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How’s your multiplayer environment? Is it vivid, with new strange and unorthodox decks each playsession... Or is it nearly dead, infested with white players who Congregate every other turn (NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!), with power-gamers using very evil"kill everyone else on turn three"-combos, with cutthroat intensity without the fun?

The latter is a very common problem; I heard that not to long ago it brought chaos to the northeast**, and right now it’s trying to infest my territory (a small town in the Netherlands). You hardly notice it in the beginning; it starts very subtly, with players building decks that abuse one or two cards... But in time, people start searching spoilers and will try to only play with the cards they view as the most powerful or abusable. Then somebody will come up with a"turn 3=win" deck, and all hell breaks loose. Paranoia, rules freaks, and combo-players will rear their ugly head. They will play like mindless automatons. They stop swinging. They will be dead, for they lack Magic... In other words, your party’s alignment will shift to Lawful Evil. To cure this, you have to force them to become the exact opposite: Chaotic Good***. Bringing giant miniature space hamsters for everybody won’t do the trick, although it will help. (If you don't get this, you really need to go out and get Baldur's Gate II. Right now. Really. Go buy it! — The Ferrett, who's beaten BGII with two different characters and is waiting the expansion with shaking fingers) No, you need something more powerful; you need a deck fully built around shaking up your environment.

The best way to mess up something is to involve extra, unexpected factors, and this also applies to Magic... Which means that we’ll have to make a deck full of extra factors to randomize gameplay. This translates into three rules:

• The cards effect needs to be symmetrical, so everybody will be exposed to its chaos;
• It should have a permanent effect, to make sure players constantly have to keep it in mind while playing;
• It should bring an additional randomness to the game;

Global enchantments and"poly artifacts" (you know what I mean) work best, but there are some other cards that help here as well. I’ve constructed a list that contains most of the cards that apply to these rules, but I probably missed a few:

ENCHANTMENTS:

GLOBAL:
Psychic Battle
Ice Cave
Zur’s Weirding
Sunken Hope
Vernal Equinox
Pulse of Llanowar
Dual Nature
Infernal Genesis
Spreading Plague
Impatience
Keldon Twilight
Mana Flare
Mana Barbs
Overabundance
Sunken Hope
The Abyss
Oaths of anything

LOCAL:

Kudzu — just make sure nobody controls a Sacred Ground, or it’s an infinite mana combo
Laccolith Rig/Cloak of Confusion — These two aren’t symmetrical, but they bring so much fun and randomization that I’ll include them anyway

ARTIFACTS:
Teferi’s Puzzle Box
Howling Mine
Jinxed Ring
Worry Beads
Crown of the Ages — Again, not symmetrical, but too much fun to be excluded

OTHER:

Legerdemain — You can switch control between two other players too, you know
Nature’s Resurgence
Elephant Resurgence
Invigorate
Skyshroud Cutter

If you don’t know these cards, search them up on StarCity's own singles search page immediately to your left. Now, I know a lot of these cards are rare... But all save a few are binder rares, so you can get them cheaply, and probably have a few to spare yourself.

Now how do we turn this into a deck?

1. You don’t have to include all the cards on the list, just as many as possible.
2. Since most cards don’t become more effective if there are more of them in play, include them only twice, and put in four copies of the ones who DO work in multiples.
3. Include a lot of mana accelerators too, since most of these cards are expensive in terms of mana.
4. Furthermore, DON’T INCLUDE ANYTHING AGGRESSIVE! You want to shake up the place, and killing the opponents doesn’t fit into that scheme. You want them to stick around and be exposed to chaos; hence the Invigorates and Skyshroud cutters. Use Wall of Blossoms/Tears/Essence/Junk and Jungle Barriers and stuff like Propaganda to stay alive.
5. Put in some removal (Desert Twister, Vindicate, etc.) to punish powergamers and players playing mono-white lifegain, or anybody who generally ruins the game for the rest.
6. If the deck gets waaay bigger than 60 cards, that’s no problem; we’ve included Howling Mines and Teferi’s Puzzle box for that reason.
7. To make sure you’re scheme won’t be foiled by a Tranquility or the like, you should include four Gaea's Blessing (interesting with Worry Beads, to say the least) or something similar.

You should play a deck like this in a huge chaos game, when nobody expects it. Your goals should be to:

• Bring as much anarchy and chaos to the game as possible
• Stay alive as long as possible to maximize the effect of the previous goal

The games will turn out very differently each time you play it, since most of the mentioned cards have been included twice (and therefore don’t always show up) and have interesting synergies with each other — like Teferi’s Puzzle Box with Zur’s Weirding, or Pulse of Llanowar with Ice Cave, or Impatience with Ice Cave, et cetera.

Your playstyle should reflect all this randomness. Don’t make the rational choices — make the irrational ones. Force players to expect the unexpected. Be like Minsc ("Make way, villany! For Justice!"). Minsc is cool. (Baldur's Gate reference again -- The Miniature Giant Space Hamstter) And chaos in its perfect form.

Hopefully, playing this deck will make your fellow players realize that it’s more fun when you swing, and inspire them to build freaky decks themselves (all the strange synergies in this deck should be very inspirational).

Until I think of another thing to write (and the Ferrett is smart, kind, or stupid enough to publish it) --

Job van der Zwan****

bojnas@ccgplayers.com

* - If this title seems familiar, then you’re not only correct, but you also are a loyal StarCity reader, and possibly a fan of articles written by the Ferrett. Way back in the old days (when Omeed was still StarCity’s editor, and the Ferret was"just" a writer), the Ferrett posted an article about how your player profile alone can keep you alive in multiplayer that had a similar title. It was a good article — in fact, if anybody still has it, send it over to Alongi to convince him once and for all THERE IS SUCH THING AS DIPLOMACY IN MULTIPLAYER!!!

** -- Am I a loyal StarCity reader or am I a loyal StarCity reader? Neither; I’m a geek with too much useless info memorized.

*** -- The alignment system from D&D is very useful in describing the situation of your play-group. Mine currently is on neutral good and shifting to lawful neutral (yipes!) — and from there, it will become lawful evil unless I do something about it. Which is exactly what I am doing right now.

**** -- If Stijn van Dongen gives the Ferrett's spellchecker fits, how will it react to my name? (It just went into seizures — The Ferrett)