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Explorations #5 - Shards of Alara Deck Sketches
(Naya, Misc)

Steve Gargolinski

One More Shard to Go

So far I've covered every shard except for Naya.  You can read part one here and part two here.  Today I'm going to take a look at the Naya shard and then run down a few more interesting synergies/comboes/etc. that I didn't find a place for elsewhere.  Let's go!

Nayageddon

At the very first Pro Tour, French player Bertrand Lestree took this deck to the finals:

The basic idea of this deck is to use Elves/Fellwar Stones to drop a quick Erhnam Djinn (or Serra Angel or Autumn Willow) and then clear out all of the lands on the table with Armageddon.  This presented a board position that very few decks were able to deal with.  Erhnam Djinn was a total house back then.  Not many creatures could fight it in and win - especially on the third turn.  Armageddon negates the Djinn's drawback and the non-land mana sources help this deck function in a world without land.

In addition to this strategy, Erhnamgeddon runs Land Tax, Sylvan Library, Zuran Orb, and the mighty Balance.  Each of these cards has a profound effect on the game, especially when you're planning on blowing up all of the lands in play.  Swords to Plowshares and Wrath of God provide board control alongside a playset of maindecked Disenchant, which was a lot more relevant back then.  Speaking of 'more relevant back then', Erhnam Djinn was much more impressive in the old Standard than he seems today.  Not much could kill him, he presented four power, only cost a single colored mana, his drawback was easily negated, and it was a piece of cake to drop him on turn three.  All-in-all a solid threat.

Speaking of solid threats, check out this card from Shards of Alara:

One of the keys to success with the old Erhnamgeddon deck was to quickly develop an advanageous board position prior to the casting of Armageddon.  We don't have Armageddon, but we do get Realm Razer - which is sort of like Erhnam Djinn and Armageddon rolled up into one.  this brings some positives and some negatives.  On the plus side, Realm Razer is a four-power threat all by itself.  If you have a 4/2 in play and have blown up all of the lands, then that's usually a pretty decent step towards "developing an advantageous board position".  Throw in a few more beaters and we should be all set to race our opponent to the end.

The most obvious downside is that your land destruction is effectively undone if your opponent manages to remove your Razer.  This obviously hurts your strategy, but thankfully your opponent will have limited ways to deal with your Realm Razer - he or she will have to do it under heavy mana constraints.  If they have Incinerate then it's two turns away.  Oblivion Ring is a minimum of three turns away.  The other obvious drawback of Realm Razer is that it costs six mana across three different colors, but thankfully mana is very easy to generate in today's Standard environment. 

How about something like this for starters?

This idea here is to power out an advantageous board position with the non-land mana producers:  Birds of Paradise, Bloom Tender, and Steward of Valeron.  Wooly Thoctar, Kitchen Finks, and the Rip-Clan Crasher can all be used to apply some early pressure while accelerating into Realm Razer.

After clearing away all of the lands, your mana producing creatures will continue to function while your opponent struggles to rebuild.  Garruk Wildspeaker can end the game quickly from this position, as can any of this deck's fifteen or so efficient beaters.

While proof-reading this article, one of my buddies pointed out that Bennie Smith has also been developing a deck based on Realm Razer.  His deck uses a different strategy than mine:

Bennie's list favors a fuller set of aggressive creatures (Nettle Sentinel, Twinblade Slasher, Wilt-Leaf Cavaliers, Wilt-Leaf Liege, etc.) over the non-land based mana accelerators that I used.  His deck relies on a fast start and the post-Realm Razer reapplication of pressure via many cheap creatures to win.

Both of these ideas seem valid to me, and it's going to take some testing to really nail down the positives and negatives of these two strategies.

Here's a third way to think about this idea:

I made this deck as efficient as I could, and then stuck in four copes of Realm Razer.  Basically it's a typical Red Deck Wins/burn deck with Realm Razer included way above the top of the curve. Here's what the mana curve for this deck looks like:

1 mana:  12
2 mana:  8
3 mana:  12
6 mana:  4

Definitely odd for an aggressive strategy.  The playset of Realm Razer clogs the deck up a bit with six mana creatures, the only cards in the deck that don't consistently hit play within the first three turns.  On the positive side, Realm Razer allows a deck like this to compete more effectively in a topdeck war against control builds.  Decks that thrive in the late game typically struggle early on - doing their best to stay alive, build up resources, control their opponent's development, and then deploy a powerful threat to close out the game.

