Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven, and…

Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?

Nigel: Exactly.

Marty: Does that mean it’s louder? Is it any louder?

Nigel: Well, it’s one louder, isn’t it? It’s not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You’re on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you’re on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?

Marty: I don’t know.

Nigel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?

Marty: Put it up to eleven.

Nigel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.

Marty: Why don’t you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?

Nigel: [pause] These go to eleven.

This week I thought it would be fun to really dig deep into one of the powerful, “build-around-me” cards from Innistrad that has yet to find a real home in the new Standard—Heartless Summoning. I think there’s no good reason why there can’t be a powerful deck that utilizes this card; it’s just a matter of exploring your options and figuring out the best way to tackle the metagame harnessing the power of super-acceleration.

What Does Heartless Summoning Do?

In a lot of ways, Heartless Summoning reminds me a lot of Lotus Cobra, and if you think back, Lotus Cobra took a while to “catch on” with people too. Of course, Lotus Cobra was capable of things Heartless Summoning will never do (for instance be able to beat down, block, or pick up a piece of equipment), and I think that might be part of the reason the enchantment hasn’t really captured people’s imagination. So I think it’s important that we break down what Heartless Summoning does for us.

It does provide serious mana each turn. The long history of Magic has shown that attaining mana advantage is often the key to winning. Often even temporary boosts to mana can be key to securing a winning game state, but cards that stick around and provide mana each turn are huge benefits. There’s a reason why Sol Ring is banned in Legacy and restricted in Vintage (and so sought after and controversial in Commander). So long as you’re playing a creature spell each turn, Heartless Summoning is effectively giving you two extra mana to do it. However, what makes Heartless Summoning potentially even more powerful than a Sol Ring is how often you’ll be able to cast more than one creature in a turn, netting you four or even six mana worth of cards!

It does provide a serious, permanent drawback. While you’re able to cast your creatures for cheaper each turn with a Heartless Summoning in play, there is a not-insignificant cost of making all your creatures just a shade smaller. This has an immediate impact of making any X/1 creature not worth playing unless you can get a benefit from its casting or its dying. When we played Lotus Cobra we often buttressed the mana we were banking on from the Cobra with Birds of Paradise and Noble Hierarch in order to provide redundancy. We can’t rely on the traditional green one-drop mana creatures in a Heartless Summoning deck if we want to build mana redundancy into our build. There are a few other options to consider.

Heartless Summoning demands a deck designer to weigh several considerations when choosing creatures for the deck. Sometimes a creature being a little smaller is relatively insignificant relative to the ability to play them cheaper—Solemn Simulacrum was made to die, so being a 1/1 instead of a 2/2 is no big deal. And a 0/3 Spellskite for zero mana is a helluva bargain! Higher up the scale, a 5/5 Frost Titan that comes down two turns earlier than a 6/6 version can be totally devastating to your opponent, especially with Dismembers seeing less play lately.

On the flip side, a 5/5 Grave Titan that makes 1/1 Zombies is significantly less scary than the 6/6 that makes 2/2 Zombies. A 5/5 Wurmcoil Engine that breaks into 2/2s falls somewhere in the middle and makes you think long and hard about what you’re expecting to face on the battlefield.

Despite how relatively under the radar it is, Heartless Summonings is definitely one of my picks for one of the top cards from Innistrad. This card is definitely setting off alarms.
—Patrick Chapin, The Innovator’s Guide To Innistrad Standard, Part 1

Now, while Heartless Summoning decks have been under the radar, they haven’t been totally absent from Innistrad Standard and have shown up in the top decks from some recent events. Using the handy-dandy StarCityGames.com deck database yields some decklists we can use to give us a baseline.

First up are some decks from the States/Champs tournaments.

Heartless U/B

Jacob Vosik

6th Place at States on 10-16-2011

Standard

Creatures (18)

Lands (15)

Spells (27)

Sideboard

Jacob’s deck uses Heartless Summoning to take a U/B Control shell and load up on some heavy hitters—Frost and Grave Titans, Wurmcoil, Steel Hellkite and Sphinx of Uthuun. There’s no real mana redundancy for Heartless Summoning outside of the Solemn Simulacrums, but he does play Ponder to help dig for Heartless.

Heartless Architect

Pep MacDonald

7th Place at States on 10-16-2011

Standard

Creatures (28)

Lands (12)

Spells (20)

Sideboard

Heartless BUG

Kyle Wilson

7th Place at States on 10-16-2011

Standard

Creatures (23)

Lands (22)

Spells (15)

Sideboard

The last two Heartless decks from States add Grand Architect to Heartless Summoning, each providing some redundancy with each other. Kyle’s deck even goes so far as to add a couple Spheres of the Suns to the mix to give him access to green for sideboard Beasts Within. Playing Heartless and Architect makes it much less risky to go ahead and run Myr Superion. Both also notably run Ponder.

