Monday, April 29, 2013

Crackling Perimeter Miracles Deck

Miracles are the closest equivalent to Infect or Curses decks I can think of. Decks with miracles are very dependent on the draw, and if you run a few, you will eventually see the need to run as many of them as possible. This deck started as a Gates-only Maze's End deck, but I then trimmed it and added more miracles to it. It can actually win in tournament practice, something none of my previous cheapo decks have ever been able to.



Tuesday, April 16, 2013

You Make the Card 2013: Black Enchantment

Whatever I come up with needs to at least not be a card that has been previously issued. I would like to design a card that has very little text. I like cards like Progenitus, with "Protection from Everything."

Here is some data on black enchantments issued to date. I came up with 167 from Gatherer. Here is the mana curve.


This is the casting cost.


...and the major theme. It looks like Graveyard, Like, and Sacrifice are the big three themes.


From these, I kept for study the ones with the smaller text.















A lot of design ground has already been covered. Here is one of my favorite black enchantments.


And here is my submission:



BBB

Pay 3 life.
Sacrifice a creature with converted mana cost 3 or more.
Return a creature card from your graveyard to the battlefield.



Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Gates Deck Building Heaven

...or something like that. I have been working on a deck shell for Dragon's Maze that can be used once the mythic land Maze's End is issued.This is a fourth or fifth iteration. The deck is very, very slow without Temporal Mastery. At first, I got just one from the bots, but this deck can only be sped up with a playset (I am sure the bots are happy about that). I also added Index because I want to get Temporal Mastery coming my way as soon as possible. I tried everything that is a creature with a gate advantage, but these cards proved ridiculously slow and ineffective. Crackling Perimeter, though, is a keeper. With it I can hit the player or a plainswalker for damage and use up all of my mana to win at the same time. I bought a Tamiyo now that it has come down in price for my redemption and figured I might as well use it in this deck to delay my opponent, but I may decide to add a second one because one card of anything is usually not enough to help a deck's strategy.





And here is another iteration.