Part 1 of Donald X.'s House of Scourge can be found by looking in a mirror and sticking your tongue out. Part 3 will be made available on a need-to-know basis only.

Aphetto Runecaster
As noted under Aven Farseer in my last article, you can build a cute deck with this with Wall Of Deceit and the like. That's this card's role in life. It's also a wizard, but I don't hold that against it. It turns Break Open into a cantrip. Eventually turns Backslide into a cantrip.

Brain Freeze
See Astral Steel for a list of ways to use storm cards. Now, sure, you can build an Early Harvest/Mind's Desire deck (or Aluren deck, or whatever), in order to rapidly do an unprecedented amount of milling with your Brain Freeze. But for me, the real joy of the card lies in building a deck consisting of nothing but islands and one- or two-mana blue instants. You cast all of your spells on your opponent's turn, and it's a mad flurry of cheap countermagic and cantrips, followed by milling. You would probably win a few games before you got bored with it - and, for a card like Brain Freeze, why ask for more?

If that's not good enough for you, remember that since Brain Freeze fills up your opponent's graveyard, it interacts well with Haunting Echoes and cards like Animate Dead. You can even fill up your own graveyard with it, for a big Living Death, or to gain threshold, or for access to flashback cards.

Coast Watcher
Back when Sea Sprite came out, trample worked differently. Sea Sprite could block a Ball Lightning and suck up all the damage. These days trample isn't so wimpy - but then again, not so many things trample anymore either. But"protection from green" can never rival"protection from red" (what with all of the ways red has to hurt your own stuff). This is still passable as a cheap creature for your Sleight Of Mind deck, or in that rare deck of global green damage (Cyclone, Hurricane). You can also build a deck that consists of nothing but blue cards that hose green, with Coast Watcher providing your crucial two-drop.

Just keep playing the deck until one day you run up against a mono-green deck. Bash it to pieces. Then take the deck apart.

Day of the Dragons
The key to making this really pay off is to have one card that gives you multiple creatures that you won't lose if Day of the Dragons gets trashed. That card is Siege-Gang Commander. You do actually lose the goblin tokens (they"cease to exist") when they leave play, but when you get the Siege-Gang Commander back, it comes with fresh goblins. Four creatures (the Siege-Gang Commander himself plus the three tokens) is the perfect number, giving you twenty power worth of flying dragons. Of course you want Anger in your graveyard so you can immediately attack for the win. You can keep your tokens when you lose Day of the Dragons, by playing either Stifle or Artificial Evolution.

There are much wackier and convoluted things to do with Day of the Dragons, if that's your style. For example: Play Phage the Untouchable. Play Day of the Dragons. Donate Day of the Dragons to your opponent. Then Disenchant it. Phage comes back into play under your opponent's control, and your opponent loses. That's gotta sting.

Decree of Silence
Unlike instants, enchantments are relatively easy to recurse. You can get this into play initially via Academy Rector - then, when it runs dry, get it back with Hanna, Ship's Navigator and recast it. This is extra-insulting with Standstill. Since this doesn't stop storm copies, you'll want to play with Stifle or Hindering Touch as insurance.

Dispersal Shield
Though this interacts with casting cost, it's basically just a vanilla utility card. You want a high casting-cost permanent in play, but it doesn't have to be that high for you to counter nearly anything. If you must try to make your deck interact with this, play creatures that can't be targeted, so that your opponent is unlikely to kill them in response to this.

Dragon Wings
See Dragon Scales for general dragon part info. Because this has a built-in way to discard it thanks to its cycling, this dragon part does its trick better than the other ones (which either need a way to discard them, or need to be hardcast on something). However, most of the blue creatures that qualify for this upgrade already fly, and the ones that don't often have islandhome or are simply a bad deal. So you really don't want this with blue creatures; you want it on big green monsters that don't trample, like Enormous Baloth. Dragon Wings is always going to be upstaged by Wonder; but note that, unlike Wonder, Dragon Wings will work in a non-blue deck, provided you have a way to discard it like Wild Mongrel. Of course, you can just play big flying creatures instead.

Faces of the Past
This is reminiscent of Intruder Alarm, but much harder to get action out of. It mildly hoses theme decks, since if you kill one of your opponent's creatures, you can tap the rest. You can play this with Unnatural Selection in order to make sure your opponent is playing a theme deck.

