moonmist

Casual Encounters- Bruce Brews a Bad Deck #2

Welcome back looters! After a week of being all pensive I wanted to write about something a little lighter. I just wanted to crack a pack, see what we found, and then see if we can make a fun little brew that might get a few of you excited. Once again, my guidelines for the deck are that I need to use as many cards from the pack as I can, that it needs to be standard legal, and it needs to be pretty budget conscious. Seems simple right? We’ll let’s see what we have found here today and what we can brew up.

 

Rare:

 

Uncommon:

 

Common:

What struck me about this pack is a pretty interesting uncommon. Ulvenwald Mysteries is a powerful card advantage engine that has served me very well in limited. The thought has occurred that it might be a decent addition to a constructed deck, so I immediately was intrigued by the possibilities of this card. This pack also had a pair of powerful werewolves in the Geier Reach Bandit and the Breakneck Rider that wants to push me into red. With a few other little role players in the pack playing some sort of R/G werewolves deck seems very playable and pretty interesting.

Ok, so I need to use the Sanguinary Mage, the Magmatic Chasm and the Stoic Builder, which are a little disappointing. The Magmatic Chasm is a useful way to push through some damage with a pile of aggressive werewolves. The mage is just filler but could be a relevant early play. I like the idea of the Stoic Builder because I could play a little fixing and see if I can’t get access to a third colour. If I slam a bunch of Warped Landscape or Evolving Wilds in the deck I could use them early to get the land drops I need, but in the latter stages I could get them back with the Builder and reuse them to splash a third colour for something like a Fevered Visions. That seems like a reach, but might be worth it. There really isn’t anything else in this pack that is on colour, but some of the white cards seem like useful combat tricks.

The rest of this deck is going to be mostly red and green werewolves like Duskwatch Recruiter and Hinterland Logger.  My plan is to be pretty creature heavy as a way to trigger Ulvenwald  Mysteries as often as possible for extra cards and for human tokens to help plug up the board the short term. Here’s the list.

 

G/R (U) Werewolves

I’m not going to lie, playing Fevered Visions is just pure greed in a deck like this, but I can’t help myself .  The combination of a fixed Howling Mine and a Black Vise is too good to turn up and if I can create access to the mana then I see no reason why not.  Also, with the sheer number of creature spells in this deck I am really interested in the Duskwatch Recruiter as a form of card advantage to be activated on my opponent’s turn. I’m not quite sure what the math works out to on hit hitting, but I feel like the odds are very high when over ⅓ of your deck is creature cards.  

The deck feels unbelievably janky…and is totally something I am keen to build and run. However, there is a slight twist that I thought about that would be just hilarious.  Has anyone else noticed that Ghirapur Aether Grid is still legal in Standard?  So, how’s this for a little twist to this deck.  You drop the two Howlpack Resurgence and the two Cult of the Waxing Moon and sub in four Ghirapur Aether Grid with an eye towards having your creatures die in combat and then using the Clue tokens to power up the Aether Grid as an alternative way to get the win?  Honestly, how many creatures need to die before you’re leveraging those Clue tokens pretty handily?  I would wager 4 to 6 creatures need to die, but let’s be real, many of these creatures are there to die in combat so I would be happy to see them perish in exchange for Clue Tokens that can be weaponized. Those tokens represent cards in the mid part of the game if I need to draw answers, but make for a hilarious win condition if you need to go that route.   Here is version 2.0 of this list!

 

G/R (U) Werewolf Grid

 

Now, neither of these lists are very competitive and would not be something I would trundle out to play with anything real on the line, but as a kitchen table deck this looks and feels like it is just hilarious.  I’ve already started assembling the parts to piece together version 2.0 because I want the Aether Grid kill.  I figure  if you can get someone that way, even at a kitchen table, that you have unlocked some sort of achievement. The rest of the deck is essentially a massive pile of creatures that I want to turn sideways.

The one piece that is truly missing from this deck is access to a Moonmist effect that would allow me to flip my werewolves on command.  However, the Moonmist werewolf deck is coming for an upcoming deck list as I update my Modern-legal werewolves deck from our first visit to Innistrad.   It is shaping up to be a pretty fun update with some very fun new additions to help spice up the list.

Well that’s it for today. I’m pretty excited to try the Ghirapur aether grid version of this deck out in a couple of weeks when I sit down to play a few games with a friend of mine. I’m under no illusion that it is actually good, but I would love to get someone with clue tokens. If nothing else I hope these lists get you excited to build something for yourself. I suppose that is the reason I love to crack a pack one in a while…to see what new options can exist and what new and strange decks I can cobble together.

Thanks for stopping by and having a read. Be sure to stop by next time for another Casual Encounter.

Bruce Gray

@bgray8791 on Twitter