It's unfair to tap your first turn swamp for a 6/6. It's unfair to never take damage. It's unfair to draw 8 cards every turn.
Guess what today's three decks are going to do!
Deck 1 Maralen of the Mornsong
Let's look at two cards next to each other. The Maralen avatar and Death's Shadow.
Maralen is in fact the first thing I thought of when I saw Death's Shadow in the Worldwake spoiler.
The second thing I thought was, "I hope Death's Shadow doesn't become a tournament bomb, because I want to use 4x in a Maralen deck and I'll feel guilty doing so if it does."
(I thought the same thing about Abyssal Persecutor, for use with the Loxodon Avatar, but that did indeed prove itself to be 9-ticket bomb material, so I've steered clear of it.)
Back to Death's Shadow: if you're not seeing the interaction, Maralen lets you start the game at a very low life. If you pay 10 to it, Death's Shadow is a drawback-less 6/6 on the first turn. And since you paid 10, you are all but guaranteed to have it on the first turn. Or at the absolute latest, Turn Two. Tops.
Of course, if we are starting the game at 7 life, we'll need to take a few precautions. And gaining life isn't one of them, since we don't want to weaken our Death's Shadows. But we should have:
- Defense. Wall of Souls can be a terrific early game deterrent. Oona's Gatewarden too. It's amazing how timid your opponents will become when there's a slight drawback to attacking.
- Self-preservation. Worship will keep us alive as long as possible. And our Death's Shadow as big as possible (without resorting to Platinum Angel and negative life totals, of course). Also consider Ivory Mask effects.
- Creature preservation. If we're relying on Worship, we'll need to rely on our creatures sticking around as well. Death's Shadow's largeness combined with some good ol' fashioned shroud should do the trick. I went with Steely Resolve, partly for not being an aura and partly for being only 2 mana. Which segues to our next point:
- Accel. We won't have a lot of time to set up the above before our opponent kills us. Four mana for Worship is actually quite expensive when you start the game at 7. We'll need some ways to speed ourselves up. I chose Birds of Paradise for this build, since it's 3 colors, but pick what you like. But something cheaper than Darksteel Ingot!
- Removal. Given the nature of our avatar, it pays to use very specialized removal, and singletons of them, since they're so easy to tutor up. For instance, Aura Blast is much better with Maralen than Disenchant. You can look at the below list for my choices, but you have a great deal of freedom here.
So you've spent your first few turns dropping a large Death's Shadow and setting up some defense. Now what?
Each turn, you're seeing a selection of 10 new cards to pick from. Among those ten should be some specialized utility (following the same rationale as the specialized removal section). Primal Rage can help get your Death's Shadow, who before very long will be a 12/12, across that army of saproling tokens. Familiar Ground can help too. And are they janky, yes, but they only take up one deck slot each. Our avatar will still make sure we can get them.
This is starting to sound like a lot of enchantments, so I also threw in a Greater Auramancy.
Speaking of being at only 1 life, we might as well run Avatar of Hope. (I didn't plan it this way, but aside from the obvious benefits, his creature type is also an avatar, letting him leech off of our Death's-Shadow-protecting Steely Resolves!) And seeing as we're running black, white, and green, and many of our creatures have higher toughness than power... why not run a singleton Doran, the Siege Tower? Again, I don't love playing with tournament caliber cards, but this deck is certainly a far cry from the ways he was actually used in tournaments.
A Maralen-specific trick is Gaea's Blessing. You are basically guaranteed to get back whatever you shuffle in. Which is relevant, since the avatar encourages you to run so many singletons.
And a Maralen-specific feature is the high land count. Even with a low mana curve, you want a lot of lands with this avatar. This is so you can have several in your opening hand, and not have to waste your tutoring to fix your mana.
One last trick I want to highlight before I get to the decklist: Hurricane. I was originally thinking of running Bond of Agony as a giant growth for my Death's Shadow while also dealing some damage to my opponent. Until I realized that Hurricane would be in multiple ways better (not only taking down some fliers in the process but also playing well with Worship).
Like all of my decks, consider this one casual and customizable.
Deck 2 Chronatog
This avatar is one tough nut to crack. I eventually did though. My thought process was as follows.
1. Many avatars let you draw extra cards. If you're going to use this one, it should be for a deck that can abuse the turn skipping mechanic.
2. What decks want to skip turns? Decks that make bad things happen during turns.
3. What's a bad thing that happens every turn? Sulfuric Vortex.
4. Aside from having it happen to me half as often as my opponent, how else can I survive the Sulfuric Vortex? I can't gain life. But what if I prevent damage? And what if I do so in a way that's also able to be prolonged by my avatar? (I am referring, of course, to Glacial Chasm.)
5. What other bad things can I make happen every turn? Preferably in a way that's synergistic with the above? I came up with Manabarbs.