You can also try to abuse the untapping ability, but since Scourge also has Pemmin's Aura, which just requires"U" to repeatedly untap stuff, instead of"sacrifice a creature and get it back and replay it," you probably aren't so interested. On the other hand, if you want the rest of your Wirewood Channeler deck to consist of more unbounded mana combos (instead of ways to make the main combo work), you can throw in Faces of the Past and some tricky combos with it (such as Fecundity/Haunted Crossroads/Fallen Angel/Llanowar Elves - you sacrifice Llanowar Elves, put it on top of your deck and draw it, and recast it, meanwhile untapping and retapping your Wirewood Channeler to provide the mana for this operation).

Frozen Solid
It says right on the card to play it with pingers like Prodigal Sorcerer, and then you can kill most creatures with a mono-blue deck. However the main use I see for this is in a deck that prefers to leave creatures disabled on the table, for later use. For example, when you cast Decree of Pain, you'll draw a card for each frozen creature that dies, which you wouldn't if you'd just killed them. Also, you can poke a creature that's Frozen Solid, and in response to the triggered ability that kills it, move Frozen Solid onto something else with Crown of the Ages.

Hindering Touch
See Astral Steel for general storm comments. Though this has storm, the most it ever does is counter everything (which is usually just one thing). It's not much of a card for storm combos. And in a storm theme deck, you'd want cheaper countermagic to feed storms. As a Power Sink variant, it can be used with cards like Rhystic Lightning, but there are much better Power Sink variants out there. If you're scared of storm cards, Hindering Touch does the trick - but so does Stifle, and for just U.

Long-Term Plans
I know what you're thinking. Not now, in a moment. You're thinking,"Sure, I can use Mental Note or whatever to draw the card faster, but so what? I could just play with a better tutor if that's what I wanted. But is there any reason why I'd specifically want the card I'd searched for to be the third card down?" The reason you are looking for is called Deep Spawn. With Deep Spawn out, the top two cards of your deck are milled every upkeep. Simply fetch a card with Long-Term Plans on your opponent's turn, and it will be the next card you draw.

Mercurial Kite
Every other turn, this flies past that Will-o'-the-Wisp. Not very useful. If what you want is a chump blocker that bothers stuff, you can kill the blocked creature outright, with Venomous Dragonfly, Abu Ja'far, etc. Or make it 0/2 with Brine Hag. I guess I could see randomly sticking this in a Royal Assassin/Nettling Imp kind of deck.

Metamorphose
Like Recoil, this is at its best when your opponent has no cards in hand. Then it's probably Repel for 1U. By that point, you could just cast Repel, though. It can function as a faster Repel in decks that see what your opponent has (such as with Peek or Duress), but you'd have to have a lot of Repels and Fallow Earths and Agonizing Memories in your deck before it was worth playing this too.

The main trick to this card, then, is in political multiplayer games. Second turn, Metamorphose an opponent's land, make a friend. Pick someone with forests so they're likely to have a big monster to drop, but play green-hosing cards in the same deck for when there's just the two of you left (that'll teach 'em).

Mind's Desire
There are two kinds of combo decks. The first kind just immediately wins (or at least gets unbounded something or other) when it gets its combo out. For example, use Saber Ants/Gaea's Embrace/Pandemonium/Phyrexian Altar for unbounded insect tokens. The second kind doesn't just win. It gets some card interaction going which lets you dig into your deck, and hopefully you draw whatever it is you need to keep the chain going. At some point you either"fizzle," or else get twenty to sixty of something or another and win.

Mind's Desire falls into the latter category. Just playing the card out of the blue is equivalent to one activation of Temporal Aperture. Unless you've gotten your deck down to one card with Thought Lash, the card you get to play will be random, and so it isn't that useful or interesting. However, Mind's Desire has storm, so you can get to play a bunch of free spells at once, and if one of them is another Mind's Desire, your combo is proceeding towards generating twenty to sixty of something (probably twenty lost life with Tendrils of Agony, or sixty Millstones with Brain Freeze). See Astral Steel for general notes on storm.

