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You Lika the Juice? No Time to BBQ Standard

Friday, September 24th – Bennie Smith starts brewing with Scars of Mirrodin – prepare for some Johnny-licious action!

A Magic friend of mine sent me a message telling me he was having a guest fly in who really wanted to have some good Carolina-style barbeque, and could I recommend any places to go?

At first I was surprised by the message – why would he ask me specifically?  Was it because I was a large Southern man born and raised here in Virginia, and so naturally I’d know the best places to eat BBQ?  As luck would have it, I do dearly
love

Carolina-style BBQ… so maybe people who’ve spent time around me, even playing card games, just know of my love through osmosis.

Good Carolina-style BBQ means topping your pork with a bold, spicy, vinegar-base sauce that’s just a delight for your taste buds (and of course a dash of cole slaw).  Unfortunately, good Carolina BBQ is actually hard to find around Richmond.  The invasion of chain restaurants that followed the suburbanization of America has unfortunately brought chain sensibility to BBQ, and that typically means
tame

BBQ -Texas-style, tomato-based BBQ sauce.  I mean sure, that sauce is fairly tasty, but when you go to all the trouble of slow roasting and smoking tasty pig, why top it off with something that’s just
fairly

tasty?

As has been said, the secret’s in the sauce – and you can BBQ just about any meat and make it delicious if you’re using the right sauce, right?  Points if you catch that movie reference.

My parents live in North Carolina, and whenever I travel that way I make it a point to stop at one of the numerous small BBQ joints that pepper the by-ways and pick up some good eats.  But it’s been a challenge to find such a place locally.  However, recently I made an awesome discovery: a food truck called The Hogwagon came by my place of work, offering up pulled pork BBQ sandwiches and smoked BBQ chicken wings.  Of course, I ordered the pork BBQ sandwich and it was incredibly good, but the guy who served me threw in a sample chicken wing, telling me “this is so you’ll know to order some of these next time.”  

Now, I’m not a fan of chicken wings – they’ve always struck me as too messy and not enough meat to be worth all the trouble, so I was skeptical of what the man said.  Still, when I opened the wrapper the chicken wing was surprisingly meaty and not at all messy… and tasted heavenly!  Smokey and delicious.  I’ve never gone out of my way to order chicken wings, but between the delicious sandwich and the fantastic wings, I’m going to have to go to the restaurant behind The Hogwagon - a place called
Grandpa Eddie’s

.  The restaurant has “Alabama BBQ” in the name, but the owner says “the pulled pork is pure Western North Carolina, with its own vinegar-based sauce and secret rub.”  Mmmm… I’m sold, and looking forward to trying the ribs too!

Pork BBQ meat is near perfection-slow roasted, smoked, and then slathered in delicious sauce; in other words, hard to beat!  Our new Scars of
Mirrodin Standard, on the other hand, is a whole different animal when it comes to preparing for this year’s
State Champs

.  We don’t have time for perfection, to slowly and lovingly craft something amazing from diverse ingredients.

In the coming weeks I imagine you’ll be hearing a lot about the chase Mythics from Scars of Mirrodin – Koth of the Hammer; Elspeth Tirel; Venser, the Sojourner; and Mox Opal – and for very good reason.  They seem incredibly powerful and may very well live up to the hype.  For those ultra-competitive Spikes who pay whatever it takes to get the most powerful cards in the format, they’ll have these cards; they’ll pay through the nose but they’ll be slinging them at the Champs tables.  A playset of those four cards alone will run you $600 or so.

For the rest of us though… card availability will be an issue.  I mean seriously-there’s all of one week between the release of Scars of Mirrodin and the 2010s!  I can’t imagine there’s going to be many of us who’ll be able to open enough packs or trade for a playset of Koths or Elspeths in that amount of time.  So I’ve made the decision to not even bother thinking about brewing up new decks for Champs containing those cards.  I’m still going to pay attention to the decks with those cards that folks like Patrick Chapin will be throwing our way, because well-heeled Spikes are going to be playing them and you need to have a plan to deal with them.  Instead, I’m going to be focusing on adding janky mythics, rares, uncommons and commons from
Scars

to the mix. 

I’ve joined with a group of players to put our heads together and throw ideas around, and I have to say I’m really enjoying working with these guys.  I’ll talk more about them in the coming weeks, but for now I would like to quote good man Dave Meeson on the group:


With this many Johnnies in one place, please tell me we’re calling this something awesome like “The Johnny Fever Project.”

Thus the group name was born.  Who knows, maybe we’ll kick ass and make T-shirts!

