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By: BlippyTheSlug, Volker Kirstein
Sep 26 2012 11:00am
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Slugs of the World, Unite!

  Woo...huh? Slithering out from underneath a rock comes another cousin to join in the fray! A ridiculous monstrosity, weak but tough, overcosted, and ability-less. Huh? While happy to see another slug enter the ranks, at the same time I find it rather meh!, and kinda insulting. I mean, for we get Molder Slug - which is 4/6, and makes every player sacrifice an artifact on their upkeep. For we get Thermopod - which is 4/3 and has Haste for the mere cost of a snow land! Wha-wha-WHAT?!?!? Hasty snow slugs?!?!? I love it! And, last but not least, the oft-maligned Spitting Slug  for .

  And now, for , we get a 2/6 vanilla chump. One can plainly see why we, Blippy, Sluglord, look upon this as an insult to our most august personage. M'kay? Back to reality. I'll just have to live with it. Which, I suppose, also means that slug decks will now be Jund instead of . At least the flavor text is awesome. *sigh* Can a brother get a Pepsi?

Valakut! Gesundheit! 

  Well, apparently I blew that one! I didn't see it coming at all. I thought the Banned & Restricted announcment for Modern would read "No changes", but nooOOOoooo! They have to go and unban Valakut!

  Blarg. I hate Titan Ramp. Didn't I just see a whole two years of Titan Ramp in Standard? Sure seems like it. And now it's going to be in Modern? Blarg. Oh! And let's not forget Scapeshift! Oh well. I suppose it isn't about what I like. But I'm not alone in this. People have voiced their displeasure at me, as though I can do anything about it. "Modern is dead!" "They ruined Modern!" "The sky is falling!" I remember how I felt last year at the first bannings. And I see where we're at today. So I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. For now.

  But still. "The DCI is unbanning a card to see how that affects the format."  Hello? To me, that reads as "Let's see what happens when we do this" Ohhh... kay.... Like I said. I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, and not cry wolf.

  If the sky were falling, we'd all be wearing blue hats.

Monster Garage

  As sometimes happens in these hard economic times, I had to liquidate my collection for a cash influx. After collecting quotes and cashing out, this left me with my PRM Guru Basic Lands. Period. However, since I'm such a dedicated pimp , I do have a continual weekly budget* that I can rebuild with. So I'm going to chronicle my rebuilding somewhat, along with prices, just to see how expensive it is to get into Modern in a vacuum.

  * As you may or may not know, hosts running sponsored events receive bot credit on the sponsor's bot for running the events. I also "get coin" for writing these articles, the amount thereof varying depending on various arcane feng shui. All of this is scattered over a few bots, so it's not like I can pull up to a bot with 50 tix in pocket. It's some here, a little more there, more somewhere else.

  Since I'm such an Infectious Host, the next deck I decided to build was Infect. Mwahahahaha! I found a recent 4-0 decklist, and picked up what I needed, spellwise. Here's what I ended up getting.

BUG Infect
im2g00t4ubarn (4-0) Modern Daily #4340769 on 09/17/2012
Infected Beaters
4 Blighted Agent
4 Glistener Elf
4 Phyrexian Crusader *
4 Plague Stinger
16 Creatures

Other Spells
4 Groundswell
4 Might of Old Krosa
4 Mutagenic Growth
4 Rancor
4 Vines of Vastwood
20 Other Spells
Lands
4 Inkmoth Nexus *
2 Pendelhaven *
6 Lands

21.91 For what you see 

  The money cards being Inkmoth Nexus (3.97). Pendelhaven was 0.67, and Phyrexian Crusader was 0.47. Everything else was under a quarter each. And I have some change left.

  Obviously, mana will be an issue until I get some Shocks. In the meantime, Basic Lands with Verdant Catacombs, and Drowned Catacomb will do

Phyrexian Crusader

 

  This is the creature and spellbase needed, and several of those cards find use in other archetypes, as well: Inkmoth Nexus, Rancor, Pendelhaven, and Vines of Vastwood are all found in other decks. Some staples as well another pair of decks. Voila!

  Obviously the manabase is rather meh! until I get some appropriate shocks to go with my Verdant Catacombs. That is why several of my decks are listed as "semi-casual". They're based off of valid archetypes, but the manabases, and "money spells" aren't there. Yet. I'm holding off on the shocklands until later in October, when I expect them to be around five a pop. Or less. And it'll probably be a few weeks/months before I start getting "heavy spells" like Planeswalkers, or Cryptic Command. So while a Delver deck might be "mean", it ain't really all that and a bag of chips without the appropriate accessories. Dragonskull Summits and Drowned Catacombs are fine and dandy, but can't do much for you on turn one. Mana Leak is pretty much a dead draw on turn seven..