6. It looks like I'll be skipping a lot of turns. Is there any way I can still be productive during them? A quick Gatherer search led to Burgeoning as the answer.
7. It's looking like I'll have very large hand sizes, with all of these skipped turns, and with Chronatog's "no maximum hand size" clause. How can I put that to use? I came up with Spiraling Embers.
8. All I'm missing now is some early defense. Are there cards that stall best when skipping turns? Sheltering Ancient, Keldon Marauders, and Tangle.
And there you have a dominoes-like train of thought that constitutes about 90% of my deck. The only cards I haven't mentioned are a handful of walls, and Final Fortune (among Chronatog's best combos).
Notice the wording, "You lose the game at the end of that turn." Unless "that turn" never comes. For instance, if you skipped it to draw three cards. This turns Final Fortune into a half-costed Concentrate which, although I suppose not broken, is certainly efficient. And has that "omghax" appeal to it.
This deck takes a few practice runs to get the hang of, but it can be startlingly powerful. I recommend it.
Deck 3 Maro
This deck was born from a premise: what if I were to use the Maro avatar in a non-broken way? And I think I succeeded, in that this deck doesn't get Turn Two Quirion Ranger kills, but it can still do some ridiculous things once it gets going.
The three creatures this deck uses Maro on are Viridian Joiner, which will make a whole lot of mana; Cold-Eyed Selkie, who will draw us a whole lot of cards, and Living Hive, who will make us a whole lot of tokens.
Each card presents us with a few problems. How do we get those Selkies to connect? Spreading Seas.
What do we spend all of that Joiner mana on? The Living Hive. And the cards we're drawing with the Selkie.
How do we get those three-mana spells out a turn early? Ol' reliable Llanowar Elves.
What do we tap to pump up our guys? (This question actually has the same answer as the previous one.)
What do we discard, Reach of Branches, and how do we find all of the above, Harmonize and Worldly Tutor.
Really there isn't much to the deck beyond that, so I'll just get to the list. Give it a try!
See you next time, and have fun with vanguard!
6 Comments
Creating decks is fine, but you should definetely give us some testing, and maybe adapt with some tuning...
I've thought about this before. My reasons for not are:
1, game reports in the casual room are fairly meaningless
2, it's better to just post the final iteration of the deck -- the one that's the result of my tuning -- than all the failed previous versions of the deck.
Thanks for the feedback though -CR
As usual I love the stuff you put out Cotton. However, you are thinking waaaaaay too hard on Death's Shadow. Maralen is definetly the avatar to use, however for my trick you could use any avatar with a high hand count and a low life. Death's Shadow wants your life to be low so it can be big, right? Well you're focusing on the lowness of your life, and not the hugeness of your creature. I would make the deck Red/Black. Toss in 4 Lotus Petals for color fixing and a bunch of ritual effects. Pay a lot of life to Maralen like you did. With a Blood Crypt (really good in this case) or a Badlands (less good cause no life loss) you could potenially see first turn that looks like this.
Pay 10 life. Play Blood Crypt and lose 2 life. Play Lotus Petal. Tap the land for Black and cast Death's Shadow at 8/8. With a second Petal, you can cast Mass Hysteria, he has haste now, attack for 8 damage. Sac your other petal for red, and play Rite of Flame, and use Fling to toss him at your opponent for another 8 damage. That's 16 damage on turn 1. Granted your hand is now empty, but you get to tutor on your next turn. 16 damage is enough to kill most avatars.
As for Chronotog. I don't know if you remember, but Chronotog used to be a teir one deck in tournament standard vanguard. You use the draw ability to kill your opponent with Soul Spikes and Conflagerate. The whole idea is to use madness and draw spells and pitch cards. Works even better in classic thanks to FoW! yay?
Both good points. I plan on trying other types of Death's Shadow decks in the future.
I will say though that I usually try to stay away from the "win all at once" type of deck -- especially when that "all at once" happens on turn one or two. And I also try to avoid deck ideas that were tier one in tournaments, since my column is meant for casual vanguard. Thanks for the ideas though! -CR
PS To anyone who cares about grammar as much as I do, I just want to quickly point out that the error in the article's tagline isn't my fault! I originally submitted it as "ought not to." The editor I guess didn't like the word ought, and so changed it to should, with the only problem being that "should not to" doesn't make grammatical sense. Sorry everyone....
Marlen doesn't let you draw cards at all, so Disenchant is strictly better than a more narrow cantrip.
For the chronatog deck, why not just add Angel's Grace and all the 0-mana you-lose-the-game-if-you-don't-pay cards? I'm talking of course about the Pacts. Turn one plains, keep skipping turns in your opponent's turn, answer anything he plays with FoW, pact of negation/slaught pact, eventually you get four titans, clear the way swing for 16 and a couple soul spikes for the win!