(Imponing Decks is a series cataloguing the more than 30 complete decks I have ready to play that I bring with me to casual Magic games. These decks have proven themselves over the years with a fun factor and appeal that has stood the test of time. The entire series is viewable here.)

This installment showcases one of the more complex decks in my entourage. I am not a fan of dirty combo decks, but this is one combo deck that's way too complicated and enjoyable to be called anything but good, clean fun.

Urza’s Hot Tub Reanimator Suggested by Kenneth Nagle on 2006-10-22 as a potential deck for Casual/Multiplayer As written about in http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/13009.html Print this deck!
Maindeck: Artifacts 1 Helm Of Possession 4 Talisman Of Dominance 1 Talisman Of Progress 1 Talisman Of Unity 4 Urza's Hot Tub Creatures 1 Angel Of Despair 1 Bringer Of The Blue Dawn 1 Bringer Of The Red Dawn 1 Herald Of Leshrac 1 Infernal Spawn Of Evil 1 Infernal Spawn Of Infernal Spawn Of Evil Enchantments 1 Oath Of Ghouls Instants 1 Read The Runes 4 Spoils Of The Vault	Legendary Creatures 1 Akroma, Angel Of Wrath 1 Keiga, The Tide Star 1 Kokusho, The Evening Star 1 Meloku The Clouded Mirror 1 Patron Of The Kitsune 1 Ryusei, The Falling Star 1 Sol'kanar The Swamp King 1 Visara The Dreadful Legendary Enchantments 1 Night Of Souls' Betrayal Sorceries 3 Beacon Of Unrest 1 Life From The Loam Basic Snow Lands 1 Snow-covered Forest 1 Snow-covered Island 1 Snow-covered Mountain 1 Snow-covered Plains 13 Snow-covered Swamp Legendary Lands 1 Mikokoro, Center Of The Sea 1 Minamo, School At Water's Edge 1 Miren, The Moaning Well 1 Oboro, Palace In The Clouds 1 Okina, Temple To The Grandfathers 1 Shinka, The Bloodsoaked Keep Snow Lands 1 Mouth Of Ronom	Stats: Average mana: 2.52 Average creature mana cost: 7.07 Average creature power: 5.00 Average creature toughness: 5.35 Deck Composition: Artifacts: 18.33% Basic Snow Lands: 28.33% Creatures: 10.00% Enchantments: 1.67% Instants: 8.33% Legendary Creatures: 13.33% Legendary Enchantments: 1.67% Legendary Lands: 10.00% Snow Lands: 1.67% Sorceries: 6.67%
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This is one of my weirder casual decks, built around the Unhinged Uncommon Urza's Hot Tub. It's a Reanimator deck with some corner tricks tacked on for good measure.

The Good:

Fun!
Combos galore.
Convoluted decision trees; nearly impossible to pilot optimally.
Silver bullets that can demolish narrow decks.
Neverending supply of fatties in the late-game.

The Bad:

Randomness!
Heavy reliance on an early Urza's Hot Tub.
A turn 4 fattie is quite slow in Reanimator terms, meaning all you really accomplished is saving about three mana.

That's the deck in a nutshell, but the actual execution of its strategy requires a massive, thorough explanation. I've found that when players borrow my decks for a casual game of Magic, they oftentimes don't even know what half the cards do, or how they're supposed to play the deck, especially Constructed-only Spike players. The more convoluted and decision-intensive the deck is, the more likely it is to get “thrown back” in favor of powerful deck that just turns guys sideways.

If I spell out how to play each my decks correctly right here in this series, I can just point them to one as a primer (a thorough guide on a particular deck or archetype).

Find Urza's Hot Tub

Step one of the Urza's Hot Tub protocol is to find an Urza's Hot Tub and drop it into play. This consists of the four natural Hot Tubs and four Spoils of the Vault, which are usually playable on turn 1.

Discounting a good land count, you should have at least an Urza's Hot Tub or a Spoils of the Vault 65.36% of the time for a starting hand of seven. If you allow for drawing first for eight cards, like half the time in Duel and all the time in Multiplayer Free-For-All, the probability bumps up to 70.6%.

That means a good third of the time, you won't have an early Urza's Hot Tub and you're just going to be screwed into doing everything the hard way. Without one of these eight cards in the first three turns, the deck plays something akin to a Black-splash-everything Dragon deck with bad acceleration, bad removal, bad tutoring, and bad card drawing.

Assuming you have a Spoils of the Vault but no Urza's Hot Tub, play the Spoils naming Urza's Hot Tub immediately. You have a 13.28% chance of dying to Spoils in this scenario, but on average you'll lose 9.56 life for your critical Hot Tub. If you need second or third land, you can Spoils of the Vault for Snow-Covered Swamp at an average payment of 3.5 life.

