I'm back and ready for more punishment, ladies and gremlins. I have decided to do something new, innovative, and most of all, unexpected. I am going to try to make Burn/Fat into a good deck for Type Two so I can play it at Regionals. I just know you're all stunned by this development.

Really, I will make a Burn/Fat deck that wins someday, mark my words.
Really.
I'm not kidding.
At least I know that my fanatically loyal Starcity fans believe me, even if no one sane does. It's time for the Jyhad, my followers!

(Sure. This'll be good. Sky will probably charge WotC headquarters with signs reading, "Print big fattie with words 'Counter Target Spell' somewhere on it." Sheesh. -Sky's Left Hand)

My starting point for this new deck will be my latest Extended creation, being as I have no other good ideas currently. You can see my Extended deck in my last article in the new archives.

Basically, Type Two is a lot slower than Extended, so I think I can afford to go more fat heavy. I also lose the Spike Feeders, which are really critical, so I need more heavy hitters that don't need extra counters to punch through.

4 Hunted Wumpus
4 Blastoderm

I also need some Shocks and Incinerate replacements, and I think the new Seal will do nicely.

4 Shock
4 Seal of Fire

I really liked having the Lyrists and Monkeys in my deck as it is great to have answers to all kinds of questions without having really dedicated slots to them. Yavimaya Elder is also good utility, which I like.

4 Yavimaya Elder
4 Elvish Lyrist
4 Uktabi Orangutan

I also need some generic beatdown, and I think these are among the best.

4 River Boa
4 Rancor

I had a real advantage in Extended that I could abuse Cursed Scroll, which allowed me a multi-pronged attack. That is, I could be defeated on the creature front, and yet win by Scroll. I also had the advantage that no global sweeper short of Nev's Disk could really end my game unless I really screwed up somehow. In this deck I have more utility critters and I need some way to make smaller critters into real threats. Rancor is the obvious choice because it lets me beat down without overcommitting and getting wrecked by Wildfire or Flowstone Slide or Perish. I really have a low red count in this deck, but having the extra colour makes a huge difference. The sideboard will be a lot more powerful, and I have a good shot at Stompy because of the phat in the deck teamed up with early burn negating the Jags and Dogs.

All in all the deck looks like this:

4 River Boa
4 Rancor
4 Shock
4 Seal of Fire
4 Elvish Lyrist
4 Uktabi Orangutan
4 Yavimaya Elder
4 Blastoderm
4 Hunted Wumpus

4 Treetop Village
4 Karplusan Forest
6 Mountain
10 Forest

The sideboard will probably have Earthquakes, Rack and Ruins, Boils, and Flashfires. That sounds like plenty of hate.

This is of course just the preliminary version. It is pretty much based around the assumption that your opponent cannot deal with this much fat if you have enough other utility cards to keep yourself in good shape until the biggies come calling. This theme is continued in another deck I have been thinking about recently: Green Big.

Green Big actually has some stuff in common with the Wood deck that some of you may have seen floating around Starcity recently. It relies on getting lots of mana out so I can play out my abundance of massive fatties. It pretty much wants to play 20 things that cost five mana to cast, and lots of ways to ensure I get to five mana quickly and have a healthy life total when I get there. Some of the best five mana plays currently are:

Weatherseed Treefolk
Deranged Hermit
Rushwood Elemental

This is clearly not enough, so I went rooting around in the nearby slots and found Blastoderm and Child of Gaea. So, lets throw together a bunch of mana and mana accelerators to make a cool deck. First thing to keep in mind is that because we must get to five mana, relying on lots of elves and Cradle is pretty scary. If our elves get mashed early, we could end up with nothing but land in play on turn six, holding onto a stack of phat like nobody's business. We need varied mana acceleration that will reliably let us cast all this ridiculous phat we have.

4 Yavimaya Elder
4 Vine Trellis
4 Llanowar Elf
4 Birds of Paradise

It's also good to not get wrecked by anything our opponent throws at us, so we need some utility.

4 Creeping Mold
4 Simian Grunts (only in this deck would these guys count as utility)

Some of the fat should also be trimmed because there are certain critters we really don't want more than one of.

2 Child of Gaea
2 Weatherseed Treefolk
4 Rushwood Elemental
4 Deranged Hermit
4 Blastoderm
4 Simian Grunts

4 Creeping Mold
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Vine Trellis
4 Yavimaya Elder
4 Llanowar Elf

20 Forest

Now that's a deck. Sure, it can't beat Bargain or Replenish to save its life, but who cares? It looks like a ball to play. Put out some land and some huge monsters and beat the tar out of people. Sure some nasty bad guys out there will make bargains with demons and use their new found power to eat your soul, but when they get unlucky with their demons, boy, you're gonna show‘em what a real 20 to the head in one turn feels like, green style.