Here are a couple of the decks I’ve tossed to the group that haven’t been immediately laughed out of the room.  The first is sure to make Tom from Monday Night Magic smile:


The deck coalesced around several ideas – first, I wanted to make sure I had ways to handle powerful Planeswalkers, since the hype on Koth and Elspeth is through the roof.  Vampire Hexmage is still a very good way to handle them, while also being just fine when there are no Planeswalkers around.  The second idea was that Necrotic Ooze was deceptively powerful, especially in a deck with lots of creatures.  Third, if we add green to the mix we can tap into Fauna Shaman – an incredibly powerful card that is sure to be just as good in the new Standard as it was before. 

I quickly fell in love with the idea.  If you have to use your Hexmage on a Planeswalker early, drop the Necrotic Ooze and you’ve got backup.  Did your opponent Bolt your Fauna Shaman?  Guess what?  Necrotic Ooze can do it, too.  I quickly cooked up an interesting toolbox to build around the Ooze (Gigantomancer, Sylvok Replica, Geth, Lord of the Vault, Steel Hellkite, Royal Assassin, River Boa), along with a couple non-Ooze silver bullets like Acidic Slime and Gaea’s Revenge.  I can’t wait to test this thing; it feels awesome and fun!

In the old Standard I’ve been having a good time with my G/W Fauna Shaman deck, so I definitely wanted to update it for the new Standard, something like this:


The previous Fauna Shaman decks I’ve tinkered with in the past seemed to spend a lot of early game dickering around with small utility creatures… so I thought I’d go a different route here, tapping some of green’s early heavy hitters with Garruk’s Companion and Leatherback Baloth. I think Razorverge Thicket and Joraga Treespeaker help make the heavy early green requirement work out, though in a pinch you can always just pitch them away to Fauna Shaman for some other creature.

The Magical Christmasland combo of Stoneforge Mystic for Argentum Armor, tap Mystic to put Armor into play, and then play Kor Outfitter to equip actually seems doable in a Fauna Shaman deck - it might be too romantic to worry with, but it only takes up two slots and just might be worth it.

I thought about running just one Collar, but it’s such a great card with a fair number of tramplers in the deck that I figured one more would be good to have to increase the odds of just drawing it instead of having to tutor for it.

I’ve also been intrigued with Clone Shell, which strikes me as a nifty card to pair up with Summoning Trap to be able to dig deep and hopefully not whiff as much.  Of course, the easy way out is to just drop Clone Shell into the U/G Titan Ramp deck and be done with it. That might be the best use for the card, but I also came up with this silliness:


Clone Shell, Summoning Trap, and Hoarding Dragon all dig for the mighty, mighty Wurmcoil Engine. Of course, the problem with both Clone Shell and Hoarding Dragon is having them get removed from the battlefield without actually dying - so it seems pretty important to have sacrifice outlets, and Viscera Seer and Bloodthrone Vampire seem like decent enough for that role.  The Culling Dais is another recent addition to consider.

Imprint’s back, but I can’t lie – it scares me now just as much as it scared me back during Mirrodin.  I’m not scared
of

it - I’m scared to
use

it.  The mechanic too often just seems to beg for you to get two-for-one’d by your opponent.  Yet some of the Imprint cards just seem so juicy, so tasty…


I came up with this while thinking about Prototype Portal + Brittle Effigy, which seems like a pretty sick engine. Also, imprinting Portal with Voltaic Key could be pretty sick if you have a fair amount of mana available - got six mana this turn? Make three Keys. If you get an Everflowing Chalice up to three charge counters, you can generate some sick mana with the keys.

The one thing that’s desperately missing?  Welding Jar.

There are a lot of different ways you could take this, such as more heavily proliferate-based with Trigon of Infestation, Contagion Engine

Lastly for today I’d like to talk about the Infect mechanic.  I have to tell you folks, Infect gives me the same sort of warm, fuzzy feeling I got
when played the first serious Dredge deck back when Ravnica first came out.  If you haven’t been reading me that long, check out my column
Judging Dredge: Top 8 at Virginia States

.  I’m not exaggerating when I say that this was the only Dredge deck in all the State Champs to show up in the top 8, mostly because no one had actually tried putting a good one together.  At the time it was popularly viewed as a pretty weak mechanic, with a couple of decent individual cards but most being Limited fodder at best. 

I myself stumbled across how good a dedicated Dredge deck could be quite by accident – at the time we were trying to build a deck around Bloodbond March involving killing with multiple copies of Kokusho, the Evening Star, and Jay suggested the new dredge mechanic as a way to fill up the graveyard and tutor for the pieces we needed.  During testing, our March plans kept falling through… But the Dredge cards kept working together and beating people.  Over and over and over. 

The lesson of playing Dredge and making Top 8 at States that day was that, when a critical mass is reached, some mechanics make their cards much better than they appear to be individually.  Cards like Golgari Thug, Greater Mossdog, and Stinkweed Imp looked terrible on the stats, but each were superstars in that deck.  That’s why, when I hear the initial buzz on infect creatures – and the conventional wisdom that there just aren’t enough good infect cards – I just have to smile and think to myself, “Maybe… but maybe
not

!”

