Mono-Black Devotion
Owen Turtenwald
1st Place at Super Sunday Series Championship on 2/9/2014
The creatures all remain the same with Pack Rat into Nightveil Specter into Desecration Demon into Gray Merchant of Asphodel working up the curve. The manabase also remains entirely unchanging with full sets of Mutavault which double in the deck as rats to bolster Pack Rat and Temple of Deceit the chosen Scry land although the deck doesn’t run any blue spells per se. The draw/discard package again is no different with Underworld Connections to not only fuel the hand but also devotion count and Thoughtseize which is perhaps the most powerful turn one play in Standard at the moment. Now where we find the changes are in the removal suite that still has a full set of Hero’s Downfall but has eschewed Pharika’s Cure and scaled Devour Flesh down to two in order to squeeze in Born of the Gods new offering Bile Blight.
My favorite Born of the Gods cards that have been spoiled
While all the spoilers were unrolling the last couple of weeks my friends and I were looking at the new treats we would get to play with. Everyone had their own favorite…apart from Brimaz (aka the Lion King), because he’ll be ridiculously good and a standard all-star soon enough. I will go through my pick for best card for Mythic, Rare, uncommon and common slots . You may not agree, but as with anything in Magic, anyone is entitled to their own opinion.
Mythic of choice:
The first card that caught my eye was one of the minor gods. Mogis is cool. Xenagos could make G/R monsters absolutely insane and power out bananas monsters that crush EVERYTHING. However, neither of these got me excited. One of the gods fit exactly into a deck I already have built, but is missing something…and the fact that she was staring right back, like an answer to a prayer, was tremendous. What caught my eye was Ephara, God of the Polis. While her ability looks a little underwhelming, for the casual player, she is a bomb and a can’t miss all star. Here’s what got me excited.
A little over a year ago I wrote an article detailing what is in essence an Azorius deck where I push the detain ability just about as far as I can go. The deck list is as follows:
Azorius Detain (casual)
Now, this deck list wants to do exactly what Ephara is looking for: play lots of dudes! And with this deck, everytime you do, you’ll be detaining a creature and slowing down your opponent. The problem that this deck runs into is the need to replenish your hand and while it has ways to this, Ephara is the perfect card draw engine to make things work for you even faster. You’ll cast your guys, slow down your opponent, and then refill your hand with new weapons to tie up your opponent.
Now, people will tell me “Wait! This deck isn’t standard! What are you doing!”. True…this is not a standard legal deck, but at its heart Magic is game designed to be fun and this casual deck is exactly that. It is also a deck that I routinely run in a multiplayer free-for-all environment and can be very effective and can shut down the whole table for turns on end. Also, it could certainly be adjusted to be Standard playable and the detain ability is still perfectly valid. So, for those Standard players out there, with little adjustment, Ephara could play a role for you too.
Basically, at its simplest, this becomes a solid addition to simple decks looking to drop lots of creatures to turn sideways and smash your opponent. However, it combos really well with Heliod in the Standard environment, or any Bant populate deck (which could totally become a thing with Advent of the Wurm still running around). The quiet ability of drawing extra cards for playing creatures is terrific. It rewards you for doing exactly what we all want to do: play dudes and let them fight.
Rare of choice:
So, while I was at excited, the sheer fact that this card is printed it amazing. However, couple it with Springleaf Drum now you are a) able to ramp b) tap your Pain Seer without combat and c) get yourself cards. Imagine this in a Mono-Black Devotion deck. Turn 1: play a Swamp, cast Springleaf Drum – Turn 2: play a Swamp, cast Pain Seer, tap Pain Seer, play Thoughtseize – Turn 3: untap Pain Seer, draw your card, play a Swamp, tap Pain Seer, tap your Swamps, cast Desecration Demon Turn 4: untap Pain Seer, draw your card, play a Swamp, tap Pain Seer, tap your Swamps, cast Gray Merchant…and you’re off to the races. I’m sorry…Mono-Black just got one more way to accelerate into stuff, draw more cards and frankly, be even scarier than it already was. If this excites me for the impact it could have in a game just imagine what someone who LIKES to play Black will do with it. One word comes to mind: Gross.
Uncommon of choice:
This fits nicely in G or G/R creature heavy decks and games where the board state has stalled a little. This can happen in a multiplayer game because people just can’t force through enough damage to finish off an opponent. Little Noble Quarry will quickly result in a blow out. Bestow it on your Sedge Scorpion, or some other innocuous creature (although Deathtouchers are always the most fun!) and watch the rest of your army punch through to your opponent and blow them out. Sadly, your Scorpion dies, but guess what? Noble Quarry, because it is now a creature allows you to untap, reload, and take out opponent number 2 with exactly the same maneuver. This cute little unicorn is a game breaker and I love it!