Now that I've got all that bad deck out of my system, I feel I should comment on a few things. First, the state of the bannings in Extended. Even with the current plan to scrap Ritual and Vault, I don't think that Extended is fixed yet. There is still the problem of the broken card drawing engines. Thaw is broken. Necro is broken. Survival with Squee is broken. All of these allow you to draw numbers of cards vastly beyond anything anyone else is going to achieve. Of course, these broken engines are held in check by broken beatings. Fireblast, Ball Lightning, Flame Rift and Price of Progress make sure that lots of the time it's a dead mage that has lots of cards in their hand. These two sides of Extended power supersede the classic combo/control/beatdown. Combo and control have combined under the flag of broken card drawers, and beatdown will reside almost solely under the flag of Burn when the bannings castrate Suicide. The success of 3-Deuce and I Am Sky do prove that midrange decks are still viable, but it almost seems like a new triangle has formed. Pure beatdown is on one axis, card engine is on another, and midrange decks with both critter control and their own beatdown form a third major strategy. It would seem like this is a healthy metagame, but I feel there is too much emphasis on the broken card drawers. Most games vs. the new combo come down to either a very rapid win, or watching Force of Wills be discarded while Ophidian hits, Necro for five, Survival Squee for Rector, etc. I think the current environment is fun and fair, but I think that without Necro, Thaw and Squee the environment would be a lot better. WOTC has gone far in killing the broken card drawers, but they need to go one step further. If you want to draw two cards a round, you should have to play with good ole Jayemdae Tome. Now there's a fair card engine if there ever was one.

I am going to steal a page from the book of another Starcity writing legend, Anthony Alongi. Actually, I am going to steal from his work on the Dojo, but that is neither here nor there. Anthony started out trying to find uses for very, very bad cards and tried to coerce the masses into helping him do so. I have a similar, yet different tack. First, I am going to select cards that I think have a pretty good effect, yet have seen virtually no play outside of Limited. I am going to ask all you folks out there to try to come up with the best possible combo with said cards. To make it interesting, I'm going to set the decks I request in the realm of Type One on Crack. This format is simply Type One without any banned or restricted list. That way, you can use all the neat stuff from Legends that your heart desires, but be warned that if your deck includes twenty Moxes, four Academies and bunch of things with 'draw seven cards' written somewhere on them, I am really not going to give you much credit for innovative design. If you think Tolarian Academy would work well with my cards, go crazy, just try to avoid using my cards only as Mind Over Matter fodder, okay?

The rest of the rules are pretty straightforward. You must have at least one of each of the named cards in your deck. You must actually use and abuse the abilities of the cards in question in order to win. There is a minimum deck size of 60, and also a maximum of 60, because I believe in strict adherence to the minimum deck size, and my attention span wouldn't allow me to comprehend anything much bigger anyway. You don't have to playtest the silly thing to figure out mana ratios and such, but if I can tell on sight that the thing hasn't a chance in the world of working, that's going to count against you. Build the deck with a dueling perspective in mind. Multiplayer is fun, but the idea here is to kill just one person. Please include a description of how the deck works if it is particularly arcane. Try to make decks that do not rely on illegal plays. :)

I will judge based on four criteria, weighted equally: Raw power, that being how fast you usually kill your opponent, or how brutally you shut him down. Two, creativity, using cards and combinations that have not already been featured in some Deck to Beat on the Dojo. Third, I want synergy. The cards I list really don't have much to do with each other, but I want you to find a way to make them work together. The last, and not least, is Bad Card Count. The more cards you stuff into your deck that work really well despite being scoffed at by most serious players, the better.

The cards for this month are Field of Souls and Brink of Madness. Remember, I didn't say this would be easy.

Field of Souls
WW2
Enchantment
Whenever a nontoken creature you control goes to the graveyard, put a 1/1 flying white token into play under your control.

Brink of Madness
BB2
If you have zero cards in hand during upkeep, sacrifice Brink of Madness to cause target opponent to discard their hand. Remember, like all phase triggers under 6th ed., this only triggers if you have zero cards at the beginning of upkeep, not if you somehow get rid of all your cards during upkeep.

Clearly these cards are no Sorrow's Paths. They have useful effects, and in some games you would be very happy to control one of these. However, you probably also wouldn't want to invest four mana and one card for these effects. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to build a deck that makes these two cards broken. I just know there is some broken application no one has thought of yet, but it is your job to find it. Whichever one of you succeeds to the greatest degree shall be world renowned and adored by the masses. I'll also deign to mention you in my articles, you lucky person you. :)

You have until March 31, 11:59 pm to get your submissions in. Please make the subject line 'Field/Brink'.

Most importantly, have fun.

All right, all right, I lied. Most importantly, stay rogue.

Sky Winslow Roy

swroy@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca

the rogue SKYcaptain