Realm Razer seems like a great tool against this strategy.  If the aggressive deck can put this big guy into play, then the control decks lose out on a lot of the resource development that they've been counting on through the early part of the game.  Wooly Thoctars and Boggart Ram-Gangs are a lot scarier when Akroma is suddenly eight more turns away.

This deck may look more like something post-sideboard, but still seems like a fun thing to try.

A Few Words on Casual

One bummer about the decks above is that they will not make any friends in the casual room.  A lot of discussion goes on about what exactly qualifies a deck as 'casual'.  Land Destruction is very much frowned upon and definitely tends to fall on the non-casual side of things.  This seems like kind of a bummer to me since it disqualifies pretty much any deck with Sundering Titan, Deus of Calamity, or in this case: Realm Razer.  What a bummer.  These cards all seem like a lot of fun to me.  It's not like we're casting Stone Rain, Stone Rain, Demolish - but to lots of people land destruction is land destruction, taboo any way you look at it.

The same casual dislike holds true for countermagic, although it is not as hated as land destruction.  The only thing people hate more than having all of their spells countered is not being able to cast them in the first place.  There are a whole bunch of other potential no-nos in the casual room:  nonbasic lands, rares, Wrath of God, Umezawa's Jitte, Tarmogoyf, Counterspell, etc.  The real problem is that every single player has a different definition of the term 'casual'.  Name a card, and chances are that there's someone out there who doesn't consider it 'casual'.

I really think that everyone would be better off if we could agree on which decks exactly should be played in the casual room so that game drops and arguments could be kept to a minimum.  That way we could all focus on actually just playing Magic and having fun.  Doesn't that sound great?

Here's my idea:  Everyone should just play whatever they want in the casual room.  Anything.  Bring land destruction, counterspells, Affinity, Faeries, whatever you want.  Every player is allowed to concede at any time and move onto their next game - no problem.  If you're up against a deck that you're not interested in playing, then just concede and move on with your life with no hard feelings.  If you're interested in avoiding a specific archetype, then use the comment field to specify the type of game you're interested in.  Try something like: "no counterspells", "no tribal decks", or "testing a new deck".  Simple!

This is not something worth getting all upset about.

Back to decks.

Naya Zoo

Here's the little common that aggro players are so excited about:

Wild Nacatl is a very powerful creature, and a perfect fit for Extended Zoo decks and their fetchland-heavy manabases.  This creature will almost always come down as a 2/2 on turn one and then attack as a 3/3 on turn two with no additional investment.  In just about every respect it is a strict improvement over perennial beatdown favorite Kird Ape.  That extra point of power can go a long way towards taking down your opponent.

The only downside of Wild Nacatl (when compared to Kird Ape) is that the Kitty comes down on turn one as a 2/2 and the Ape comes down as a 2/3.  If your opponent has a Shock or Tarfire, then Wild Nacatl will hit the graveyard while Kird Ape hangs tough.  Not a huge downside, but definitely worth keeping in mind.

This is a hyper-aggressive Zoo build for the new Extended.  It runs eleven fetchlands, nine mana-producing lands, twenty burn spells, and twenty creatures.  It's a classic 20-20-20 deck from the deck building advice handed out by experienced spellcasters around the days of Unlimited.  I'm not really sure how good this deck is (I haven't tested it yet), but it's certainly very powerful - and a solid starting point for Zoo decks in Extended moving forward.

Adapting this strategy to Standard means a pretty big drop in power for all of the obvious reasons, including the fact that Wild Nacatl is no longer a slam dunk 3/3 attacking on turn two.  There is really no replacement for the dual/fetch lands in standard.  The closest thing that we currently have are the new Panorama lands released in Shards of Alara - along with Terramorphic Expanse.

Unfortunately, I just don't think the Panorama lands are very good right now - they're just too slow.  It's nice that they tap for a colorless mana, but in a world of three color decks that often doesn't do us a whole lot of good.  If some sort of dual lands with the basic stamps come along, then that will probably change my mind.  This sort of reminds me of the set of Vivid lands - at first I didn't really think that they were so great, but then Reflecting Pool alongside the full set of filter lands changed everything.

There are three cards in the Naya shard that really care about Plains, Forests, and Mountains:

I spent a while trying to make a deck based on getting a quick 3/3 Wild Nacatl into play and surprising foolish attackers with Qasali Ambushers, but by the time I had the necessary lands the creatures were just no longer impressive.  I think that the smart thing to do with a Standard Naya Zoo deck is to just focus on strong cards without worrying assembling a set of Forests, Mountains, and Plains.

