First off, I'd like to clarify something from the first article I posted two weeks ago. Several people were quick to point out that the Academy Rector/Cabal Therapy Bargain deck was in existence well before I posted the two different versions of the deck in the aforementioned article. I agree completely. At no point in that article did I claim to have originated this deck... I merely purported that is was in all likelihood closer to being the best deck in Type 1 than the typical Type 1 control deck. I can see how the way the article was presented may have left some with that impression, however, but I'd just like to take a second to clarify that that was not my intent. The decks I did claim to create are listed in the second paragraph, and I still stand by what I wrote in that regard.

As for the deck, I don't think it's too broken in the context of the current Type 1 environment to warrant much in the way of banning or restriction, although I do think that moving Yawgmoth's Will and Yawgmoth's Bargain to the Banned list would be a generally healthy move for the Type 1 format. This is a slightly updated build of the deck that takes much more advantage of Yawgmoth's Will, making Bargain unnecessary some of the time:

4 Academy Rector
4 Duress
4 Cabal Therapy
4 Brainstorm
4 Dark Ritual
3 Intuition
1 Yawgmoth's Bargain
1 Timetwister
1 Yawgmoth's Will
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
1 Seal of Cleansing
1 Sol Ring
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Diamond
1 Chrome Mox
1 Lotus Petal
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mana Vault
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Pearl
1 Lion's Eye Diamond

4 Flooded Strand
3 Polluted Delta
2 Underground Sea
1 Tundra
1 Scrubland
3 Gemstone Mine

It also has a maindeck Seal of Cleansing, which may or may not be necessary. It would seem that Chains of Mephistopheles would be an absolute nightmare for this deck though, so something along those lines seems necessary if you would ever want to take the deck to a competitive event. But enough of Type 1 for now, what I really am interested in talking about is...

Casual formats.

No, I'm serious.

Not more than two years ago, I would have rather been drawn and quartered before even considering the idea of building a"casual" deck that wouldn't be able to earn me money or product. The only foray I made into non-competitive Magic up to that point was Mental Magic... in the summer of '98, while I was living in Raleigh, my roommates and I would play Mental Magic for hours upon hours, until enough of us passed out so that there was no one left to play with. No money, no prizes, just bragging rights, and fun. By the time I left that locale, the five hundred or so Tempest block cards that we had been using could have passed for a Revised set based on the border wear.

But, with the introduction of Magic Online came a venue for me to build and play with"casual" format decks in a virtually effortless manner. And, as it turns out, the only thing that I really didn't like about Casual Magic in real life was the effort involved in digging up the cards, and finding people to play against, both of which are alleviated with Magic Online and a cable modem (and a suitable collection of course). It started with me building a Prismatic (5-Color for Magic Online... very similar rules) deck to play between draft rounds. But, after getting stomped on more than a few times, I set to work tuning the deck. Before long, I had a pretty good grasp on what the best cards in the format were.

In Magic Online 5-Color, Quiet Speculation and Buried Alive are probably the two most powerful cards, because they offer such consistency and raw power at the same time. Speculation, unsurprisingly, usually fetches some combination of Roars of the Wurm and Deep Analysis, while Buried Alive has a wide array of applications. In an aggressive creature deck, it can fetch Genesis, Anger, and Glory or Wonder to ensure that your creatures push through for lethal damage, and in more controlling decks, you can set up a card advantage/creature defense engine with Genesis/Krosan Tusker/Flametongue Kavu. If you have a way to ensure that Jens can find his way back to the graveyard, Solemn Simulacrum would work great in that capacity as well. Eventually, after tuning my first deck as well as I thought I could, I tried to build a combo deck built around Mirari's Wake and Time Stretch that actually worked out pretty well, and an Elf deck that turned out really, really bad, as well as several other decks that fell in between.

Then, I learned of other formats, such as Singleton (Highlander) and Tribal, built decks for each of those formats as well, and found them to be pretty interesting too. But, enough about Magic Online... here are some of the basic casual formats and ideas for them:

First off, try to have a group of people to play against, whichever format you decide to try out. Building a deck for one of these formats is really fun, but not having anyone to actually play it against afterwards is equally lame.

5-Color
There is actually a site dedicated to this format( www.5-color.com, although it appears to be down at the time of this writing), and at least one StarCity writer has written on the topic. [Kurtis Hahn is the main man, though lots of others including Abe Sargent and Rui Oliveira have written about the format recently. - Knut] You can find some helpful articles on the lower left hand corner of the StarCity homepage that show various strategies for building 5-color decks. For the uninitiated, you have to play a minimum of 250 cards, and a minimum of eighteen cards of each color, with gold cards only being able to count towards a single color requirement of your choice.

