One reader of my previous article observed that the deck contained just one Mirrodin block card (Fireshrieker), and that the cards in the limelight were all from the Odyssey era. That couldn't have been very exciting for you, since the reason you visit this prestigious site is for up-to-the-minute news and ideas. To remedy this, today's deck will be made up largely of Darksteel cards.

There are two cards that are foremost on the mind of anyone who's someone as far as Darksteel is concerned: Skullclamp and Arcbound Ravager. That gives us a good place to start:

0 Skullclamp
0 Arcbound Ravager

If you're down here in the Multiplayer and Casual department, it's probably because you're sick of hearing about Skullclamp and Arcbound Ravager. I'll focus instead on an entertaining theme of Mirrodin block - tokens and counters, a.k.a. the crunchy bits.

It used to be that putting together a deck featuring crunchy bits was a whole lot of work, because effects which generated them, especially counters, were ridiculously overcosted (Cycle of Life, anyone?). The Spike creatures from Tempest, like Spike Worker, were a step in the right direction, but with Mirrodin such decks finally became easy to build.

It's always bittersweet, in a way, when this happens. Do you remember the days when tribal decks were a curiosity, rather than a tournament-worthy strategy? When the closest thing to today's Elvish Champion was Kaysa, and instead of Siege-Gang Commander we had Goblin Scouts? If you saw even a semi-successful tribal deck back then, you knew it had taken a lot of work to put that thing together. Nowadays, it can be done in minutes by anyone with a playset of Onslaught commons.

That'd be the"bitter" part - but overall the sweetness wins because a whole class of decks has been raised to a new level of competitiveness. This increases the variety of the field, and the game is more entertaining as a result.

Enough about Kaysa and her ilk- we're talking about new cards today, so the founding of the Soraya, the Falconer fan club will have to wait for another article.

I should begin by mentioning that I generally play multiplayer. That's important for this deck in particular, since it takes advantage of certain properties that multiplayer games generally have. For instance, there are more creatures in multiplayer games than in duels. This makes multiplayer a perfect environment for the Genesis Chamber/Arcbound Crusher combo.

Genesis Chamber produces 1/1 artifact Myr tokens for anyone who puts a creature into play. Arcbound Crusher gets bigger for every artifact that comes into play, including not only everyone's Equipment and artifact lands, but also the Genesis Chamber's Myr tokens. That means a whole lot of crunchy bits for you (and everyone else, but more on that later.) Discovering this combo doesn't require a rocket surgeon, as today's wittiest pundits might say. But just because a combo is obvious doesn't mean it can't be the basis for a deck - just ask Worldgorger Dragon.

Genesis Cruncher: Step 1 (8 cards)
4 Genesis Chamber
4 Arcbound Crusher

If you were playing Type II back in the time of Tempest, you have an ability which triggers whenever you read about abilities which trigger on creatures coming into play: You immediately think about Shrieking Drake and Aluren, which can trigger the ability an arbitrary number of times, netting you an arbitrary number of Myr tokens in this case. Hold that thought while we address a well-known universal truth about 1/1 creatures like Myr tokens: They die a lot. This is especially true for 1/1 token artifact creatures in an environment where artifacts have become so ubiquitous that to see both Seeds of Innocence and Pulverize in one game wouldn't be a huge surprise. The mortality of our tokens makes it tempting to use a few copies of Disciple of the Vault.

This is the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure section of the article, or for the highbrow literati among you, the Two-Roads-Diverged-In-A-Yellow-Wood section. We can focus our efforts on getting a 14/14 Arcbound Crusher - but what is the point, if a Disciple sucks the life out of the opponent before we can attack? Is it fun to roll the Crusher over opponents when it becomes huge by turn 5 thanks to Aluren, and all they have to block it is a Crazed Goblin?

In my opinion, the above ideas would be overkill for a friendly game. Decks can become so fast or specialized that they cease to be casual. The critical speed or power level for a given deck varies with the skill of your group, the size of their collections and their propensity to play certain"to-the-point" types of decks (such as permission or burn.) Given the über-casual nature of my group, I am less than excited about either Shrieking Drake or Disciple of the Vault. Perhaps an example would be instructive.

