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By: blau, Mr. Awesome
Feb 09 2010 3:53am
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Obviously, the best way to use Hive Mind is with Pacts.  That was proven when a player showed up to World’s using the Hive Mind/Pact deck.  When I first read the card, Pacts were not the first thing to spring to my mind.  The reason is, pacts are nice, but I’ve tried playing the tournament version of the Pact deck against my tournament playing friends and they consistently beat me.  The pacts do nothing if they can pay the cost for the pact.  That forces you to have more than one pact in hand to go off.  With as combo driven as that deck is, needed MORE cards in hand is counterproductive.

Also, I was looking for a casual deck.  Call me crazy, but even a poor man’s version of a world champ deck is still too good for the casual room.  My first instinct was to go with something that would truly hurt my opponent: Epics!!!!  If having your opponent hit you with a Pact is equal to a slap in the face, getting a forced Epic is a kick to the crotch.  Now which one do I use?  They all hurt my opponent, but they can all be good too.  Naturally I went with the one to show the least likelihood of being good: (Enduring Ideal). 

                                                                               

There is a trick here though.  You have to have the Hive Mind in play FIRST.   You cannot cast Enduring Ideal to fetch Hive Mind.  Hive Mind has a little problem in its design that isn’t on the card.  It only copies a spells being CAST, not spells that are created on the stack, more on that later.  You’ll notice that Form of the Dragon is missing from this deck.  I did that because this deck moves really slowly.  With already being in blue and beginning fairly color intensive in white, it just made more sense to drop the Form in favor of Luminarch Ascension.  Obviously this deck has problems with decks that run Oblivion Ring, but most of the time, you can get a scoop from an opponent as soon as they realize they can’t cast spells.  However, that may take a bit for them to understand.  I get a lot of, “I think the game is bugged.  I can’t play anything.”  If you want to make this deck a bit more competitive, I would suggest running Wrath of God in here, possibly pull out the Ghostly Prisons for them.  You could also consider running all the white/blue non-basic lands Extended has to offer.  This deck was designed to be cheap.  The most expensive card in the deck is Greater Auramancy.  Take those out and you could build this whole deck for less than 10 tickets.

The Ideal Hive
12 Plains 1 Confiscate
11 Island 4 Ghostly Prison
  2 Greater Auramancy
3 Enduring Ideal 3 Hive Mind
4 Foresee 1 Ivory Mask
4 Ponder 3 Luminarch Ascension
4 Remand 4 Oblivion Ring
  2 Persuasion
  2 Sigil of the Empty Throne

This second deck is all about really abusing Hive Mind’s ability in the wackiest way possible.  However, it only works in multiplayer, especially 2HG, where the game goes slower and you have more life.  Hive Mind loves when people cast spells, especially targeted spells, in my opinion.  What other enchantment loves targeted spells?  Why none other than the Unglued functional reprint, (Grip of Chaos)!  But there is a problem here.  I tried putting the two in the same deck, only to find that the combo DIDN’T WORK!!! With some careful reading of the rulings on these cards, what I found was that the cards, while they read like that should work together, according to the rules, they don’t for one simple reason: Hive Mind puts the copies directly onto the stack as it makes them.  Grip needs to see the spell being cast in order to change the target.  Can you imagine if these cards DID work together?!?  Oh man, that would be crazy.  This left my puzzling, how do I cast lots of spells in order to rightly break this combo?  Then I remembered another combolicious card, (Eye of the Storm). 
 
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Eye actually has the player cast each spell that is removed by it, which then triggers Hive Mind.  Granted the copies made by Hive Mind are still not using random targets, but the point is that it creates a lot of spells over and over and over.  Obviously, this deck requires a certain type of play group.  Getting three other players that share the hilarity of this deck is not easy.  The tricky part is getting all three of these things into play at once.  It is extremely hard to do, as any one of these by itself will usually get you killed.  I have only managed to get all three into play once and to quote George Foreman’s head, “My memory isn’t what it used to be, but I’m fairly certain the entire Earth was destroyed.”

