Yeah true, although don't kid yourself, Predatory Rampage is an awful card.
Yeah, I keep forgetting it's a bad version of Overrun because it has no trample. It's actually a pretty good draft card though!
Quote from Anubis_Ravenheart »
Perhaps we could take out Deadly Allure and run some sort of wincon. Not sure what yet. If I have any ideas, I'll get back to you. All the creatures I can think of are more roleplayers. There's Thragtusk, which is insane, but he's also incredibly expensive right now, and I feel there's gotta be something more budget. Perhaps some sort of demon or other big black creature? Harvester of Souls would be insane. Of course, we could always run Revenge of the Hunted.
I think Revenge of the Hunted would be a great card to put our Primadox to good use. Also, I feel Soul of the Harvest fits the deck better since his ability is triggered when our creatures are cast as opposed to any creature dying. With Primadox, we will be drawing a card at least once per turn, and two if we play the Visionary! Plus he has trample. That would make him searchable by Mwonvuli Beast Tracker. Maybe replace our Timberland Guides and Quirion Dryads with three Beast Trackers, two Soul of the Harvest, and add a third Borderland Ranger? Then we'd probably want to replace our Young Wolves with Arbor Elves for ramp. For the Revenges, we could cut either the Deadly Allure or Prey Upon. Deadly Allure has flashback and can turn any of our creatures into killers, but with Prey Upon we can choose the target. Disadvantages of Prey Upon include lack of flashback and the fact that most of our creatures have low power. It would be more useful in the mid- to late-game though.
Well it wouldn't be just the Primadox responsible for bouncing. I'd also run Conjurer's Closet (that was the card I was referring to earlier but could not recall the name). But being as the focus of the deck would be Slime and only Slime, I don't know how we'd fare.
I'm still excited about the deck with Rats and Visionaries, but I'm just unsure of our ultimate wincon. Do we just overwhelm our opponent with creatures due to our card advantage? It seems extremely vulnerable to board wipes and aggro decks. I almost feel like we should run Predatory Rampage or just throw in some deadlier creatures.
Thanks for the post Anubis. I was also thinking about the deck more yesterday and came to a similar conclusion. I also broke them down into two decks and ended up with two similar themes to you, so that's reassuring to me as someone that's been away from the game for so long.
I like both decks you've come up with, and think that both are a great start for a budget under $5. I would probably take the Dryads out of the second deck since we don't have as many black spells to play. As a matter of fact, I was attempting to play a deck similar to Flicker Slime where our Primadox would return Mwonvuli Beast Walker or Acidic Slime to our hand every turn, then continue the shenanigans with that artifact that exiles and returns a creature at the end of your turn (name escapes me at the moment).
I think we have a strong base here, but I'd like to look at what we could get with a slightly bigger budget, say $20 per deck. I think we could really get somewhere with making the first deck mono black and adding Geralf's and Gravecrawlers and maybe even the artifact described above with more undying creatures and other creatures with enter abilities.
As for the second deck, maybe a strong Flicker Slime? I bet we could make one and it end up being much cheaper than the mono black deck.
i like the concept and the whole it's budget but in reality this wouldn't cost you $2. This would be more like $5 due to shops selling .10 - .25 commons etc...
Correct. I'm just using the convention used in previous budget deck threads (low value for card via tcgplayer).
I'm thinking this deck over more, and I feel like it might be a little vulnerable to aggro. The more I do dry runs on mtgdeckbuilder, the more it seems like Skirsdag High Priest is the actual staple of the deck. In that regard, I need more creatures to play. I'll need to narrow down the spells to fit more creatures in the deck.
Blood Artist synergizes well but is too slow for this deck I think. I'd rather have the Essence Harvest for the big burst spell.
As for the splicer, we really don't want to be recasting a 4cmc creature every turn with this deck. I think with a more control-oriented Primadox deck this would be a good fit though. This deck is more of a midrange deck with a very low mana curve.
I've decided to change the focus of the deck slightly. I've taken out the "enter effect" creatures and replaced them with undying creatures. I also took out Driver of the Dead, Duress, and Undying Evil.
I've added two Grim Backwoods to bring our land total to 22. As suggested above, it serves as a morbid trigger and also gives us late-game card advantage. Adding Young Wolf gives us a turn one creature that can be sacrificed and pinged by the Primadox and replayed for cheap. I've added Altar's Reap to add card draw while providing a morbid trigger, and Demonmail Hauberk as another morbid trigger while pumping one of our beefier creatures to massive proportions, be it one of our 5/5 flier tokens, the Dryad, or even the Primadox. Essence Harvest is a good card for fending off aggro decks since we gain life and deal damage, and is particularly effective with the aforementioned Demonmail Hauberk.