Pep’s deck adheres pretty closely to what we expect to see in a Grand Architect deck, while Kyle gives us some additional heavy hitters that are particularly nice to play at a discount price—Consecrated Sphinx, Massacre Wurm, and Sheoldred, Whispering One.

Next up is a black/white deck from a StarCityGames.com Invitational Qualifier.

Heartless B/W

Pasha Frederick

7th Place at Star City Games Invitational Qualifier on 10-09-2011

Standard

Creatures (15)

Planeswalkers (4)

4 Liliana of the Veil

Lands (18)

Spells (23)

Sideboard

Pasha strips the pesky blue cards out of Solar Flare for better mana and the ramp potential of Heartless Summoning. There’s some cool synergy you can take advantage of here, such as Heartless Summoning making Perilous Myr a zero-mana shock than can be recurred with the four-mana Sun Titan. One issue I have with this deck is the lack of ways to reload your hand with creatures to really push Heartless Summoning into a back-breaking spell, but unfortunately black and white don’t give you many options there outside of cards like Phyrexian Rager and Bloodgift Demon.

Now let’s take a look at some success at the StarCityGames.com Standard Opens!

B/G Heartless Pod

Ben Yampolsky

13th Place at Star City Games Standard Open on 10-09-2011

Standard

Creatures (26)

Lands (14)

10 Swamp
4 Woodland Cemetery

Spells (20)

Sideboard

This reminds me quite a bit of the Heartless Creep deck concept I’d been working on leading up to States, with even a Creeping Renaissance in the sideboard! There is a lot of overlap and synergy between what a Birthing Pod deck wants to do and what a Heartless Summoning deck wants to do, but Ben is leaning pretty hard on the Pod side of the equation, with just three copies of Heartless Summoning adding some explosiveness. The Skinrender stands out like a sore thumb here since it can’t stick around with a Heartless in play, but other than that I certainly like a lot of what’s going on here. Four Phyrexian Ragers is certainly a nod to Heartless, a cantrip 1/1 than can be Podded away into a Simulacrum or Entomber Exarch is good times! Tree of Redemption was heavily featured in my Heartless Creep deck and is a great card to play with Heartless Creep, since a 0/12 for two is significantly better than a 0/13 for four.

Heartless U/B

Alex Mukhar

15th Place at Star City Games Standard Open on 11-06-2011

Standard

Creatures (19)

Lands (20)

Spells (21)

Sideboard

Alex’s deck is obviously an evolutionary step up from Jacob Vosik’s States deck above. While Jacob ran two copies of Sphinx of Uthuun, Alex goes full-on with four copies. Sphinx of Uthuun is a very strong choice for a Heartless deck because it’s a big creature you’d want to accelerate out early but who also gives you the ability to reload your hand, leading to some potentially devastating sequence of plays, especially when chaining into Phyrexian Metamorphs or Evil Twins. While Rune-Scarred Demon is more precise (allowing for Demon into Metamorph as a Demon into Metamorph as a Demon), the raw card-advantage of the Sphinx is definitely worth considering. In fact, I think that there’s even more you can do with the Sphinx to make him even more insane (and splits more challenging for your opponent), adding cards like Buried Ruin, Creeping Renaissance, or Exhumer Exarch to the mix.

One last deck I’d like to show is this one that popped up in my deck database search:

Solar Flare

Michael Kerby

6th Place at Miscellaneous on 10-02-2011

Standard

Creatures (6)

Planeswalkers (4)

4 Liliana of the Veil

Lands (20)

Spells (30)

Sideboard

What’s interesting here is that Heartless Summoning is not even in the maindeck! While puzzling over why in the world you’d want to sideboard in Heartless Summoning, it occurred to me that while Heartless Summoning can make casting creatures cheaper, it can also effectively pay for most of a Mana Leak if you’re patient.

I decided to crunch together all the creatures from these decks to see which creatures seem to be the “consensus best” along with some ideas for potential tutor-targets or under-utilized gems.

