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By: CottonRhetoric, Cotton Rhetoric
Mar 15 2016 1:00pm
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Cotton Threads, you know from my Necrotic Ooze special last December that I like copying activated abilities from graveyards. Well there's another card that can do this, and it's a doozy!

Myr Welder

The obvious difference is that it has to tap and exile to use. The unobvious difference is that it can hit noncreatures. So how can we abuse this fine card? 

1. Avoid drawbacks

You don't copy the whole card—just the activated ability. That means there is no cumulative upkeep on Juju Bubble, no defender on Snow Fortress (lol), and no discarding for Masticore.

Snow Fortress  Masticore  Phyrexian Devourer

And I don't recommend either of these in the Just for Fun room, but, famously, you can activate Phyrexian Devourer as much as you want, or you can go infinite with a single Time Vault.

2. Skip high CMCs

You no longer have to pay full price for Steel Hellkite, Obelisk of Alara, Memnarch, Bosh, Iron Golem, or Xanthic Statue.

Steel Hellkite  Obelisk of Alara  Memnarch

 

3. Untap Combos

    Summoning Station     Solarion

You can easily have the Welder untap itself with Staff of Domination, Phyrexian Ironfoot, or Voltaic Construct. From there you can:

 

4. +1/+1 counter combos

You can add counters with Steel Overseer, Flowstone Sculpture, or Bow of Nylea.

Then you can make use of them with Mindless Automaton, Etched Oracle, Triskelion, Triskelavus, or Suncrusher. (Or with your attack phase.)

Flowstone Sculpture  Mindless Automaton  Suncrusher

 

5. Charge counter combos

You can get a ton with Ventifact Bottle (!). You can use them with Grindclock, Talon of Pain, Chimeric Mass, Infused Arrows, and especially Titan Forge.

Ventifact Bottle  Chimeric Mass  Titan Forge

 

6. -1/-1 counter combos

Rack them up with Matopi Golem or Serrated Biskelion. Dump them with Grim Poppet or Power Conduit. Keep things rolling with Cauldron of Souls.

 7. Myr tribal

He is a Myr, after all. Go all out with Myr Turbine, Myr Galvanizer, and the like.

8. General goodstuff

It rarely hurts to give your Welder the ability to activate a Forcefield, Null Brooch, Spear of Heliod, Mishra's Helix, Karn, Silver Golem, Mirror Universe, Contagion Engine, or Clockwork Beast.

Master Transmuter could be a way to actually drop those expensive spells from category 2 instead of just putting their abilities on a 1/4.

Nevinyrral's Disk plus any regenerator is repeatable nukes.

Forcefield  Null Brooch  Nevinyrral's Disk

 

10. Go infinite

Again, probably not for the Fun room, but it's worth mentioning that a simple Gilded Lotus in the graveyard plus any untap card is infinite mana.

 

    Strategic Planning

So how can we turn all of this into a deck?

The first thing that stands out to me is the need for enabling. And every color (including colorless) has ways of filling up its graveyard, but I'm going to go with blue for its cards that also help us in other ways while they're doing that—Merfolk Looter, Strategic Planning, and Deranged Assistant.

My favorite of the above strategies is repeatable Nevinyrral's Disking, so we'll need some regenerators. I like Jhoira's Toolbox's ability to touch multiple creatures, and it's hard to beat Masticore's utility. As for untapping, Phyrexian Ironfoot is also a great way to stall while we set up. (This is not the fastest deck, and a cheap 3/4 is a respectable deterrent against many opponents.)

We are strong in colorless, so let's take advantage of the new colorless mana symbols. Spatial Contortion is another early stall spell for those pre-Disk threats. And by now our deck is almost full, so let's just round it out with a few goodstuff cards!

 

 

And why not, let's take this card from a different angle.

My next-favorite strategy from the above is the -1/-1 counter business, because you don't get to see that very often. Power Conduit is a link between -1/-1 counters and charge counters, so let's run some charge cards too.

Most of my card choices are already mentioned above, so this time let's just put the decklist first and commentary after:

What is a Biskelion
And do you pronounce it like "biscuit" or like the "bi-" prefix?
Creatures
4 Myr Welder
4 Serrated Biskelion
2 Voltaic Construct
3 Matopi Golem
2 Grim Poppet
15 cards

Other Spells
4 Ancient Stirrings
Spatial Contortion
4 Anvil of Bogardan
2 Energy Chamber
4 Power Conduit
2 Titan Forge
1 Ventifact Bottle
2 Cauldron of Souls
1 Contagion Engine
22 cards
Lands
11 Forest
2 Blasted Landscape
3 Buried Ruin
3 Quicksand
4 Radiant Fountain
23 cards
 
Power Conduit

 

Serrated Biskelion    

Power Conduit is the heavy lifter of this deck. Whether you have a Welder out or not, it will enable nearly any other card in the deck. Play around with it; get a feel for its tricks. For instance, if you have a Serrated Biskelion and are attacked by two Savannah Lions, block one, tap the Biskelion to kill the other Lion and bring the Biskelion to a 1/1. Then activate Power Conduit to remove the -1/-1 counter (he's a 2/2) and give him a +1/+1 counter (he's a 3/3!). Two dead Lions, and you still have your Biskelion to weaken more creatures next turn.

You can also do things like regenerate your Matopi Golem and remove his -1/-1 counter to charge up your Titan Forge.

I didn't want to run the same graveyard-enabling suite as the previous deck, so instead of blue's looters, I went with the colorless Anvil of Bogardan. And because we have so much colorless (56 cards out of 60), I ran four Ancient Stirrings. So useful!!! Especially when the deck is as combo-oriented as this one.

Since there aren't as many graveyard fillers, we want the tricks to work on board in addition to through the Welder. Therefore I'm running Voltaic Construct as the untapper instead of Phyrexian Ironfoot. Give this hunk of junk a try!

Well I don't think I can muster a third deck out of Myr Welder so let's do something totally else for the last one.

 

Deck 3 Circle of Affliction

Circle of Affliction

What if, instead of using the Circle reactively against our opponent's cards, we used it proactively with our own self-damaging cards? Oh yes. Ohhhhh yessssss.

Black is the king of damaging itself, so let's go with that as the color to name. Here are our tools:

Shadow Guildmage  Fledgling Djinn  Hasran Ogress

Noxious Field  Plague Sliver  Spiteful Visions

(You could also name red with such cards as Jackal Pup, Fireslinger, Sparksmith, and Steam Blast—but that's another deck.)

Shadow Guildmage ended up starting a whole train of thought. It led to Death Pits of Rath (love this combo!!), which led to Forked Bolt and Fireslinger, which led to Darkest Hour, which actually is a nice boost to our Circle of Affliction.

I wish that Night's Whisper or Sign in Blood worked off of damage instead of life loss! We do need some draw/filtering in this deck, but we should probably pick something that doesn't kill us, since we are after all already running so much of that. (Even with a Circle out, we can easily lose more than we gain.) I went with Orcish Librarian.

The list:

Darkest Affliction
Also the name of my 90s goth band
Creatures
4 Shadow Guildmage
4 Fledgling Djinn
4 Fireslinger
2 Orcish Librarian
3 Rakdos Augermage
2 Juzam Djinn
2 Plague Sliver
21 cards

Other Spells
2 Darkest Hour
2 Forked Bolt
4 Circle of Affliction
1 Arc Lightning
1 Forked Lightning
2 Spiteful Visions
4 Death Pits of Rath
16 cards
Lands
13 Swamp
10 Mountain
23 cards
 
Darkest Hour

 

Don't forget to name black! I actually put that in my deck's file name as a reminder.