Let’s take a look at the infect creatures and spells we have available:

·        One mana:  Vector Asp

·        Two mana:  Plague Stinger, Blight Mamba, Ichorclaw Myr, Necropede

·        Three mana:  Contagious Nim, Ichor Rats, Cystbearer,

·        Four mana:  Blackcleave Goblin, Hand of the Praetors, Carrion Call, Tangle Angler, Tel-Jilad Fallen, Corpse Cur

·        Five mana:  Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon, Putrefax

·        “Six” mana:  Trigon of Infestation, Contagion Clasp

At one mana, my hunch is that Vector Asp isn’t worth it because of the mana cost to give it infect.  At two mana, Plague Stinger strikes me as the best of the bunch because of its evasion, and if we can boost it at all it can become a real threat.  I’m a bit leery about Blight Mamba, because we’ve rarely seen regeneration at two mana be any good on something small.

The last two seem a bit better – Ichorclaw Myr tears down blockers quite well, while Necropede can throw around its Infect to other creatures.  My gut instinct is that Plague Stinger and Necropede will ultimately prove the best choices at this mana but the other options should be tested.

At three mana, Ichor Rats jumps out as the best because it directly throws a poison counter at your opponent.  Cystbearer is just straight-up better than Contagious Nim (aside from the fact that it’s vulnerable to Doom Blade).

At four mana there are a bunch of choices - but standing at the front of the line is definitely Hand of the Praetors, the infect lord that really pushes this strategy into viability.  It may surprise you what my next pick is: Tangle Angler.  With a Tangle Angler in play and a couple of green mana, suddenly all your other infect dudes start to get really, really scary. 

Of the rest, I find Corpse Cur the most interesting – I’ve always thought the idea of chaining Gravediggers together was kinda cool, but 2/2s for four mana have never been particularly helpful even if you can keep playing them over and over off each other.  Give the fellow infect, though, and you’ve got a real chance of wearing down any attackers you’re chumping by two points of power and toughness each time.  Eventually you can chain into something even sweeter, like something juicy at five mana…

…Like Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon!  This guy is definitely something your opponent’s going to be scared of, especially if you’ve got a Hand in play!  Sadly, Putrefax really pales in comparison – both are in the five-mana slot, both have evasion (of sorts), but Putrefax is a one-shot spell for one extra point of power (but one smaller point of toughness).   I imagine you’ll want to run four Skithiryxes first before maybe adding one or two Putrefaxes if you feel the need.

I’ve got the two artifacts at six mana, mainly because you’ll most certainly want to activate them the turn you cast them.  Contagion Clasp feels like it’s strongest in supporting this deck’s entire strategy… though Trigon of Infestation might be decent with enough Proliferate support. 

Speaking of proliferate, it seems tempting to want to pair blue cards with that mechanic alongside black’s infect/poison themes, but I think we really need the green cards to reach that critical mass of good infect creatures. 

Here’s my first stab at an Infect deck:


When the full Scars spoiler was revealed, I was blown away by two pieces of equipment that seemed to be perfect additions: the first was Infiltration Lens, which seems like a “fixed” Skullclamp.  It’s cheap to cast and cheap to equip, and gives your opponent a hard choice – either block your equipped infect dude and let you draw two cards (or more, if doubly equipped), or let it through and find himself burdened with more poison counters.  What’s even more fun is the thought of equipping it to Tangle Angler, right? 

Livewire Lash is even better, giving your creature that crucial power boost while also making it scary to target with a removal spell – since the creature is dealing the damage, it’s going to deal poison or -1/-1 counters depending on what you want to do with it.  At two to cast and two to equip, I’m not sure the number of these you’d want but I’m starting out at two… the correct number may be more. 

With any luck, one of these ideas might come together and form something tasty, juicy, and spicy in the short time we have before Round 1 of the 2010s begins!

Are you going to a
Scars of Mirrodin

prerelease this weekend?  If you’re in the area, I hope you come to
the big event
StarCityGames.com is holding here in Richmond
!  We’ve got Star City alum Zac Hill from Wizards R&D coming down to gunsling, and to see first-hand what you all think of the cards they made.  I’ll be working the admin table, so please come by, say hello, and let me know what you think of the new cards… and BBQ.

Take care,


Bennie


starcitygeezer AT gmail DOT com

 

Make sure to friend/follow me at:

http://twitter.com/blairwitchgreen



http://community.wizards.com/blairwitchgreen

 

New to EDH?  Be sure to check out my EDH Primers:
part 1

,
part 2

, and
part 3

.

 

My current EDH decks:

Bone-Gnawer (RATS!)
Phelddagrif (carrots and sticks)
Tsabo Tavoc (red and black nastiness)
Reki, the History of Kamigawa (more legends than you can shake a stick at)
Korlash, Heir to Blackblade (brain-eating zombies, Commander)