In the Beginning...

Hello World! Welcome to the beginning of Dave’s newly powered website and my new blog, the era of the Hero Zone online that doesn’t include the word “border,” as in “black-bordered dual lands are t3ch,” spelled incorrectly.

At least I hope.

For the record, “border” is an edge of something. The border between Canada and the U.S. is the longest undefended border in the world, unless you want to carry Cuban cigars or Canadian whiskey across it. A “boarder” is a person who pays for a room and gets food, as in: The Canadian boarder ate all of our bacon and donuts and clogged our toilet; she’s not staying here again.

Anyway, my name is Nat, and I’ll be your blogger for at least the next half hour and possibly a lot longer as long as the Hero Zone can sell enough junk food to upkeep my painfully meager salary. I play Magic and a few other, random, non-collectible card games and board games. When I throw the Magic cards around it’s usually Vintage, that being Type 1, the first and only type in my heart. I read about the other formats and can play them, but they’re not what I do regularly. If I ever got the chance, I think I would play Legacy

Now, that being since I moved away from lakeside to middle-of-the-stateside, I don’t get as much chance as I’d like to play, but I do keep up by reading lots of articles and constantly tinkering with my decks. Since I don’t have Power I’m sort of limited, but I’m constantly looking for cards that break people with Power. I’m thinking now that graveyard hosers like Planar Void and Withered Wretch are uber and that Leyline of the Void would be unbelievable if it didn’t cost 4 to drop on the table outside of the post-mulligan-pre-first-turn phase.

On second thought, I’m sure I’d play Legacy. I bet we could all agree on that. You all should convince Dave to have Legacy tournaments because then we’d have something to talk about. I can even give you a deck for it, or at least the star of one, right now. Check it out:

Darkside Eggs

4x Duress
4x Helm of Awakening
4x Dark Ritual
3x Cabal Ritual
20x Eggs from Odyssey (Darkwater, Mossfire, Sungrass, Skycloud, and Shadowblood)
4x Chromatic Sphere
3x Tendrils of Agony
4x Burning Wish
Some Card Drawing (I’d suggest something like Night’s Whisper or Thoughtcast, maybe even Impulse)
4x Ancient Tomb or City of Traitors
Some Swamps

Do you smell that? It’s breakfast. I played this in Vintage only brokener—some of you may have fallen victim to it at one time or another. You power out Helm of Awakening, use it to play eggs for free and draw through your deck until you get to Tendrils of Agony, which you use on your opponent.

I’m probably not the original originator of this deck (okay, definitely I’m not, and more people will know it as Easter Tendrils, which is the name I gave my fantasy football team), but my friends will vouch for the fact that I developed it independently. The first incarnation of this deck was blue and killed with Brainfreeze but without Helms of Awakening and was retrospectively named Lightside Eggs.

For this deck, the sideboard should contain 1 more Tendrils of Agony and probably 2 Drafna’s Restoration, which is disgusting once you have the Tendrils in hand.

The other format I’m quite fond of is Type Fun, that being casual, played at the Kitchen Table Arena. Right now I have decks build around Sacred Mesa (using Skyshroud Elf and Priest of Titania to power out tons of Pegasi is tight) and the Zur’s Weirding-Words of Worship interaction (I gain five life a turn to pay two life and make sure you never draw anything useful again). I once had a Goblin deck that used Mana Echoes to make tons of mana and kill you with massive Flamewave Invoker.

Sometimes I can’t understand why my decks don’t end up winning major tournaments anywhere.

I’ll leave you with that until next time.

Actually, I’ll leave you with this: The artwork on Mob Justice is as inspired as it is gruesome. Did you all read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”? If not, you should. You’ll know what I’m talking about. One of my friends made a paper-Mache project illustrating that story that included a spring-mounted rock. It was sweet.

Until next time, increase the pwnage.