Common of choice:
We learned from Theros that cheap Heroic triggers are the way to go in order to take maximum advantage of the mechanic. So, Epiphany Storm being only one red mana is efficient and triggers Heroic on a creature. A great example is my Akroan Crusader that acts like a little mini Assemble the Legion in a aggressive W/R deck. I don’t REALLY want to attack with my Crusader, but I do want the tokens, so this is perfect and it can then be used to help me rummage through my deck to accelerate my aggressive deck.
The other ability is finding cheap ways to trigger the Inspired mechanic on…you guessed it…Pain Seer. In a Rakdos B/R build this is the perfect enabler on a Pain Seer to get him to tap without forcing combat. So, you’d rummage with the Epiphany Storm (to discard a card you don’t need), and then when Pain Seer untaps draw a card and then take your draw step. So, for little investment you’ve just dug three cards deeper in your deck and hopefully found the gas you needed to continue to beat down…or find an answer to slow down your opponent. Either way, this card is huge boon and something anyone looking to play Red should be looking to pick up in order to trigger Heroic or Inspired abilities.
Those are my picks for top cards for each of the four slots. You may have different picks on your own, but the bottom line is that Born of the Gods looks like it could a very interesting set with lots of neat new tricks, fun choices, and things that continue to make Magic enjoyable and fresh.
Thanks,
Bruce Gray
@bgray8791 on Twitter
You walk through the door and turn on the light, the adrenaline of tonight’s matches is still coursing through you as you shoulder your backpack to the floor. Your shoes and jacket are next to go as you take them off and set them in their proper places before picking up the backpack and going to the dining room table. You open your backpack up and pull out the deck box containing the deck that won you tonight’s FNM draft at your local game shop. It was hard fought, but in the end you persevered and walked out with mad loot.
After taking a breath or two you begin the practiced art of desleeving your deck, stopping for a few moments as you as you reflect upon the Voyage’s End that bounced Hythonia the Cruel before she could go montrous and wipe out your little army, the Lightning Strike that killed the Disciple of Phenax before the devotion trigger could count it and make you discard your bomb, and finally that Prognostic Sphinx that made your opponent cringe when it hit the board and you had not one but two Flamespeaker Adepts ready to strike! Ahh, that was a match to remember.
After you finish the chore of desleeving your cards you grab your trade binder and put the Prognostic Sphinx into its new home behind the two or three you already had from drafting the previous weeks. Quite a collection you have built up, you look at it smiling to yourself before walking over to your bookshelf. Only there aren’t many books on the shelf. No, instead there are those long white boxes that we all know and love to use for storage of cards. You look them over and read the writing that sorts them by set – RTR, GTC, DGM, M14 and THS. You take the last one off the shelf and open it to find that you don’t have near enough room to put all of these commons you drafted with the rest of your prize winning deck tonight. So you grab another box, write THS on it and throw them inside probably to be neglected like all the others sitting on your shelf.
Well, I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be that way. There are other things that you can do with that abundant collection of commons you bring home every week. And I don’t mean the usual suspects. I mean, who of us hasn’t taken a basic Mountain and folded it in half to mark the area of the storage box as being your red section. Or used a card to mark your place in the book you’re reading, if you’re a book reading sort. As an aside my personal favorite was Earthbind while reading William R Forstchen’s Magic the Gathering: Arena. Or maybe you were one of those people that decided that they were going to pretend to be Gambit from the X-Men when you heard that Seething Song was getting banned. There are many things that we do with the extra commons we have laying around, but hopefully none of those examples beats what I am hopefully about to talk to you about.
Pauper.
For those of you who don’t know the word and just went to Google to search the definition, that’s not what I am talking about. While it is a decent word to describe the format, we aren’t talking about being poor or impoverished but instead a format of Magic: the Gathering. You see, a few years ago Wizards of the Coast sanctioned a format exclusively on Magic Online that was spearheaded entirely by the player community. The format doesn’t officially exist as a sanctioned format in paper, but that’s no reason why you can’t take advantage of the great resource you have sitting in those little white cardboard boxes. But first I should explain the rules of Pauper. Now there are two different versions but for the purpose of this article I’m going to focus on Standard Pauper. But they both work from the same set of rules.
