|
Old Home Decks Combos Articles Visual Spoilers Art Features Links Search Forum |
|
|
|
|
One Card to Rule Them All: Forced Fruition by Streetz Whether you are a tournament or casual player, a Johnny, Timmy or whatever, you should be able to see something good in Forced Fruition. Unless, of course, your name is Amadeus. Forced Fruition is one of the crazy, wacky, Johnny enchantments Wizards of the Coast released (from Lorwyn anyway) and you shouldn’t be fooled. There are endless possibilities with this card; possibilities that are beyond just milling your opponent. Some of you may have already read about how it combos with Megrim or Underworld Dreams. However, did you stop to think for a moment what other cards might work well with it? In just reviewing the Gatherer card database for fifteen minutes I was able to find over ten other cards and/or strategies that will work really well with the card. If you were even slightly interested based on my intro, I would encourage you to read on. After all, this is a One Card to Rule Them All article... Oh, and Cashew will be rounding out the second half of the article with a second One Card to Rule Them All! Before I go on, some of you may not be familiar with the card. I understand that you can’t memorize every new card or read every article on every site, or even just on Magic Deck Vortex. Speaking of articles on MDV, if you haven’t checked out First Impressions: Lorwyn - Part 4 (BLUE) by Amadeus, I would encourage you to check out his rant. It is quite amazing. But I digress. Here’s my featured card:
Some mages in the past had to resort to generating huge amounts of mana to then dump the mana into a Braingeyser or Stroke of Genius and kill their opponent using the Mill Strategy. With Forced Fruition, all you have to do is play it and protect it. Assuming you play it turn four, your opponent has seven or less spells he or she can play before their library empties out. They better make those spells count! But as mentioned, the mill strategy isn’t the only strategy available to this card. You can pseudo-burn your opponents to death via cards like Underworld Dreams and Phyrexian Tyranny. You can utilize the fact that they will have to discard down to seven every turn and employ Megrim. You could even use your opponent’s large hand size to benefit you via Windfall and/or Mind’s Eye. Or, if you prefer the true Burn route, try Cerebral Vortex or Impatience! As you can see, there is more than meets the eye to Forced Fruition. It’s, as Chris Newton said in the Writers Guild, perhaps in line with cards like Mind Over Matter in terms of raw power. Mind you, expensive power, but power nonetheless. Powerful Dreams of Milling One of the cards I referenced earlier was Underworld Dreams. What’s terribly painful about this card in combination with Forced Fruition is the damage your opponent will inflict upon himself whenever he or she plays a spell. Forced Fruition will make your opponent draw seven cards when they play a spell, and Underworld Dreams will deal one damage to them for each card they draw. So while Fruition is depleting their deck contents, Underworld dreams is dealing seven damage to them for each spell they play. The following deck was found in the Gleemax forums (www.wizards.com) and was created by Halo_MTG:
Black/Blue for the win! This deck seems to be a control oriented deck using cards like Sudden Death, Cancel and Terror. However, it also seems like a mill deck with cards like Jester’s Scepter and Howling Mine. Despite this, we all know this is a combo deck with Underworld Dreams and Forced Fruition. Thus, it needs some control to keep the combo alive. The unfortunate side of this deck is that it is so mana intensive. There are no cards to compliment its intense mana requirements like Signets from Ravnica block. All it has is all eight dual lands and some basic Islands and Swamps. I can see this being a big problem in the mid to late game. It does have some nice control but will it sustain the aggressive natures of decks nowadays? Only you can tell that by play testing it. I do like how the deck sideboards in white to play cards like Oblivion Ring, Zur the Enchanter and Pacifism. This concept isn’t new but it is still ingenious. Here’s a deck using a control aspect, but not so much combo... well, scratch that. It uses Rule of Law, which is like a combo.
With Rule of Law in play, your opponent will only be able to play one spell per turn and thus each turn you can counter that spell with cards like Voidmage Prodigy, Condemn, or Pact of Negation. Mind you, you’ll only want to counter the spells that could damage your combo. However, even though you counter their spell, Forced Fruition will still strip their deck of seven cards. They’ll be going into your opponent’s hand, but who cares? They can only play one spell at a time! To reinforce the Forced Fruition card, this deck’s creator added some additional mill in the form of Magus of the Jar. And then there’s Evacuation... which is slightly unnecessary in this deck but quite effective for a weenie deck and/or a deck with lots of creature tokens. Wall of Shards acts as a great early game and late game defender. Who cares if your opponent has a gazillion life if you are going to mill them to death? So far, I've only looked at ways to get Forced Fruition into play fairly - by paying the mana cost. I wonder if Cashew has any sneaky ideas on getting Forced Fruition into play without paying for it... ~Streetz One Card to Rule Them All: Enduring Ideal by Cashew Sometimes, a card isn't powerful because of what it does, but because of what the other cards you own can do with it. These cards are the enablers of the Magic world. They speed up decks, return things to play, fetch other cards, and generally frustrate other players by tipping the scales in your favor. By themselves they are worthless, bringing nothing to the field, but, when built into the right decks, they become power houses. What if I told you that some cards are so powerful that, when cast, you can never cast another spell. Those of you that remember the "failed" power of Epic from Saviors of Kamigawa know just what I'm talking about. While never casting another spell can be rough, sometimes you just won't need to. We're going to be talking about Enduring Ideal, probably the most successful of those cards.