If you are interested in generic Spoils of the Vault calculations, here is an Excel spreadsheet (LINK) developed by college buddy Jerry McMahan. Some more interesting things Jerry has done include reverse-engineering River City Ransom's password system and writing a working NES game “Easy Icey” that was previewed in my Pro Tour: Charleston report.

Once you've secured an Urza's Hot Tub, chaining can begin.

Chaining

Now that Urza's Hot Tub is in play and we almost died getting it there, we can start chaining (or “Survivaling”... or “Tubbing”) — the process of discarding an unwanted card to Urza's Hot Tub to search for a more desirable card. I call it a chain because you will often have some end goal in mind (“get Akroma into play,” “kill Worship with Angel of Despair”), but you must trace the route backwards to a card in your hand. This is not an easy or straightforward task.

Urza's Hot Tub basically grants access to any card in the deck, putting it into your hand, graveyard, or into play given a long enough chain. However, each link in the chain costs mana, which add up to cost turns, which add up to your demise if you take too long executing an adequate plan.

Keyword “of”

The main combo chain stems from the “of” keyword:

of card into Beacon of Unrest, cast Beacon of Unrest.

This chain will put something monstrous into play and conveniently put Beacon of Unrest right back into your library, where Urza's Hot Tub can fetch it again. Because of this, the same Beacon of Unrest can be reused every turn, so a single one will suffice should you lose the others somehow. Don't forget Beacon of Unrest can also reanimate artifacts like Urza's Hot Tub and target things in any graveyard. It's exceedingly elegant how Beacon of Unrest executes in combination with Urza's Hot Tub, making the rest of the deck possible.

The “of” creatures are nigh-uncastable fatties that affect the table:

1 Akroma, Angel of Wrath
1 Angel of Despair
1 Herald of Leshrac
1 Infernal Spawn of Evil
1 Infernal Spawn of Infernal Spawn of Evil
1 Patron of the Kitsune
1 Bringer of the Red Dawn
1 Bringer of the Blue Dawn

At some point in the late game or through proper chaining, the Bringers become hardcastable at WUBRG.

Keyword “the”

The “the” keyword appears in its exclusive form on a subset of cards. These are the “castable” cards that, while worth reanimating, become easily castable during the midgame. One of these cards makes for a great follow-up to the main combo, cementing your board position.

1 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
1 Keiga, the Tide Star
1 Kokusho, the Evening Star
1 Ryusei, the Falling Star
1 Visara, the Dreadful
1 Sol'Kanar, the Swamp King
1 Read the Runes
1 Life from the Loam

Keyword “of the”

Cards with both “of” and “the” in their names are particularly valuable because they can link to and from a pure “of” or pure “the” chain.

4 Spoils of the Vault
1 Mikokoro, Center of the Sea
1 Patron of the Kitsune
1 Bringer of the Red Dawn
1 Bringer of the Blue Dawn

Keyword “Snow-Covered”

A color-fixing chain is built into the manabase, putting those “new” Coldsnap Snow-Covered lands to good use:

Snow-Covered Swamp into Snow-Covered Mountain

This is rarely utilized but it still should be considered for turning on your castables and Bringers. With nothing better to do, you can simply pitch Snow-Covered Swamps for other Snow-Covered Swamps, thinning your library.

Keyword “Swamp”

The smallest chain of all is a minichain that can link “Snow-Covered” to “the” and vice versa:

Snow-Covered Swamp into Sol'Kanar, the Swamp King into the card.

You can make a good argument for putting that purple Sol'Kanar you cracked at the Time Spiral Prerelease into any deck that can cast him, solely because he's dripping with coolness. Now he's even a Demon!

Non-Basic lands

The non-basics in the deck provide some combo potential and most of them are chainable:

1 Minamo, School at Water's Edge
1 Oboro, Palace in the Clouds
1 Mouth of Ronom
1 Mikokoro, Center of the Sea
1 Okina, Temple to the Grandfathers
1 Shinka, the Blood-soaked Keep
1 Miren, the Moaning Well

Life from the Loam Engine

As with all graveyard-centric decks nowadays, the deck wouldn't be complete without a fully functional Life from the Loam engine built in. It takes setup time and some additional mana, but dredging Life from the Loam is far superior to simply drawing off the top if the game goes long enough. The printing of Life from the Loam has made Green mages no longer slaves to the randomness of their draw step.

While there are only two painless sources of Green mana in the deck, it's very convenient to tub away Life from the Loam for Okina, Temple to the Grandfathers. The alternative is to pitch Snow-Covered Swamp for Snow-Covered Forest.