This deck is pretty much straightforward aggro with twelve burn spells for reach if the early aggro rush doesn't finish the job.  Gaddock Teeg is the deck's only real form of disruption unless you count the burn - which you probably don't.  The only bummer about Teeg is that he prevents you from casting Flame Javelin, but that's the only card in your deck that he shuts down.  I guess we could run some other burn in that slot (Shock?), but Flame Javelin just seems too good not to use.

I'm going to call it quits for Naya right now, but hopefully these decks give you some ideas about what Alara's green-red-white shard is capable of.

Some Final Ideas

To close out this Shards of Alara set review, I'm going to just run down a few cards/combos that I didn't manage to fit in anywhere else.

This guy reminds me a lot of Reya Dawnbringer.  One plan for reanimator decks in the past has been to:

1. Dump a bunch of creatures into the graveyard.
2. Reanimate Reya Dawnbringer.
3. Use Reya's triggered ability to bring everything else from your graveyard into play.

Could this same sort of strategy work with Sedris?  There are a few major differences here:

• Sedris requires mana to bring guys back to play.
• Sedris can reanimate multiple creatures per turn.
  
• Reya is able to reanimate the same creature more than once.  When a Sedris devotee dies, he's gone for good.
  

Evoke creatures would go straight into this deck, and there are plenty of good ones in color (black and blue).  Evoke a Mulldrifter and then get him back again for 2B?  Seems pretty exciting.  Even better if you manage to get a River Kelpie into play.

The major issue here is that Sedris costs six mana across three different colors, but there are ways to get around that.  We could always discard him and then use Makeshift Mannequin to return him from the dead at instant speed.  Bring him into play at the end of your opponent's turn and then untap and unload your graveyard?  Seems like an idea worth exploring.  There are already a bunch of decks that run lots of Mulldrifters and Shriekmaws; it doesn't seem crazy to run this guy as a singleton for a serious late gameadvantage.

Manaplasm was originally spoiled at 1G with trample, which had players all over sitting up to take notice.  Who doesn't love a two mana cost beater who gets bigger every single turn just by playing Magic?  1G and trample is certainly much, much better than 2G without trample - tournament players quickly soured on the card with the new casting cost, but there's still something fun and exciting there.  Tower Above (and each of the other 2/X 2/X 2/X casting cost cards) has a converted mana cost of six, which is pretty exciting when combined with Manaplasm.

Tower Above turns Manaplasm into an 11/11 trample, wither, mini-Lured nightmare for your opponent.  If you can accelerate into two copies of Tower Above then Manaplasm becomes 21/21.  Flame Javelin plus Tower Above gets you a 17/17 Manaplasm with four points of direct damage.

Turn one:  Forest, Bird
Turn two:  Forest, Elf
Turn three:  Mountain, Manaplasm
Turn four:  Mountain, Tower Above, Flame Javelin, swing for the win?

Seems exciting?  Pretty janky though.

Here's a combo.

If you have Sharuum the Hegemon in the graveyard and a second copy in your hand, then summoning the second Legend will create an infinite loop.  State based effects (including the Legend rule) are checked before the 'comes into play' abilities of the Hegemons go on the stack - so these two copies of Sharuum will be able to destroy/resurrect each other a potentially infinite number of times.

Thankfully the triggered ability on Sharuum the Hegemon is optional, so you're able to stop cycling whenever you want.  What do we do with this huge cycle?  One idea is to create a gigantic Glaze Fiend or Mirrodin's Vermiculos.  An Extended legal idea is to use Bitter Ordeal to remove your opponent's entire library from the game.  Disciple of the Vault deals an infinite amount of damage.  Where Ancients Tread creates infinite damage in-block and only requires five more mana and a fourth color!  Vicious Shadows does the same for seven additional mana.

I'm sure that there are plenty more ideas to abuse this infinite loop.

Set Review Done!

All right, that covers every shard of Alara!  We went through a whole bunch of decks and tons of different ideas.  I definitely learned a whole lot about the new set, and hopefully you learned something also.  It'll be interesting to see how three color shards and mythic rares end up playing out as more players get their hands on the new cards.

Thanks for reading!

Steve Gargolinski
spgmtgo@gmail.com