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Deck 1

Your search - "song of serenity" site:puremtgo.com - did not match any documents.

Yes, in all of PureMTGO's history, not a single mention has ever been made of one of my all-time favorite cards, Song of Serenity.  Time to fix that.

Song of Serenity is a truly great card.  Not "great" as in "tournament worthy," but great as in cool.  Great as in it introduces a completely new direction for deckbuilding.  For the first time ever, your goal is to pack your deck full of auras that are designed to target your opponents' creatures.  We've been enchanting our opponents' creatures since Alpha (see Weakness), but has a single other deck ever been built around that premise?  Does a single other card even encourage it?

With Song of Serenity, every aura you cast is also a Pacifism.  Which begs the question, what auras are best for the job?  There are ones with penalties for the opponent, like Wanderlust.  But I prefer the cheap cantrip route.  Which means I'm going to use another card you don't hear about very often: Frog Tongue.

Frog Tonnngguuueee!!!  Now, if you're asking why we would want to give our opponents' creatures reach, you're missing the point.  Frog Tongue is, with Song of Serenity out, a cantripping Pacifism for only one mana.  It's even good before the Song of Serenity drops, because the draw could help us get to the Song (and our other cards).  Just don't cast it (or any other auras) on your own creatures.  Not in this deck.

Of course just 4 auras aren't enough to carry the Song, so let's pick some more.  Literally the only other cantrip aura for 1 mana is Sisay's Ingenuity, if you dip into blue.  Bequeathal and Betrayal can sometimes lead to card drawing as well.  (Don't be fooled by Curiosity and Keen Sense — next to Song of Serenity, they have no hope of ever triggering!  At least Betrayal could trigger off an activated ability.)  If we dip into two mana, there are still somehow only two cantripping auras.  Vampirism, which is completely worthless in comparison to the one-mana options, and Stupefying Touch, which I actually really like in here.  It upgrades the Pacifism effect to Arrest, while still costing less mana and cantripping.  There will be times when this is relevant.  The 3 mana spot has seven different cantrips to choose from, but honestly that's getting a little expensive for a Pacifism, and none of them have the type of effect we'd want to tack onto a Pacifism anyway.

So how do we win?  We're preventing our opponents' creatures not only from attacking but also from blocking, so we might as well win through our own attacking.  Let's get some cost-efficient beaters.  Fortunately, green is full of those.  And vanilla is fine since they'll basically be alone on the battlefield.  I went with Imperiosaur (we can easily build our landbase around him), Yavimaya Enchantress (there will be a LOT of enchantments on the battlefield), and Lorescale Coatl (we will be drawing a LOT of cards).

Looking at the last two creatures on that list made me want to also run cards like Argothian Enchantress and Enchantress's Presence, but playtesting made them really feel superfluous, so I took them back out.  I was already drawing more cards than I could cast.

We already have 9 cheap cantrips for our Lorescale Coatl.  And we're already in blue, so there's no reason not to run the obvious combo of Brainstorm.  The cycling ability on Edge of Autumn can also be useful, especially when our curve tops out at 4 anyway.  Don't forget that both of those cards can be used at instant speed, for combat tricks!  For the rare instances when your opponent does have a blocker, I mean.

We (basically) have 9 pinpoint removal spells in this deck, so defense doesn't usually bother us, but there's still the fact that we will occasionally face Saproling token decks, who can chump our 14/14 Lorescale Coatl all day.  So let's run Primal Rage and O-Naginata (the former of which pumps up our Enchantress, don't forget).  Having the Enchantress also makes me want to run Seal of Primordium instead of Naturalize, and Mirri's Guile instead of Sensei's Divining Top.

We'll need to protect our creatures, since we're relying on a small number of large ones, for which I employed Confound and Lightning Greaves.

Here's the list!  It's 100% ready for non-vanguard classic, but this being a vanguard column, I'm running it with Ashling the Pilgrim (take that, Saprolings).

Avatar: Ashling the Pilgrim Land (21): 9 Island 10 Forest 2 Bant Panorama Creatures (12): 4 Yavimaya Enchantress 4 Lorescale Coatl 4 Imperiosaur

Noncreatures (27): 4 Brainstorm 2 Sisay's Ingenuity 4 Frog Tongue 1 Mirri's Guile 1 O-Naginata 2 Edge of Autumn 2 Confound 1 Primal Rage 2 Seal of Primordium 4 Song of Serenity 3 Stupefying Touch 1 Lightning Greaves

Deck 2

Your search - "hatchet bully" site:puremtgo.com - did not match any documents.

Not a single mention of Hatchet Bully either.  Is he really so much worse than Grim Lavamancer?

  

Okay, he is so much worse than Grim Lavamancer, but he can do at least one thing that the Lavamancer can't: combo with Power Conduit.  And that's what today's deck is all about.  Power Conduit.  I already featured a monoblack Power Conduit deck thirty articles ago, but today's is monored and so has very little overlap.  Actually, no overlap at all outside of the Power Conduits themselves.  (Yeah, I just said "Power Conduit" five times in one short paragraph.)

It's not so hard to find cards that combo with Power Conduit.  It lets us remove counters, so any card with undesirable counters is good.  This could mean cards with -1/-1 counters, age counters, or even oddly worded unique counters, like "hatchling counters" (see left) or "wage counters" (see Rogue Skycaptain).  It also lets us gain +1/+1 counters, so any card that can put those to use is also good.  Most of those seem to be in green or blue, but red does have cards like Goblin Razerunners and Ashling the Pilgrim at least.