Once upon a time, I had a simple deck featuring Bladewing, the Risen. The obvious plan was to cast one or more early Buried Alives, load the graveyard with Bladewing and Dragons/Bladewing's Thralls to taste, and then add a pinch of reanimation. I even had a couple of Funeral Charms to use on myself in case I happened to draw my lone copy of Bladewing.

Surely, I thought, any deck where you plan to Funeral Charm yourself can be considered casual. But my playgroup thought otherwise. After several rounds of glares and sighs from my opponents, I dismantled the deck.

Bladewing, the Risen is difficult to disrupt without counters or Swords to Plowshares-type remove-from-game effects, although I did suffer a vicious loss at the hands of Goblin Psychopath, Spirit Flare and Prismatic Strands. In sanctioned formats, the other players' sideboards would've been expected to deal with the situation. But in most multiplayer formats, there are no sideboards and your deck must come with all its junk in the trunk. If you can't maindeck Ebony Charm, Rapid Decay or Tormod's Crypt, then they can't be in your deck. And that means that niche decks like those that abuse reanimation or shadow (or modular) are difficult to play against.

It's likely that some of you have playgroups where well-honed decks are prevalent, Tolarian Academy is seen more often than Seaside Haven, and you would never play Grip of Amnesia over Counterspell. You look down your nose at Bladewing, the Risen... but you're missing out if you've never lost to a Marsh Viper wielding a Fireshrieker, or if you've never screwed an opponent out of a win with Timesifter. As Stijn van Dongen the Wise and Merciful once said,"This game is truly at its best when you can agree with your friends to play moderately bad decks."

Before I was so rudely interrupted, I was dismissing various ideas for what to do with our Myr tokens. Now I think it's time to come up with some acceptable ones. Carrion Feeder is always hungry and fits with our crunchy-bits theme. It is also a non-Mirrodin block card, but at least it's Type 2 legal. Besides, it's too good of a fit to exclude. And"exclude" sounds like"extrude", which reminds me of a card which eats artifacts and which also, lamentably, is way outside of Type 2: Extruder, which turns spare artifacts into +1/+1 counters for any creature. And it does all that for only four times the mana cost of Arcbound Ravager! Ha!

So we're going to need some mana, obviously. We will eventually have lands in this deck, so that's one possible source, but what I'm getting at is that we should consider putting our Myr to work for this purpose also, by feeding them to Ashnod's Altar.

And since we have so many things which eat our little artifact creatures, we should be envisioning Dross Scorpions skittering about the Mephidross ingesting their remains. We don't have any artifacts that would be worthwhile for it to untap at the moment, but the token-generating Nuisance Engine comes to mind.

Like most decks which even think about including Dross Scorpion, ours is (again) turning into a potential combo engine. Ashnod's Altar gives us two colorless mana for each creature we donate to it. We could hypothetically use this mana to activate the Nuisance Engine, garnering a Pest token which we can in turn feed to Ashnod's Altar again. A Dross Scorpion could untap the Nuisance Engine for each Pest we feed to Ashnod's Altar, and then use the Nuisance Engine again, thereby generating an arbitrarily long trail of short-lived Pests.

This normally pointless self-flagellation becomes less pointless with Arcbound Crusher (or, yes, Disciple of the Vault) in play. Yes, I think we should use it.

"Drake," you're saying,"what are you saying? You spout all that 'decks should be fun' blather, and then include an infinite combo?" First, the sole purpose of this combo is to fatten up an artifact creature. As Platinum Angel taught us, every color can eliminate artifact creatures, and hence every color has a way to disrupt this combo, which by the way requires three cards which are mostly useless on their own (Ashnod's Altar, Dross Scorpion and Nuisance Engine) to get going, and an Arcbound Crusher to make it useful. To mollify complaining opponents, we'll include only one copy of each piece. Are you happy now? Sheesh.