What's so cool about this format? It's a chance to play with your older cards that aren't even legal in Extended anymore together with Onslaught and Mirrodin block cards. For me, it's a chance to play with two of my favorite cards, Attunement and Mana Crypt... I mean, is there anything more laughable than the fact that Mana Crypt actually saw print? How could one possibly think the 50/50 chance of taking three damage each turn is a worthwhile drawback for something that has a cost-to-production ratio of Mana Vault and Dark Ritual? This was probably the same guy that lobbied for Tinker and Memory Jar to be in the same set. Maybe you haven't given those Hypnotic Specters or Serendib Efreets a workout in awhile... 5-color is the format that gives them a home.

Highlander
I hadn't knowingly played the Highlander (called Singleton on Magic Online) format before getting started on Magic Online, although, in retrospect, when I used to play Type 1 back in 1996-1997, I was pretty much piloting a Singleton control deck (Four Mana Drains and Four Strip Mines were the four-ofs, most other cards were one-ofs). Interestingly, therein lies the problem for Highlander in real life Magic. You pretty much need to either have a"Set Cap" where you say no sets before a certain set are allowed, or have a group of friends that pretty much has access to the same selection of cards. Otherwise, Highlander turns into slightly modified Type 1 decks. On Magic Online, the earliest sets you have access to are Invasion and 7th Edition, so that seems to be an excellent place for a group of casual players to set their bounds.

If you even go back just one block before that, you are throwing in free countermagic galore (Thwart, Foil, Daze) as well as the Rebel mechanic, and Rishadan Port, which would likely make deckbuilding a lot less diverse and interesting. Here's my Highlander deck from Magic Online:

1 Merfolk Looter
1 Nightscape Familiar
1 Psychatog
1 Undead Gladiator
1 Flametongue Kavu
1 Silent Specter
1 Visara, the Dreadful
1 Duress
1 Counterspell
1 Mana Leak
1 Memory Lapse
1 Fire / Ice
1 Merchant Scroll
1 Chainer's Edict
1 Smother
1 Talisman of Dominance
1 Crosis' Charm
1 Undermine
1 Exclude
1 Repulse
1 Probe
1 Circular Logic
1 Cunning Wish
1 Complicate
1 Infest
1 Fact or Fiction
1 Rewind
1 Spite/Malice
1 Deep Analysis
1 Concentrate
1 Future Sight
1 Confiscate
1 Upheaval
1 Skeletal Scrying

1 Chrome Mox
1 Underground River
1 Sulfurous Springs
1 Polluted Delta
1 Bloodstained Mire
1 Salt Marsh
1 Urborg Volcano
1 Shadowblood Ridge
1 Darkwater Catacombs
1 Barren Moor
1 Lonely Sandbar
1 Shivan Reef
1 Grand Coliseum
8 Island
4 Swamp
1 Mountain

I'm still debating whether Merfolk Looter should get the axe to make room for a Shadowmage Infiltrator, but it's a close call. Other cards to consider are Persuasion, Diabolic Tutor, Recoil, and Isochron Scepter.

Tribal
I'm not sure if there's a format in real life that equates to this, but it's a pretty interesting format online. One third of your deck must be creatures of the same creature type. I actually built my first deck with one goal in mind -build a deck that lets me tap Vicious Kavu and attack for four damage. Vicious Kavu is one of those cards that I always thought had a lot of potential as a Constructed card, but it was always in the same format as Fact or Fiction or Pyschatog, so there wasn't really any chance for it to be in a deck that would be competitive. This is the format where such cards can come off the bench and get some game time in, although make sure that the type you choose has enough creatures to build a deck around. I had more than a few horrific losses with my not-so-hot Black/Red Kavu deck before I decided to make it a Zombie deck that just randomly had four Vicious Kavu in it in order to make it more competitive.

Whichever format you decide to try out, just make sure that you're playing with cards that you enjoy using. That is, after all, the point of casual Magic.

That's all for this week. Next week I'll be talking about what is probably the best deck in Type 2, Ravager Affinity.

Mike Krzywicki
Mkrzywicki and RonnieDobbs on MTGO...MSG Me or Heineken if you have anything you'd like to buy or sell! We're always buying collections also!