapped for cash, you can easily replace the Vindicate with Mortify, the Glorious Anthem with Leonin Sun Standard, and the Tainted Field with more Swamps and Plains.

That about does it for now. Hoped you liked these decks and check back in a few weeks for some Reaper King action!

~Potatobrain~

You can discuss this article in the MDV forums here.
Find other articles by this author here.
Find other articles from this series here.

[ Back ] [ Home ] [ Up ] [ Next ]

Articles Spotlights from 2008:
A Fresh Perspective: Stasis - Part One.
The Apprentice Magician - Part Six.
Design on a Dime: The Lunch Meat Edition!
Fit the Flavor 2008 - FINALE!
The Games People Play - Market & EDH.
Sarpadian Empires, Vol VII: Foreword.
More Evil Than Evil.
Pauper Chronicles: Top O' the Morningtide to You!
Words from the Streetz: Uncommon and Common Magical Treasures.
The Writers Guild: The Inside Scoop.