Now to elaborate a bit on the legality of cards I will use a recent example to clarify the rules with Rancor, a misprint but great card none-the-less. Rancor was originally printed at common in the Urza’s Legacy, which means that if you are playing Classic Pauper you can use it in any deck you are playing. However, and this is going back before M13 rotated out, it wouldn’t be usable in Standard Pauper because it was reprinted at Uncommon. Therein lies one of the main differences between the two formats. The other is the banlist, which for the purposes of Standard Pauper is none.
I already know what you are thinking. Why would anybody want to play with just commons? Well, the first thing I will present to you is that it is a challenge, and if you are playing Magic then I can only assume that you like a challenge. The second is that it is a gateway and there is no reason why we shouldn’t keep the community growing.
1. The Challenge!
There are a total of 1114 cards currently printed in Standard including mythics, rares, uncommons and commons. That’s a fair number of cards to work with to make decks. Not nearly as expansive as Modern or Legacy, but that’s still over a thousand cards to work with to pull together a collection of 60 cards to sling spells with. Even the best players, teams, and deck builders have trouble finding the best combination of cards within that limitation. But what happens when you take away everything but the commons? You are left with 473 cards, a much smaller pool. Now there is the challenge, build a deck using only the 473 cards available to you AND make it competitive. Don’t think it’s possible, do you? Well let me put together a list of commons in the current Standard that can be played competitively.
Mono-Black Devotion for Standard Pauper
MAINDECK
Creatures (18)
Spells (19)
Lands (23)
SIDEBOARD
And that folks is a Standard Pauper Mono-Black Devotion deck. It’s not nearly as powerful as the one running amok on the pro circuit right now and costs well over two-hundred dollars, but it isn’t altogether that bad. Instead of Hero’s Downfall you have Quag Sickness for removal, you have Disciple of Phenax for hand control in place of Thoughtseize, Deathcult Rogue to deliver near unblockable damage and it increases your devotion count for the most hated common in Standard Gray Merchant of Asphodel. All in all this deck has the potential to be devastating for a collection which was slated to exist simply as bookmarks or dividers. And you thought it couldn’t be done.
2. It’s a Gateway.
Ever been at work talking with a coworker about Magic and someone listening in on your conversation asks what it is you are talking about? Or had a new person walk into your LGS to discover what the rage is everyone is talking about? Or do you have children or nephews/nieces that are interested in playing? Why not start them out by building them a deck with commons? Why not build them a Pauper deck to get them started?
Do you remeber when you started? What did you buy to get into the game? Was it a few boosters to see what the game was all about? Was it a whole booster box or a duel deck? All of those options are great, but they cost a decent amount for anybody who is just jumping in. Not every player is going to want to drop anywhere from $20 to $125 to just experiment with a new game to see if it is for them. So why not take those extra commons you have laying and build some cheap decks for new players to experience what the game is all about before they start investing massive amounts of money with their sites set on playing next to fabled Pro Tour players. I’ll even throw you a bone and give you another Standard Pauper list to help you or your friends get started.
UW Enchantment Aggro for Standard Pauper
MAINDECK
Creatures (24)
Spells (14)
Lands (18)
SIDEBOARD
So there you have two decks to start with, a Mono-Black Devotion deck and a Blue-White Enchantment Aggro deck. And believe me there are many many more out there. So instead of using your commons as a bookmark, a divider or even as ammunition think about the challenge of playing without the most powerful cards, or think about making some decks for new players to start getting their feet wet and helping to grow our community. But whatever you do, don’t let your Friday Night Leftovers go to waste.
– Gerald Knight
WOW !!! A huge congrats to Owen T with his back to back GP titles in two wildly different formats. This deck that he used to win the Standard GP was a real beaut to watch him pilot. The true MVP of this deck is a card that most held as an overpowered limited card, but not a huge constructed powerhouse. Owen showed how crazy Pack Rat can really play. A typical opening of turn one Thoughtseize into turn two Pack Rat often meant you were going to face down a plethora of rats in the next few turns, and activating Mutavaults buffs them as they are also rats. Not that this was the only line of play as turn three would often see Specter, turn four Demon and then turn five could have a potential 8 devotion Gray Merchant. And the one of Erebos is good for some card advantage but amazing at stopping opponents from regaining lost life, especially in the mirror match from their Gray Merchants. A full set of Underworld Connections makes sure that there is a steady stream of cards flowing to your hands at the cost of some minimal life points. The rest of the deck is a very powerful removal suite with Hero’s Downfall, Devour Flesh, Doom Blade and Ultimate Price to ensure there isn’t heavy resistance against your heavy beaters.