21 Solemn Simulacrum

14 Wurmcoil Engine

12 Massacre Wurm

11 Phyrexian Metamorph

9 Steel Hellkite

8 Myr Superion

7 Perilous Myr, Frost Titan, Grand Architect

6 Sphinx of Uthuun

5 Consecrated Sphinx, Sun Titan, Rune-Scarred Demon

4 Treasure Mage, Phyrexian Rager, Sheoldred, Whispering One, Phantasmal Image, Viridian Emissary, Sylvok Replica, Acidic Slime

3 Evil Twin, Grave Titan, Spellskite, Peace Strider

2 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite, Entomber Exarch, Phyrexian Ingester, Snapcaster Mage

1 Tree of Redemption, Skinrender, Reaper from the Abyss, Trinket Mage, Hollowhenge Scavenger, Brutalizer Exarch, Geth, Lord of the Vault, Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur, Morkrut Banshee, Skaab Ruinator, Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon, Platinum Emperion

Solemn Simulacrum isn’t a surprise; the card has been a tournament staple at four mana in the past, and a slightly smaller version for half the mana is just crazy good. Wurmcoil Engine is likely good enough as a 5/5 for four mana that dies and makes 2/2s. I like Massacre Wurm a lot but was a bit surprised to see him as the third-most played, edging out the incredible Metamorph.

One thing to note about this list is that nearly every creature does something when it gets played, and if it puts another card or two into your hand when you play it, all’s the better!

Okay, so after going through all this digging, I’ve got a couple different approaches I’d like to toss out there to get your brewer’s juices going:

Heartless Architect

Bennie Smith

Test deck on 11-13-2011

Standard

Creatures (24)

Lands (16)

Spells (20)

I like what I’ve seen of Heartless Summoning complementing Grand Architect so I started there. Sphinx of Uthuun isn’t an artifact, but he is a blue creature, and the splits you get could very well yield an artifact or two you might be able to play right away. Add a couple Buried Ruin to reuse artifacts in the graveyard, particularly Phyrexian Metamorph.

Heartless Flair

Bennie Smith

Test deck on 11-13-2011

Standard

Creatures (19)

Lands (19)

Spells (22)

This is a Heartless spin on Solar Flare, with Sheoldred doing a pretty good Unburial Rites impression. I wanted to work in a couple Mana Leaks, but the creatures crowded them out.

Heartless Rock

Bennie Smith

Test deck on 11-13-2011

Standard

Creatures (29)

Lands (14)

10 Swamp
4 Woodland Cemetery

Spells (18)

Last up is Rock, good ol’ Rock. The Emissaries, Ragers, and Simulacrums provide nice mana redundancy in case Heartless doesn’t come online. The Rune-Scarred Demons can either replicate a bunch of times with Metamorphs for a flying army, fetch up Sheoldred for creature control and reanimation, or Creeping Renaissance for a massive late game reload. Since so many creatures do great stuff when they come into play, a couple Mimic Vats seem like a good idea.

What do you think? Got any great ideas for a Heartless Summoning deck?

That’s it for this week! If you’re in the area, bring your Commander deck up to Richmond Comix Friday, I plan on bringing a surprise!

Take care,

Bennie

starcitygeezer AT gmail DOT com

Make sure to follow my Twitter feed (@blairwitchgreen). I check it often so feel free to send me feedback, ideas, and random thoughts. I’ve also created a Facebook page where I’ll be posting up deck ideas and will happily discuss Magic, life, or anything else you want to talk about!

I’ve started a blog, it’s not Magic-related but you may find it fun to read and comment on. I update at least once a week so check on it often and let me know what you think! I recently revamped my blog header with a perfect drawing from the awesome MJ Scott, check it out!

New to Commander?
If you’re just curious about the format, building your first deck, or trying to take your Commander deck up a notch, here are some handy links:

Commander Primer Part 1 (Why play Commander? Rules Overview, Picking your Commander)
Commander Primer Part 2 (Mana Requirements, Randomness, Card Advantage)
Commander Primer Part 3 (Power vs. Synergy, Griefing, Staples, Building a Doran Deck)

My current Commander decks (and links to decklists):

Ghave, Guru of Spores (Melira Combo)
Damia, Sage of Stone (Ice Cauldron shenanigans)
Glissa, the Traitor (undying artifacts!)

Previous Commander decks currently on hiatus:

Glissa Sunseeker (death to artifacts!)
Jor Kadeen, the Prevailer (replacing Brion Stoutarm in Mo’ Myrs)
Thelon of Havenwood (Campfire Spores)
Melira, Sylvok Outcast (combo killa)
Konda, Lord of Eiganjo (The Indestructibles)
Vorosh, the Hunter (proliferaTION)
Progenitus (Fist of Suns and Bringers)
Savra, Queen of the Golgari (Demons)
Uril, the Miststalker (my “more competitive” deck)