You will note in that paragraph that Mind's Desire itself is one of the ways to get lots of spells played in preparation for a storm spell. That's really the whole trick; it's a storm spell that feeds storm spells. On the surface, it's an exciting combo card, but underneath, it's a boring combo card; it's mostly just going to help you get your ten to twenty spells cast so that your Tendrils Of Agony or Brain Freeze will win for you. If you want to build a deck that has fun with this but isn't about comboing people out, the obvious thing to do is to play with really expensive spells and creatures - Dragons, Decrees, Avatars, Winds - plus cheap cards to build up the Mind's Desire storm. However, your deck will end up very random, what with having all low-end and high-end spells.

For such a deck, the Urza block"free" spells are a good way to build up storms, as they come in a variety of sizes (1U for Cloud of Faeries, 4U for Peregrine Drake, 5UU for Palinchron). You can also play with other ways around costs, such as Temporal Aperture.

Mischievous Quanar
We already had a Fork on the table with Mirari (and to a lesser degree with Bosium Strip), but this one also works on your opponent's spells. It's a great card for any deck with stuff worth Forking, which is most decks. It's at its best with very expensive spells, so that Forking produces the biggest effect for your 1UU. Nothing is ever more expensive than an X spell; Fireball, Stroke of Genius, Decree of Justice, and the like are the spells you want to be copying.

You can also play Mischievous Quanar with a bunch of different random utility spells, and then copy whatever seems to be at its best against your current opponent (your Stone Rain if they're mana-hosed, your Shatter if they're playing a bunch of artifacts, and so on).

Mistform Warchief
Outside of illusion theme decks, this does no tricks you can't do better with other cards. If you want cheaper creature spells, play Nightscape Familiar or Sapphire Medallion or whatever fits your deck; if you want a creature that's any type on demand, play any superior Mistform dude.

Parallel Thoughts
This is a disappointing implementation of the dual-library concept. Why couldn't it have been"any number of cards" instead of seven? And why not"0: Exchange your library with the pile" instead of just getting to draw cards from the pile?

Anyway, this has nothing on previous similar cards, like Skyship Weatherlight or Knowledge Vault. The only fun thing I see to do with this is to play it with Duplicity, so that you have two libraries and two hands at the same time. Add phasing creatures and there you have it - a mess.

Pemmin's Aura
Yeah-sure-whatever. It makes you unbounded mana with Wirewood Channeler, it's a blue card that can kill creatures outright by lowering their toughness. So what?

The real joy of this card lies in putting it on some random creature and watching whatever it is turn into a Morphling. This is a great card for a semi-highlander deck; play four Pemmin's Aura and no other duplicates. The rest of the deck is just different creatures that you might want Pemmin's Aura on (okay, and a few ways to kill stuff, so you don't lose as often). The untap ability by itself is exceptional, on stuff ranging from Arcanis the Omnipotent (draw as many cards as you want) to Patron Wizard (which is now effectively a Mishra's Helix) to Thriss, Nantuko Primus (that's big) to Aboshan, Cephalid Emperor (it's Opposition, for U instead of"tap a creature"). Flying and flowstone is always nice, on anything from The Wretched to Mortivore. Leaving mana open to make it untargetable got you down? Try putting it on Autumn Willow. And be sure to try it out on random bad creatures, from Psionic Entity to Sandbar Crocodile. It goes on pretty much anything that's 2/2 or better (but not Morphling itself - it's completely useless on Morphling).

It's also a fine choice for creatures that specifically like enchantments - Thran Golem, Hakim, Loreweaver, Rabid Wombat. And don't forget about putting it on animated noncreatures - for example, a Stalking Stones enchanted with Squirrel Nest.

Of course, for the ultimate set of creature abilities, you want Pemmin's Aura on Akroma, Angel of Wrath. It's redundant, but at the same time, it's perfect.

Raven Guild Initiate
This saves your bird. Ideal birds to save are ones that do something when you replay them, Aven Cloudchaser, or which die a natural death anyway, like...

Oh, I can't think of one; Cloudskate would be an example, but it's an illusion.

Anyway, you can reload your Aven Warhawk or Kangee, Aerie Keeper, if they didn't get enough counters the first time. Unfortunately it's an anti-combo with birds that want to die (Screeching Buzzard) and cards that make you want dead birds (Soulcatchers' Aerie). And it doesn't do much for bird tokens. You can also add Unnatural Selection and bounce whatever you want; and as a"free" morph it's good with morph-triggers like Aven Farseer (as long as you don't have to bounce the Aven Farseer itself).