This is the longest but most robust chain when setting up Life from the Loam:

of card into Mouth of Ronom into Mikokoro, Center of the Sea into Life from the Loam into Okina, Temple to the Grandfathers

You end the chain here, dropping the Okina into play to cast Life from the Loam on subsequent turns. Every turn from here forward, you can dredge Life from the Loam then play it for Mouth of Ronom, Mikokoro, and a normal land drop. You can tub away the Mouth of Ronom and Mikokoro for most anything you need in the deck. You can also Loam up extra cards in hand in anticipation of a big Read the Runes. The dredge action fills your graveyard with reanimation targets. Always try to have at least one Beacon of Unrest in hand before you dredge to avoid binning them all, as only lands, artifacts, and creatures are reachable in your graveyard.

Part of the finesse of playing this deck optimally is planning far ahead. Fitting non-basics and off-color Snow lands into chains ensures land drops, provides useful abilities, preps Life from the Loam, and fixes colors, which enable more chains for future turns. This is all while your opponents are trying to kill you.

Another thing that further complicates chaining is that every third game or so, you have to operate with a lower life total and some number of your cards in the RFG zone due to Spoils of the Vault, which breaks up some of your chains. This scenario turns games hideously perplexing, as you might not have Akroma to lean on, or any Red mana at all, or Life from the Loam, or any life gain against burn, so you are forced to construct work-arounds with the toolbox you're left with.

Combos

Bringer of the Red Dawn plus Miren, the Moaning Well
Keiga, the Tide Star plus Helm of Possession
Life from the Loam plus Mouth of Ronom
Visara the Dreadful plus Minamo, School at Water's Edge
Herald of Leshrac plus Meloku the Clouded Mirror
Read the Runes plus Kamigawa Dragons
Plenty more...

It's possible to kill your opponent with uncounterable damage from both Infernal Spawn of Evil and Infernal Spawn of Infernal Spawn of Evil. To generate shuffle effects, you can tub away Life from the Loam fuel to ping your opponent for two damage on your turn and two damage on their turn, as long as ISoISoE remains in your library. This scenario is exceedingly rare; you'd have to be fighting a deck with a robust Fog lock, infinite counterspells, infinite Control Magics, Scepter-Chant, or similar.

I arrived at this current Urza's Hot Tub decklist after many iterations. One aspect of playing this deck that makes itself clear in testing is the need for solid defense like Night of Souls' Betrayal, and life gain like Patron of the Kitsune. Spoils of the Vault, and being relatively slow to come out of the gates, can leave you so far behind that all your huge monsters and cool combos don't matter even if you manage pull one of them off. This is why the Red Bringer is much better than the Blue Bringer in this deck; once you've gone out of your way to get something into play, it needs to affect the board in a big way, not provide something abstract like card advantage. Urza's Hot Tub will eventually provide you all the card quality advantage you could ever want.

Potential Inclusions

There are some powerful cards that seem like they fit in this deck but they actually do nothing, like Bringer of the Black Dawn and Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni. You already have access to every card in the deck and the deck is setup completely wrong to ninja out Ink-Eyes after killing something worthwhile to steal. I put a strong emphasis on remotely castable fatties that don't require mana to do things, since the engine to get them there is so mana-intensive in the first place.

Some card that look promising that I haven't tried include:

City of Brass
Yosei, the Morning Star
Pulse of the Grid
Altar of Dementia
Anvil of Bogardan
Sakashima, the Impostor (Two Akromas is hella good)
Oath of Druids (our casual group has banned this card)

Using obvious chains, Urza's Hot Tub can complete such endeavors as:

Assemble the Kaldra pieces (Sword of Kaldra, Shield of Kaldra, Helm of Kaldra)
Abuse big sorceries (Sins of the Past / Beacon of Tomorrows)
Setup flashback spells (Call of the Herd, Roar of the Wurm, Crush of Wurms, Volley of Boulders)
Complete the Urzatron into Urza's Factory
Power out Myrs into Myr Matrix

But for all the powerful things you can do with Urza's Hot Tub, it doesn't hold a candle to the truly broken stuff in Unhinged.

Imponage in Action

You can see this deck along with the previous installment's Norritt deck in action in this feature match coverage, with Kenji Tsumura piloting the Norritt deck and the Urza's Hot Tub deck in the nimble hands of Olivier Ruel.

...

That's all for this deck. Join me next time when I break every rule Dan Paskins has ever made about building Red decks by building a Red deck like a Green deck.

As of this writing, I'm currently one of the fifteen finalists in The Great Designer Search. This is a real job search a la "The Apprentice" to become the next card designer, designing real Magic cards that the millions of us play and love. This is a dream job, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It's something right out of an Eminem song. The competition is hardcore. The talent is undeniable. But there can only be one winner. Who will Make Magic, and who will be stuck slave-coding software for the forseeable future? Only Mark Rosewater can decide. Watch the carnage unfold this and every Thursday at magicthegathering.com!

Kenneth Nagle
NorrYtt
NorrYtt@gmail.com
2006.5.26