Bling & Lands
 
Full Art/Textless Creatures
4 Blood Knight
2 Deathless Angel
4 Groundbreaker
4 Liliana's Specter
4 Memnite
4 Rakdos Guildmage
4 Serra Avenger
4 Treasure Mage
32 PRM Creatures 

Full Art/Textless Spells
4 Blightning
4 Brave the Elements
4 Cancel
4 Celestial Purge
4 Condemn
4 Disenchant
4 Doom Blade
4 Fireball
4 Flame Javelin
4 Giant Growth
4 Harrow
4 Hinder
4 Incinerate
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Lightning Helix
4 Negate
4 Putrefy
4 Remove Soul
4 Searing Blaze
4 Staggershock
4 Treasure Hunt
84 PRM Other Spells
Basic Guru Lands
32 Forest
37 Island
37 Mountain
35 Plains
36 Swamp
Urzatron
4 Urza's Mine
4 Urza's Power Plant
4 Urza's Tower
Fetches
4 Arid Mesa
2 Evolving Wilds
4 Marsh Flats
4 Terramorphic Expanse
4 Verdant Catacombs
Manlands
4 Inkmoth Nexus
3 Lavaclaw Reaches
1 Raging Ravine
4 Treetop Village
Utility
4 Bojuka Bog
2 Pendelhaven
2 Reliquary Tower
Dual & Multicolour
2 Blackcleave Cliffs
4 Drowned Catacomb
4 Dragonskull Summit
4 Glacial Fortress
4 Rootbound Crag
2 Sunpetal Grove
4 Savage Lands
247 Lands
 

 

Total spent: ~220
  18 Built Decks:

  • Bloodcrank Casual
  • Bump, T1.5ish
  • Delver Snapcaster x3: Grixis, UB, URW (Semi-casual)
  • Infect x2: BUG, G (Semi-casual)
  • Jund x2: Goyfless Death Cloud (Semi-casual), Goyfless (Casual)
  • RDW. T1.5ish
  • Textless Casual x5: Jund, BRW, Boros, RDW, GR
  • Tron G Junk, Casual
  • Vampires x2: B, RB (Casual, Tribal)
  • No "real" sideboards built yet.

 

  The Tron deck is built except for the fat finishers like Wumcoil Engine and Karn. Those will come much later. The basic Tron engine, with the mana fixing and Expedition Maps came to negligible change in my purchases; I didn't even bother documenting it. In the meantime I'm running "junk", like Pelakka Wurm and Ulamog's Crusher, in place of the "real" fatties.

  The next deck I want to do is Soul Sisters, or Soul Taxes. I'm leaning toward Soul Taxes; which is just Soul Sisters with Aven Mindcensor, or sometimes Mangara, thrown in. The money cards in that are going to be Path to Exile and Honor of the Pure, unless things have changed. 

  One of my Sponsors is on vacation, so there is a delay in some on my "accounts receivable". This means that I have to wait on the Soul Taxes build for a week or so. This is probably a good thing, because there will be a "backlog" when the Sponsor returns. Cha-ching!

  *doing a bad Donna Summers impression* He works hard for the money... So hard for it, honey...

 

 

  I'm trying something new with the Overdrive! and Eurodrive! event coverage. The screenshots below link to the metagame reports of said events.

Overdrive! #63

 

 

Eurodrive! #44

  

 

 

Where Angels Fear To Tread #24

Players: 12
4-0: NONE!
3-1: romellos, _Kumagoro_, Gilipolleces, NetworkGuru

Players, pairings, and results from WAFTT #24 can be found here.
All decks from WAFTT #24 can be found here.

 

 

 

Interesting Tidbits

  Return To Ravnica paper pre-releases happen this weekend! Woo hoo! The Online release shan't be far behind. Modern is evolving before our eyes..

  PT Seattle/Return To Ravnica is also less than a month away. With less than a month of RTR cards being "in circulation", I'm expecting the unexpected in the decklists for this event. Will we see a new archetype, or several, swoop in? Will Dredge make itself felt? Will Jund play with the new toys? Will a BUG Delver evolve? I'm all a'shiver in antici...

  ... pation!

  Modern attendance continues to track well:

 

 

 

1 Comments

That slug came about because by Psychobabble at Thu, 09/27/2012 - 00:07
Psychobabble's picture

That slug came about because a designer likes to play a "game" where you roll two d6 and name a vanilla creature with the stats combo that comes up. There were a couple of holes in the list as a result of some early walls being errata-ed to have the "defender" keyword, so he added a few vanilla creatures with weird stats in RtR (I think there's a 5/2 as well?).