I mentioned Disciple of the Vault, again, recently. It seems that I've ignored what would happen if our opponents were to play one (gasp) or more (gulp!) of them. What would happen is that we would die. And that is why we will play with Triskelion, specifically so that we can ping Disciples to death.

In one more example of ignoring our guidelines about pre-Mirrodin cards, we shall add a lone Mindless Automaton. These play nicely with Extruder and can help us draw into our missing pieces, since, as is my wont, we're playing one or two copies of so many cards.

But I guess you wouldn't know that without an up-to-date decklist.

Genesis Cruncher, Step 2 (16 cards)
4 Genesis Chamber
4 Arcbound Crusher
1 Carrion Feeder
2 Extruder
1 Ashnod's Altar
1 Dross Scorpion
1 Nuisance Engine
1 Triskelion
1 Mindless Automaton

We have only sixteen cards after all this prattle? And you're still here? Perhaps it helps your attitude to have complete flexibility of resources: Genesis Chamber gives us free creatures. Extruder can change these creatures into counters, which Mindless Automaton can change into cards, or Triskelion can turn into damage. Ashnod's Altar can convert the creatures into mana, and Nuisance Engine can change that mana back into more creatures. Arcbound Crusher is a meta-engine; it uses all of our engine pieces to make still more counters, and can give itself up to move the counters on to any other piece that needs them.

You may have noticed a flaw in our plan: What if we face a fast weenie deck? This question is more problematic than usual, since we seem to be giving away free conscripts to our opponents' armies. But the tokens are really on loan from us, for it is our permanent which created them, and so we own them. And that which we own can be dealt with easily, using Tel-Jilad Stylus.

I can see that you're not impressed by this answer; after all, when was the last time that putting a token on the bottom of your library impressed anyone? I'm going to have to ditch Tel-Jilad Stylus in favor of the ancient Despotic Scepter. They may seem equally matched when it comes to dealing with our tokens, but if you think so, you've already forgotten the Dross Scorpion. Without slacking on its Nuisance Engine duty, it will also turn the Despotic Scepter into a machine gun aimed at all the Myr tokens our opponents are borrowing from us, in addition to any useful permanents which may have been Confiscated, or fallen victim to Bribery. That justifies adding another Dross Scorpion to the deck, I'd say.

Those of you who've seen this type of deck before are screaming at me to add Brand, so that we can steal our tokens back at some point (say, right after the kooky opponent with the Bird Soldier deck plays Coat of Arms and attempts to alpha-strike with ten enormous Myr.) Of course, Brand is Red, but we will also need Black in the deck, and our mana-hungry artifacts are begging for Urza lands and Cloudposts, so we aren't going to have a whole lot of room for lands which produce colored mana. If Brand had some sort of added ability, like cycling for colorless mana, I would definitely use it.

And so, we'll include three Brands.

Continuing your flaw-finding mission (you bunch of nitpickers), you've discovered that, although I've ballyhooed these surplus Myr we'll have running around, we actually have few creature spells to trigger the Genesis Chamber. We shall take out a personal ad:

Our ad was only answered by Arcbound creatures (Shifting Wall must have been on vacation.) Arcbound Fiend is tempting to thwart opponents who steal our deck ideas, but it is expensive and slow as molasses (and since we're playing Black already, if you see too many +1/+1 counters on the other side of the table, just use Spike Cannibal - he's been hiding in your trade binder waiting for these modular creatures to come along.)

Arcbound Workers are better than the Fiend because they are cheap and easy. Once our Workers have sacrificed themselves to something, perhaps giving their counters to Mindless Automaton to refill our hand, we can use Myr Retrievers to get them back and play them again, and again they're cheap and easy. Never has being cheap and easy been so laudable.

This brings us to the question,"Who retrieves the Retrievers?" The obvious answer is Skeleton Shard - and in this case, the obvious answer happens to be correct.