Let's look more closely at Roc Hatchling.  Suppose we cast it on the first turn, followed by a second turn Power Conduit.  It will have lost one hatchling counter to the second turn's upkeep, and we can tap the Conduit to turn another hatchling counter into a +1/+1 counter.  Our Roc now is 1/2 with two hatchling counters left.  On the next turn, it loses another hatchling counter to the upkeep, and we can convert the last one to a second +1/+1 counter.  It's now out of hatchling counters, activating its +3/+2 bonus... meaning we now have a 6/6 flier on our side.  It's decent.

And if we want to run age counters, we might as well throw in my favorite card of all time, Varchild's War-Riders.  (Fun fact: this is my fifth deck in this column to use him.)  But seriously: on turn 3 he could already be a 4/5 trample, and he only gets bigger each turn from there.  Now, he can never give fewer than one token to the opponent each turn, based on how the timing rules work, but with the Conduit on our side, he'll rarely give more than one token.  Besides, we can handle a 1/1 pretty easily.

Another cool age counter guy in red is Karplusan Minotaur.  This is actually one of the few cards in the deck we don't necessarily want to target with Power Conduit at every possible opportunity.  Sometimes, his ability will let us kill some of the opponents' creatures.  And even when we lose the coin flips, our guys are usually too big to be taken out anyway.

With all of these +1/+1 counters running around, we should throw in red's counter lord, Rage Forger.  Even if we don't have any other shamans!  (We do have a couple, but we'd want to run him anyway.)  Speaking of shamans, and cards that are good with +1/+1 counters, we ought to run Spikeshot Goblin as well.

Because of red's nature, I suppose, most of the cards in this deck ended up being damage dealers, so I decided to make that into a subtheme.  Volcanic Spray, Pyroclasm, Pyrohemia, and Sulfurous Blast can all combine with our targeted damage to take out some otherwise unreachable creatures on the opponent's side.  And with our own creatures getting bigger every turn, they're usually impervious to these cards themselves.

This is another deck that's completely playable in nonvanguard.  My avatar of choice is Loxodon Hierarch, for its protective ability as well as the lifegain, but season to taste.  Here's the list:

Avatar: Loxodon Hierarch Land (23): 23 Mountain Creatures (20): 4 Roc Hatchling 4 Varchild's War-Riders 2 Ashling the Pilgrim 2 Spikeshot Goblin 2 Rogue Skycaptain 1 Rage Forger 2 Karplusan Minotaur 2 Hatchet Bully 1 Goblin Razerunners

Noncreatures (17): 2 Lightning Bolt 3 Fire Diamond 4 Power Conduit 1 Pyroclasm 2 Volcanic Spray 2 Smash 1 Sulfurous Blast 2 Pyrohemia

Deck 3

Your search - "lumengrid sentinel" site:puremtgo.com - did not match any documents.

Come on, this guy is cool!  It's about time somebody talked about this guy.  Let's have a look:

Opposition was a tier-one tournament card back in its day.  Is this so much worse?  (I should know by now not to ask that.)  But at least this guy combos with a certain avatar...

Yeah!  So what happens, if you missed it, is every time we cast a creature, we get an artifact.  Which taps a permanent.  Which lets our equipment-powered other creatures get through for some damage.  It may sound inconsequential, but remember that we can also cast our own artifacts in addition to those provided by the avatar.  And play our own artifact lands.  It actually adds up pretty fast.

We'll need some more cards that combo with artifacts, and Magic is obviously full of these.  Atog, Vulshok War Boar, and Megatog are the ones I went with, but this is certainly an area in which you can exercise your creativity.  I like those particular guys because they not only give us a use for our extra artifacts, but also a free way to dispose of harmful equipment.  You can only use the Stonehewer avatar for so long before it gives you a Peregrine Mask...!

Glitterfang is a friend to Johnnies worldwide, for comboing with so many different cards.  The Stonehewer avatar is certainly one of them, as Glitterfang lets us get a new equipment from him every single turn.  All the more Atog food!

One thing I realized during playtesting is that I frequently wanted haste.  Mass Hysteria's symmetry proved too high of a penalty, so I swapped them out for an old favorite of mine, Reckless Charge.  This lets Lumengrid Sentinel reap the benefits of his own ability the turn he comes into play, while also swinging for, at minimum, 4 extra flying damage.  I say "at minimum" because, don't forget, he gets an equipment from our avatar.  Reckless Charge is also pretty great with high-power creatures like Vulshok War Boar, letting him deal 8 (!) more damage than he ordinarily would.  (Again, "at minimum.")

My first draft of this deck was made all the way back when Paradise Mantle was the only 0-mana artifact, and so was a guaranteed pull for every 1-mana creature you cast.  This made Raging Goblin an all-star in any red Stonehewer avatar deck, so I ran four of him in here.  But now that he's just as likely to get a Sigil of Distinction, he's not very good!  I took him out for the more reliable acceleration of Izzet Signet (which still provides the one artifact that the Goblin used to).

Seize the Day is in here because our board usually ends up with just one big creature on it.  And it also abuses the Atogs' "until end of turn" clause.

Here's the list!  Unlike the above two decks, this is utterly unsuited for non-vanguard play (at least not without heavy revisions).

Avatar: Stonehewer Giant Land (24): 7 Island 4 Seat of the Synod 9 Mountain 4 Great Furnace Creatures (24): 4 Glitterfang 4 Sage of Epityr 4 Atog 4 Lumengrid Sentinel 4 Vulshok War Boar 4 Megatog

Noncreatures (12): 4 Reckless Charge 4 Izzet Signet 2 Electrolyze 2 Seize the Day

See you next time, and have fun with vanguard!