Find a combo in Saviors of Kamigawa? That's this week's casual challenge. When I sat down to write this article, my first instinct was to build a deck around One with Nothing. The great, should-be-late Maro himself wrote an article explaining how Wizards actually makes bad rares on purpose, for all the die-hard Johnnies of the world. My friend Dale really appreciated that sentiment as he opened his first Saviors pack at the prerelease, only to find this Wizards-brand Piece of Crap staring back at him.
I thought, hmmm. Perhaps there's a combo there. Thoughts began running through my mind.
- One with Nothing and Balance - nobody has any cards.
- One with Nothing and Exhume - assuming there's a fattie in your hand.
- One with Nothing and Isochron Scepter - I'm just farting spicy chicken burritos now.
Alas, I am not Johnny enough to use this card... so today, I will write about some creatures with "drawbacks."
In Saviors, Wizards put in a cycle of creatures that have the peculiar upkeep effect of having to return a creature of the noted color to your hand. What would be the point of replaying the same creature turn after turn after turn? That depends on the color; let's start with black.
In black, we have Skull Collector. A 3/3 creature that regenerates, and only costs three mana. What can we do with him?
The premise here is old school black aggro in the respects of Swamp/Dark Ritual/Erg Raiders/Unholy Strength. We have reusable beaters with "comes into play" effects. Early beats put on pressure, while you set up the Skull Collector combo/lock. You can recycle in a myriad of ways:
- Nekrataal 187s any non-black creature
- Ravenous Rats forces a "use it or lose it" effect.
- Gravedigger returns any creature that has gone bye-bye
- Chittering Rats locks them out for the rest of the game.
The Wayfarer's Baubles and Solemn Simulacrums build up your mana base so you can more readily abuse this combo. Distress and Echoing Decay help insure you live long enough for this to be of value. Considering some of the rat decks I've seen people tuning, don't be surprised if this is one of the rogue decks you see at Regionals (albeit a more finely-tuned version).
Black had the best quantity setup for the bounce. Red, white and blue would require a much larger card pool than Standard to work with (even though I have Regionals on the brain). Green has the #1 in design most abuse able creature for this.
Five little words: "How about Regrowth every turn?"
I will be the first to admit that there are far better Gifts decks out there. This is an amalgamation of Gadiel's Philly championship deck and Standard Gifts variants. We replace the Hana Kami/Soulless Revival engine with Eternal Witness/Stampeding Serow (the Serow, as a 5/4 trampler for four mana, doubles as your win condition). We can now populate this with the ultimate Steely Dan collection (look at those silver bullets!).
There are better choices, of course, but I can't do all the work. The Cranial Extraction is there to get theirs. Plus, once you build up to seven mana (which is not very hard here) you can extract every turn. You can Fog every turn with the Kami of False Hope. You can Purge those pesky black ninjas every turn. The list goes on.
Imagine a sideboarded Boil leaping out of your sideboard to make sure your opponent never has more than one Island on the table. Some things just make you smile.
You've been great. For those who want to flame the less-than-tuned decks, do so in the forums. I don't read them. For everyone else, see you at Regionals.
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