Building a deck around Enduring Ideal is like building any deck towards an extremely powerful card with a high casting cost. You either have to rush there as fast as possible or you have to control the game until you can cast it naturally. We'll explore both variations and you can decide which one you like. However, before you get all down on the card, just realize that players have been honing Enduring Ideal decks to compete in Extended tourneys, taking down staples like Ichorid and Psychatog, and refuting many claims that it was merely a sub-par card only capable of Standard era performance. The first method we'll visit is acceleration to a quick Ideal. This style deck means two things, you have to get an Enduring Ideal in hand, play it and take over before you die. Acceleration style decks like this are often a lop-sided race, resulting in a severely brutal victory or a quick loss. If done properly however, you can have Ideal in play easily at turn four, despite a seven casting cost. The major advantage to the acceleration method is it offers far more utility in how to play out the Enduring Ideal.
The deck plays vastly different each time, but how it works is very simple. Cast fast and cast hard, using cards like Standstill to buy a psychological defense. With any luck you draw enough acceleration from the start to cast Enduring Ideal on turn three or four. Once cast, just play out your enchantment defenses. Solitary Confinement helps stop a quick death followed by Form of the Dragon to deal damage. If the field is empty, you can choose Decree of Silence to keep it that way. Facing control decks, getting Dovescape in play is vital to keeping your Ideals safe from counters. The deck also offers quirky advantages and disadvantages. You don't want most enchantments in hand so use the Divining Top to keep them in your deck, playing vastly different than most decks where you use Top to put cards on top. Another advantage is that the deck can be mistaken for storm decks, specifically The Perfect Storm. With many players honing their decks into handling TEPS specifically, they may radically alter their gameplay, only to have Ideal land and find themselves in a completely misplayed situation. Playing a sacrifice land and a Bloom is a great mislead to tricking a player into thinking storm deck. In case you're wondering about other ways to really mess with an opponent:
The other version, while slightly slower, tends to play a little more stable as control decks tend to do. The biggest advantage to the control deck over the acceleration deck is that you're going to survive fast attack decks that plague Extended much better. Boros, Goblin, Psychatog, and Affinity all are handled in this version as much as possible.
I apologize for the expense of these decks, as they are tuned to tournament level performance for the most part. Many cards can be substituted at cheaper costs, but it will dilute the power. Budgeting is best done by the budget person as they have the cards to do it. Some suggestions:
How you get to Enduring Ideal is up to you. It can be done cheaply in five to six turns, or with some expensive cards in three to four. Some choose to do it with Vesuva-Cloudpost as well, but that means turn five at the earliest without other acceleration. Don't think the only way to win is those cards from above, below are vastly differing approaches to enchantments that work extremely well with Enduring Ideal.
A great example of an alternative deck with Enduring Ideal is one that still allows you to play other spells after you go epic. The very idea behind that is to play with cards. This deck is going to be dedicated to those who delight inflicting misery over winning. There's a good chance you may win in the process, but hey, honestly who cares?
Psychic Possession, when passed to an opponent, causes them to lose their draw step without much recourse to getting it back, while Living Plane + Night of Soul's Betrayal combos into total land destruction forever. Nefarious Lich severely messes with an opponent to the point that many players can't handle. Plus, for each of these horrendous cards being passed to an opponent, we're stealing one of their valued cards. As an extra evil kick I threw Mindslavers in instead of Orim's Chant since they mesh well with the Vesuva-Cloudpost kick. There's lots of ways to build Enduring Ideal decks. I tend to keep about the same mana base because it's proven to work, and the Invasion common lands are fairly cheap. The basic premise is always the same though: rush to Ideal, lock your opponent out, and then find a way to win while untouchable. Heck, you don't even need to rely on Solitary Confinement. Moat and Teferi's Moat do about the same thing, or maybe you might like Island Sanctuary or any white "Protection" spell. If you have Hondens you could also go that route to a fairly powered upkeep, couple them with Paradox Haze, and it's a cheap easy-to-build powerhouse. All this maneuverability between casual to non-casual is what makes it such a great card to own and play with. The only downside to the deck is it will feel as though it always plays the same: rush to Enduring then bring out your offense. The obvious solution is to constantly change your enchantments up so that you get different experiences against your friends, maybe even secretly tuning your deck against them. ~Cashew
You can discuss this article in the MDV forums
here.
Articles
Spotlights from 2009: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Did
I mention that Amadeus’s rant referenced earlier is what inspired me to start
this article? Well, it did. I just couldn’t fathom this card being absolutely
worthless. Just from a mill standpoint, making your opponent draw seven cards
for each spell played sets a time clock (in essence) on the number of spells
they can play before they lose due to a state based effect that says you die
when you can’t draw a card from your library.
U/B
Forced Dreams. 
Forced
Fruition Idea. 
One
of the cool things about Rule of Law and Forced Fruition is counterspell
effects. Even if you counter a spell while both are in play, Forced Fruition
will still activate. A played spell is still considered a played spell even if
the spell is countered (doesn’t resolve). This is a fun trick. 
Enduring
Ideal (Acceleration). 
The
basic premise of this deck is way old, so old and infamous that you may
recognize it's old form from a single card as Gifts! You use Enduring Ideal to
bring cards you don't want into play then give them to your opponent through
Puca's Mischief. The basic Solitary Confinement Form of the Dragon combo is
intact meaning you have time to play the combos. Of course half of this stuff
might not be findable, so the goal is to just find any bad enchantments and pass
them to your opponent.