With the arrival of Urza’s block online, some of my harem decks can be (mostly) finalized in the way I had built them in real life. Briefly here are the harem legal cards in Urza’s Legacy. I didn’t post Urza’s Saga simply because there were a lot of them in there and I don’t feel like typing all of them. Also, there are only three you should really care about being in Saga: Catastrophe, Argothian Enchantress, and Priest of Titania. For comedy’s sake I guess you could care about Goblin Patrol.
Urza’s Legacy has some pretty important cards in it. The first on that list is Karmic Guide. I know a lot of players have been waiting for this one to show up online. There was even a bit of an outrage when it was rumored to be in Divine vs. Demonic, which WoTC later explained why they did not include it. They wanted to put it in there, but then felt that its inclusion would make the Divine deck too powerful so they replaced it with Luminous Angel. I think we can all agree that was a terrible decision. (Mother in Runes) shows up in this set which is good for my mono-white deck and my other control decks. Also in white, is (Radiant, Archangel). She’s pretty good and nicely rounds out an Angel harem deck. Speaking of angels, you know what puts angels into play cheaply? Quicksilver Amulet! What’s that you say? They’re both in the same expansion? Hooray!
Black gets a total pass in this expansion. Red and green are forgettable. Over in blue, we get three more Faeries for my faerie deck. Weatherseed Faeries doesn’t really matter, but Cloud of Faeries and Thornwind Faeries are excellent additions. Slow Motion rears its ugly head in this expansion. This card was so annoying that when Harem was first created, Slow Motion had the honor of being the first card banned in the format. Now that we’ve gotten rid of the banned list, and with the evolution of the format, Slow Motion presents much less of a problem.
Random Rank #1. A brief reminder that a harem deck is 60 card singleton. Yes, WotC doesn’t support 60 card singleton anymore. I have no idea why. It’s more fun than Kaleidoscope. Anyone remember that stupid format for the brief moment in time it existed? Isn’t it amazing that WotC created this “really fun” new format during Shards of Alara block was out and they were pushing Ravnica block drafts online? Am I the only one that thinks that during the second expansion of the new Mirrodin block they will suddenly come up with “Super Relic Format” in which all your cards have to be artifacts and they will “help” us by doing Mirrodin block drafts? End rant.
The last card I want to draw attention to is Tinker. Granted, Tinker has already been online for a while thanks to FtV: Exiled. I’ve always wanted to make an artifact harem deck, but never had the cards to do it. With Esper being in Alara block, we finally got some decent harem cards for an artifact deck. Pair those with Tinker and Tolarian Academy, and there could be an actual deck there. Wait! Here’s the deck right here!
This deck is pretty strong, but it does suffer from one massive weakness. If I do not get Tolarian Academy into play, I’m probably going to lose. Isochron Scepter has some really good targets in this deck. Scepter used to be banned as well because of things like Orim’s Chant and Counterspell. I don’t own a Chant online, but if I get one, you can expect to see it show up in this deck. Most of the time I kill with the big Sphinxes, but I have won a few games with Jinxed Choker. I originally didn’t include it, but I really wanted to find a way to get it in there. If things start looking ugly, I can Golden Wish for Circle of Protection: Artifacts. Quick story, I was playing this the other day and my opponent had double Sun Droplet in play. I ended up dying to the Chocker before I could find the Golden Wish. I tried to make the sideboard as much of a kitchen sink as possible for Golden Wish. Vectis Agents is terrible, but I needed a 15th card. To make the deck a little more powerful I put a lot of exile effects, Swords, Path, Dissipate, Faerie Trickery, and Liquify. If things are really desperate, I can bring in Amulet of Unmaking. I put Tawnos’s Coffin in the sideboard so I can pull off the Coffin/Sharuum combo.
If you're wondering about the Sphinxes, by definition all sphinxes have the bodies of female lions. I need a Sphinx of the Steel Wind, but it costs more than I wanted to spend on this deck. I got everything else with simple trades or pulled them in drafting.
Also for the harem fan, the MOPR’s being released both now and in the near future offer some goodies for us. Granted three of the four cards are already harem legal, but the promos are super cool looking. Also, as any long time harem player will tell you, having promos (especially foil ones) is much better than having the original card. First up is the textless Giant Growth. I have been waiting a long time for this one to show up online. As one of the first textless cards in real life, it is amazing we have had to wait this long to get it online. Now harem has a boost spell that is actually worth using.
The other three are Bloodbraid Elf, Elvish Visionary, and Curse of Wizardry. I am a personal fan of the artwork on all three of these. I just wish Curse was better as a card. It combos really well with Painter’s Servant, but since you can’t use that in harem, this card is mostly useless.
Random Rant #2. Harem was originally meant to be played multiplayer style and multiplayer is pretty terrible online. Hamtastic pointed this out in one of his articles a week or so ago, and I was going to do a whole article on it, but I think he summed it up pretty well. WotC needs to bring Archenemy and Planeschase online. We’ve waited long enough. Why are they wasting time producing, what I’m sure will be another “successful” Master’s Edition, when they could be putting out something people actually want? Granted, that would involve paying attention to multiplayer online, and if the fact that you still can’t leave a game even after you died/conceded is to be used as evidence, they really aren’t paying any attention to multiplayer. Another thing, for those of you who follow Aaron Foresythe on Twitter, did you notice his massive lie about a month ago? He tweeted that “There is no command zone online, yet.” Then, in a response to a question about archenemy, said that the command zone is where “planechase planes, archenemy cards, EDH/Commanders, and Vanguard avatars hang out.” Umm wouldn’t that mean we DO have a command zone online since we have both Vanguard and Commander? Wow, way to point out your own laziness. End rant.
Anyway, so a few people have told me they are interested in harem, but have a hard time building decks. I will have to admit, building harem decks online is no simple task. It can sometimes take me an hour just to make one deck, and that’s without testing it. Since WotC has not given us the option to make our own filters (adding that to my MTGO dream list) finding cards can be difficult. The best advice I can give you is that you already know most of the cards. Yes, most people don’t even bother looking at the artwork, especially online where it can be tiny on your screen, but stored somewhere in your brain are all the cards you need. Here’s what I do and hopefully this will be a help for you. I choose my colors first. The format is pretty easy to build into multicolor, but starting with a mono-color deck is always the best way into the format. I still have, and play, with my mono-color decks. The green one is the worst. Green has a lot of solid cards, but they tend to be small creatures that don’t deal a lot of damage. Plus, with the lack of green removal, except Unyaro Bee Sting, green can’t deal with blockers very well. Often times, I find that, while building a mono-color deck, I will start to think about cards in ally colors, which then guides me into a multi-color deck.
Once you’ve picked your cards, the hardest part, at least in my opinion, comes next. Finding lands a real pain in the butt. I like to build multicolor decks, so tracking down every single multicolor land I have is not easy. This is where that filter I mentioned would come in super handy. Imagine being able to pull down that filer menu and select “multi-color land.” I even thought of a way they could do it. Build a decklist and then have an option to save it as a filter. Pretty simple. And why can’t I save decks as a CSV file? That would make things even easier!!!
So if you’re one of those people who are currently complaining about their favorite format being broken or warped, hop on over to harem. The format is challenging, fun, crazy, and I am always looking for new players to play against. I’ll be back soon with the M11 release to bring you all the goodies that M11 has to offer! As a hint, I can tell you one of the cards I am NOT excited about is Wild Evocation. I intend to go into detail about how much I dislike this card.
I know we've talked about it in game from time to time... good to see you got it out! This is certainly a strange deck restriction, but a really unique and un-filterable one. :)
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