Raven Guild Master
In many ways, this is like Pit Scorpion; it does damage that isn't cumulative with normal damage. Either it's done enough of it that you win, or it's done nothing. Still, in a milling-themed deck, this gets a lot of work done with one hit. It's no Traumatize, but then it doesn't give your opponent access to a graveyard full of flashback and incarnations, either.

Riptide Survivor
It's like Cephalid Coliseum, except that you discard before drawing, so you can come out ahead on the deal without using madness and whatnot (if you have no cards in hand). Or it's the blue Multani's Acolyte. Basically, it's only cute in a deck that will tend to empty its hand (such as via Heightened Awareness or Wormfang Behemoth) - and even then, it's no Rush of Knowledge.

Rush of Knowledge
"Draw X cards" is generally pretty good. You don't need a combo like Draco for this - just drawing six cards off of your Shoreline Ranger is probably sufficient. As essentially a vanilla utility card, it has no real purpose in life, although it fits neatly into most casual decks that can cast it. The only thing special to do with this is the Draco combo, which will only lead you down the path of building a Cadaverous Bloom deck (with Rush Of Knowledge / Draco replacing Prosperity... which isn't exactly an improvement). If you must make this interact with your deck, play with untargetable creatures.

Scornful Egotist
"Lame.""Sucky.""Toilet paper." Whatever term you use, it means the same thing: Scornful Egotist.

It's 3U for an eight-mana creature. That might seem like a good combo with Torrent of Fire or whatever, until you realize that Zombify is 3B for an 8-mana creature, and Breath Of Life is 3W for an 8-mana creature, and Reanimate is B and eight life for an eight-mana creature... And those eight-mana creatures aren't 1/1's, either. (In fact, they're giant monsters from hell.) Even if you are only allowed to play cards from Scourge, you can do better. And if you still feel like building the deck, check it out: Wizards built it for you.

Shoreline Ranger
See Noble Templar for general landcycling comments. Shoreline Ranger in particular is otherwise unexciting. There are a bunch of reasons to play it, but they're the same reasons as for any other landcycler.

Stifle
The first thing is, you need to draw your Stifle. You can only play four, even in casual (it's a rule somewhere). That's easy to fix, though; play Merchant Scroll to dig it out of your deck, and Relearn to get it back once you've used it.

Then there's the question of what you're going to do with it. It can be great against your opponent, countering fetchlands, foiling Illusions of Grandeur, and so on... But if you're building the deck, you want a combo of your own. The cards you want are ones that really make you cry via a triggered ability."You lose" is a good place to start; that gets you Phage the Untouchable and Final Fortune."Your opponent gets a bunch of stuff" is always bad; try Tempting Wurm and its pals, or Lord of Tresserhorn."Your thing dies" is a bummer; try Skirk Alarmist, Sneak Attack, or Shallow Grave and its pals.

There are miscellaneous lesser bummers that might be worth a Stifle, such as Personal Incarnation, Phantasmal Sphere, or Psychic Vortex. This is also an excellent card to just have sitting around in your collection, so you can Cunning Wish for it.

Temporal Fissure
See Astral Steel for general storm comments. With Temporal Fissure, your plan is going to be to bounce all of your opponent's stuff (and possibly a few of your own things that need bouncing). Upheaval is better and just costs U more, but the one-sided nature of Temporal Fissure makes it worth building the deck (and you can always throw Upheaval into your Temporal Fissure deck for more mondo-bouncing action). Since it's a sorcery, you don't need to worry about playing instants with it. The free Urza block spells are particularly good here. Treachery and Snap both reduce the number of things left for you to bounce, while getting you another copy of Temporal Fissure for free. High Tide can help get you the mana to do the Shrieking Drake machine-gun trick and cast Temporal Fissure the same turn; this will be like a Time Spiral deck but without the awesome broken cards.

Thundercloud Elemental
Reminiscent of Storm Elemental, the Thundercloud Elemental is so expensive to cast and use that I'm not remotely tempted to build the deck. Nevertheless, if you are, the tricks this guy does involve cards that make you happy to tap your opponent's stuff (Royal Assassin, Stasis) and cards that hurt non-fliers (Earthquake, Form of the Dragon). The fact that you can make it unblockable isn't so exciting when you notice Covert Operative in the previous expansion.