Dead Stuff

So I haven’t done one of these in a while, and I’ve found I really enjoy doing them, so…

Without further ado…

I present to you another blast from the past Deck Circa 1995!

So far I’ve done Fish and Stax. Both of them turned out fairly well.

PaleoFish was a lot like its current version except a lot slower and more meticulous since you couldn’t have a good draw engine. You had to hold on to whatever resources you could, even seemingly aggressive cards like Blood Lust, which might be able to take out a large creature in conjunction with Desert or Lightning Bolt.

PaleoStax just became a lot more aggressive, with Triskelions to control the creature game and Juggernauts because, well, there just aren’t that many good lock artifacts circa 1995. It’s a tough deck, and the only deck it really loses to is one with a weenie hoard.

So I was trying to think of other Vintage decks I haven’t built yet. Slaver is, well, not possible at all. Actually, neither is Oath, Gifts, or any kind of serious combo other than Channel-Fireball (which I’ll probably get to at some point, heh heh). What does that leave us?

Anyone?

Anyone?

Randy Buhler?

PaleoDragon.

Okay, so obviously, Worldgorger Dragon hadn’t been printed in 1995. Shivan Dragon had! And so had Animate Dead and Bazaar of Baghdad, so that’s what I did. Instead of your basic Dragon deck, you get your basic Reanimator deck, only without Reanimates, Living Death, or anything other than Animate Dead. I threw in some control and a way to abuse Bazaar, and I went to town.

4x Bazaar of Baghdad
4x Shivan Dragon
4x Mahamoti Djinn
4x Juzam Djinn
4x Animate Dead

4x Hypnotic Specter
4x Howling Mine
4x Dark Ritual
1x Demonic Tutor
1x Ancestral Recall
1x Time Walk

1x Mox Ruby
1x Mox Jet
1x Mox Sapphire
1x Mox Pearl
1x Black Lotus
4x Volcanic Island
4x Underground Sea
4x Badlands
8x Swamp

So far it’s pretty good. The only PaleoDeck to go all the way through a 16-player gauntlet, which surprised me.

I have enough of each color to hardcast any of the creatures that I have in the deck, which I feel is a big benefit over other Reanimator style decks I’ve seen. It just makes me nervous to not be able to play when Plan A fails because of counterspells or something.

Sneak Attack gave me the same problem. I played red and green creatures like Silvos, Rogue Elemental and Viashino Sandstalker not just because they have great synergy with Sneak Attack, but also because if I never saw my enchantment or it got destroyed or whatever, I could still get stuff into play.

Interestingly, the creature base is about as good as it could be in 1995. Sure there were bigger creatures with more abilities, but they all had super restrictive drawbacks. Leviathan, Lord of the Pit, Force of Nature, Colossus of Sardia, all are unusable in a deck not geared toward using them. Nothing attacks for more than four when animated, but they’re all fat enough to dodge red removal. Better still, Mahamoti and Dragon both fly, and Juzam is really easy to hardcast.

One of the better choices I think was Hypnotic Specter. For one, it’s a good aggressive creature when paired with Dark Ritual and the mana fixing that comes with Bazaar. It’s even decent with Animate Dead, since its ability helps my other creatures stay safe. Also, luckily, it gets around Meekstone, which I never really planned for but lots of decks seem to pack against me. Meekstone seems to hit me pretty well, but it’s almost dealwitable if I have a fleet of Specters.

Plus, since my creatures are big enough to take down most of theirs in combat, and since they usually have to focus on not dying from my Djinns and Dragons, my Specters usually get through to clear out their hand as my thumpers take board control.

Actually the list above isn’t my original build. I first started with a full set of Dark Rituals and moxes without Ancestral Recall or Time Walk. I figured, more brokenness would be better, and figured I had enough blue to go with two of the best cards in the game. I have not yet been disappointed.

Perhaps the card that took the most debate and may still not be set in stone is Howling Mine. It began as Greed, which is the unbroken form of Necropotence, but I realized that I was usually discarding that because I had better things to do with my mana both before and after I would have cast it. I just wanted something that would fuel me up to keep Bazaaring.

I switched it to Howling Mine after one of my opponents played it against me in one round. I quickly realized that even starting with an empty hand, by drawing two cards, I could Bazaar and still keep the best card in my hand. That seemed pretty good, so I decided to run that hot tech myself, even though it’s working against Hyppie and it generally helps my opponent and helps him first.

The Mine is still in debate, but there are far fewer broken things people can do with it in 1995. The worst part about it is that it counteracts the Hyppie. Hyppie is a lot less good when people draw more than they discard.

If only I could run more than one Ancestral Recall.

What strikes me about these early decks, and that means even the ones that came with the game, is that they’re all so creature based. And they’re all so simply creature based! There isn’t even a Sligh-type deck that balances damage and cheap creatures. I mean, I could probably build one, and it would probably do okay, but there isn’t one that I’ve seen, or there isn’t one that I recognized as such anyway.

(I’d just like to point out that I used all three simple coordinating conjunctions in that last sentence.)

And you don’t have the option either. You could build a heavy control deck, but I’m not sure how well it would do against the fast creature rushes that are White Weenie, Green Weenie, Black Weenie, Blue Weenie, and Red Weenie.

They’re insane because they have to use cards that, if someone used them today, they’d be called teh uber n00br: Holy and Unholy Strength, Aspect of Wolf, Unstable Mutation, and Giant Strength. It’s ridiculous.

Anyway, be glad that Magic has progressed to the point where we actually have creatures with abilities and spells that have an effect outside combat. The game is so much better now than it was, even though it is more complicated and difficult.

In fact, maybe that’s why it’s better than it was.

Step up to the challenge—break Kormus Bell.