Eye of the Chaos Hive
4 Island 4 Izzet Signet
4 Mountain  
4 Scalding Tarn 2 Beacon of Destruction
4 Urza's Mine 1 Beacon of Tomorrows
4 Urza's Power Plant 3 Careful Consideration
4 Urza's Tower 2 Cerebral Vortex
  4 Compulsive Research
3 Eye of the Storm 4 Magma Jet
3 Grip of Chaos 2 Ransack
3 Hive Mind 2 Reminisce
  3 Wistful Thinking

Okay, that deck is massively ridiculous.  Let’s say you want something less outrageous.  Or maybe you only want to cast your own spells over and over without letting your opponent share in the fun.  Well I have a deck for that, too.  You know which card functions basically the same as Eye of the Storm, just without all the hassle?  This one!
                                                                                  
Best part is, it also triggers both Hive Mind and Grip of Chaos!  Here the key to victory is in the Retrace and Flashback cards.  However, you do need one copy already in your graveyard if you are trying to get a second counter on your Pyromancer Ascension.  Since this deck is less focused on using a massive combo like Eye of the Storm, I streamlined it a lot more.  This one is more about helping you win as opposed to helping everyone.  However, it still leaves odd choices for your opponents.  I played a compulsive research with just Hive Mind and Ascension in play and apparently everyone thought I was attempting something sneaky, so everyone targeted me.  I ended up going from 1 card in hand to a final resolution of all them with 9 cards in hand.  Thanks!  The deck just gets even more wild once Grip of Chaos is in play.

Grip of Pyroness
5 Island 4 Sensei's Divining Top
2 Izzet Boilerworks  
5 Mountain 3 Compulsive Research
2 Scalding Tarn 4 Electrolyze
3 Urza's Mine 4 Firebolt
3 Urza's Power Plant 4 Flame Jab
3 Urza's Tower 4 Magma Jet
  2 Oona's Grace
3 Grip of Chaos 3 Wistful Thinking
3 Hive Mind  
3 Pyromancer Ascension  

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 Grip of Chaos is so good, it really deserves its own deck, so here it is!  As I mentioned, Grip of Chaos is a functional reprint of the Unglued card Ricochet. Ricochet is infinitely better, given that it involves dice rolling, which is always fun and it only costs a single red mana.  I would really love to ask R&D why they felt Grip of Chaos needed to have the uncastable cost of 6 mana.  Did they really think people were going to play this in constructed?  If one looks at the tournament worthy decks from Odyssey/Onslaught and Onslaught/Mirrodin standard, this card would have had little to no impact on the format at all.  However it would have ruined Eternal Witness and Modular because of the added test of "or ability."  So because of those two words, they felt the need to tack on 5 extra mana and take a fun card from playable to garbage.  I would even be willing to meet WOTC half-way on this card and give it a mana cost of 1RR.  I think then it might have been noticed by more players while still high enough in cost to make me think that maybe I don't want to use this.

                                                    

This is another multiplayer deck, however, for this one the reason is its blatant unfairness.  Playing mono-red Valakut in the casual room will get you hated pretty quickly.  Even in multiplayer, Valakut can draw a lot of complaints and instant attacks.  Once a Grip is in play though, those complaints disappear.  Getting smashed in the face with your own Valakut usually draws some laughs.  I put creatures with activated abilities to make use of Grip’s “ability” clause, same thing goes for Charbelcher.  Killing your own creatures with Grip always brings a round of smiles.  I had to include my favorite card Lava Dart in this deck for sure.  We used to make jokes at the game store, "What is the best card in Magic?  Lava Dart.  I can deal 2 damage at instant speed for 1 mana."  Plus, no one

Grip Wishes it was Ricochet
19 Mountain 3 Grip of Chaos
4 Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle 3 Pyromancer Ascension
   
4 Kindle 4 Flametongue Kavu
4 Lava Dart 3 Viashino Fangtail
4 Magma Jet 4 Vulshok Sorcerer
3 Seething Song  
  2 Goblin Charbelcher
  3 Sensei's Divining Top

Some of you will probably wonder why I didn’t splash into white for (Sphere of Law) and that is because I feel that would take away the random fun that this deck brings.  What’s the point of playing a hilarious card like Grip of Chaos and then play something that makes sure I don’t take damage from it?  I can do that without playing Sphere or Grip AND it would make the deck better.  You’ll also notice that most of my spells don’t do a lot of damage.  I like the whole pinging aspect of the deck and it allows me to say “pew pew” every time I play a spell or use an ability.

 

2 Comments

The meat of your article is by Paul Leicht at Tue, 02/09/2010 - 04:30
Paul Leicht's picture

The meat of your article is as amusing as ever, however you need to be a bit more careful editing it and checking for grammatical errors. The most glaring thing is the badly formed html near the end.

Yeah not sure what happened by blau at Tue, 02/09/2010 - 10:43
blau's picture

Yeah not sure what happened there. That wasn't in there last night when I previewed the article. I also noticed half a sentence missing at the end. Most of this is probably due to my writing the article in MSWord and then copy/pasting it into the article submission screen. Gonna have to watch for that in the future. And I could get the card links to work either.