We will also add an Arcbound Stinger, because occasionally opponents might be playing decks with Clockwork Dragons and Cloudposts which mooch off our Cloudposts, and we will need chump blockers. But if we were to think about creatures which have +1/+1 counters and allow us to put something very like an Arcbound Stinger into play for cheap, we might think of Pentavus, and we might put one of those in as well. You can do fabulous tricks with the Pentavus, and I could give you a long-winded example of this but here's another decklist instead.

Genesis Cruncher, Step 3 (29 cards)
4 Genesis Chamber
4 Arcbound Crusher
2 Arcbound Worker
1 Arcbound Stinger
1 Pentavus
2 Myr Retriever
1 Carrion Feeder
2 Extruder
1 Ashnod's Altar
2 Dross Scorpion
1 Nuisance Engine
1 Triskelion
1 Mindless Automaton
1 Despotic Scepter
3 Brand
2 Skeleton Shard

This deck is loaded with tricks, but it's time to think about ways to disrupt our opponents now. There's the possibility that someone could overrun us with our own lent-out Myr tokens before we get the pieces in play to take advantage of his burgeoning population. Echoing Decay is begging to be included, just for the opportunity to kill off a zillion creatures at once, but Wail of the Nim can allow our Myr to survive the carnage and so we'll take that instead, thank you very much.

Also, since we would prefer not to roll over and die to Damping Matrix, we'll include the quintessential crunchy-bit artifact hate card: Dismantle.

Everyone knows that Dismantling your own Darksteel Reactor doubles the number of counters on it, but don't injure your neck while you whip your head around to look for the Darksteel Reactor; it's not here. Why, then, include a more expensive, sorcery-speed Shatter?

To answer your question with a question, did you notice that Dismantling your own Arcbound creature gives you twice as many counters to distribute? (You probably did, but since your opponents obviously can't match your superior intellect, they might be surprised.) Dismantle can double as a combat trick in a deck where combat tricks are pretty much the only road to victory.

Since not everyone is so enamored with newer cards, you might face a fearsome Hipparion deck. Obviously we'll require a couple of Terrors.

Assuming we want twenty-four lands, that leaves us two spots to fill. I really was hoping to use Emissary of Despair to punish anyone who dared hold on to my tokens, but the BB in the casting cost is a problem in a deck that wants so many juiced-up colorless-mana-producing lands.

Gemini Engine fits the theme, and allows for interesting tricks; we can load it up with +1/+1 counters, which will make the twin token larger, and it's not as though we don't have anything to do with the token once combat damage is dealt. But this deck would rather have three 0/1 Pests for six mana. And so we will add a Serum Tank instead, because it effectively says"whenever an artifact comes into play..." and that's good for us.

For lands, we'll use the Urza lands and Cloudposts to get copious amounts of mana, plus a mix of artifact lands and red/black dual lands to produce the occasional B or R.

Genesis Cruncher, Step 4 (60 gorgeous cards)
4 Genesis Chamber
4 Arcbound Crusher
2 Arcbound Worker
1 Arcbound Stinger
1 Pentavus
2 Myr Retriever
1 Carrion Feeder
2 Extruder
1 Ashnod's Altar
2 Dross Scorpion
1 Nuisance Engine
1 Triskelion
1 Mindless Automaton
1 Despotic Scepter
1 Serum Tank
3 Brand
2 Skeleton Shard
2 Wail of the Nim
2 Dismantle
2 Terror
4 Urza's Mine
4 Urza's Power Plant
4 Urza's Tower
4 Cloudpost
2 Badlands (or Urborg Volcano)
3 Vault of Whispers
3 Great Furnace

Now we have a fearsome casual deck which contains mostly Mirrodin-block cards and without Skullclamp or Arcbound Ravager!

This happy conclusion would work out better if you failed to notice that the deck would function quite well if we dropped the smaller Arcbound creatures for Arcbound Ravagers, and some of the costlier parts like Pentavus for Skullclamps. Just adjust the recipe to fit the seriousness of your playgroup...but remember how much fun moderately bad decks can be.

Until next time,
Matt Drake
Proud Member of no team in particular
webmaster@mattdrake.com