Sideboard considerations include:
1) Bone Splinters for creature-heavy decks to provide creature destruction for one mana.
2) Deathmark for G/W decks that, according to my research, are quite popular in the national metagame (rotating in Oct).
3) Appetite for Brains and Duress for control decks.
4) Despise for creature decks, especially beefier ones (rotating in Oct).
5) Naturalize and/or Acidic Slime for enchantment/artifact destruction, however, I fear Acidic Slime may be too mana intensive to be effective in a timely manner for this deck.
6) Rancor to give our deck greater aggro so we can race control decks.
After adding the two Grim Backwoods and removing the other cards, the deck now comes to $2.00 exactly! Now we just need to tune the sideboard.
Thoughts? I think to begin moving the budget up, this deck REALLY wants some Gravecrawlers to use as morbid bait. Pretty funny that the deck I've posted costs less than half of what one Gravecrawler is worth!
You're going to have fun. I'll build something like this, too.
Thanks for the suggestions! I've been away from Magic for so long I'm still trying to get acquainted with the Standard cards. Grim Backwoods should definitely be in here! Beast Tracker is a good idea as well. I thought about running him and throwing in some Vampire Nighthawks and Acidic Slimes as budget and then taking a couple out for a Thragtusk as the deck evolved. Then we could get rid of the Gravepurges.
All of these cards would increase our mana curve significantly, so we would definitely need some ramp at that point. I've also been considering putting in some cheap Undying creatures like Young Wolf and Butcher Ghoul as I could use them as attack/sac bait while activating my Morbid abilities and then return them to my hand with the Primadox when they get a counter on them. Being able to recycle our creatures like that would present us with significant card advantage.
Bolas is a neat idea, but I feel like he doesn't fit here, especially if we bring in some Vampire Nighthawks for lifelink. I feel like our potential card advantage is so strong in this deck that Bolas would be overkill even in a deck with a higher budget.
I think your land count is too low. 20 land with your key card being a 4 drop is really risky. I wouldn't go under 24 land if you plan to play the Primadox. Ideally you would have some mana dorks as well because the Primadox is very mana intensive. You're replaying a creature every turn (effectively stalling your board development) at the cost of a lot of your mana. That limits what else you can play.
You might be right. If not for the 4 drops I could probably get away with 20 lands. I've been playtesting on mtgdeckbuilder and 20 has generally been enough, but I might consider taking the deck up to 22-24 lands.
I could put in some Arbor Elves as mana dorks as it would give me a much-needed 1cc creature drop, which I feel the deck is lacking. To go with the theme of the Primadox, I could alternatively throw in a few Bond Beetle.
Total cost (including sideboard): $8.50 (8/24/2012, 9:32 AM Central)
NOTE: Rancor had jumped up to over $1.00 in this iteration, requiring an extra $0.80 more than the previous timestamp for Rancor.
Possible candidates for a higher budget:
1) Thragtusk: pretty obvious choice here. With Roaring Primadox and Conjurer's Closet in play, we will gain 10 life and get a 3/3 wolf token every turn. Unfortunately, Thragtusk is a $10 card all by himself. However, if you can set aside $5 per week and ignore the itch to build more budget decks or buy boosters, you can have two of these in a month!
2) Go for the Throat: Better than Doom Blade but also much more expensive. This card will be rotating soon anyway and Murder will likely go in its place.
3) Woodland Cemetery: dual lands are a good idea in any deck.
ORIGINAL POST:
Hello all! I've just recently decided to get back into Magic after a VERY long hiatus. The last time I played was when 6th Edition was released! I recently participated in the M13 release draft at FNM and did very well, and I'd like to attend more FNMs when time permits. I put together a Liquimetal Phoenix deck and like it a lot, but I'm itching to build another budget deck and I'd like it to survive the upcoming rotation (unlike the Liquimetal deck).
I had a couple games at the M13 draft that inspired this deck. I was playing W/G with two Roaring Primadox. In one particular game, I was facing a nasty B/G deck with all sorts of deathtouch creatures, fatties, and other nasties. What ended up saving me was a combination of Roaring Primadox, Attended Knight, Crusader of Ordic, Quirion Dryad, and Healer of the Pride. I would return Attended Knight to my hand during every upkeep via the Primadox, play the Knight to get a token, which would add more power to the Crusader, and gain 4 life with the Healer, as well as add a counter to my Dryad. I was able to stall the game this way until eventually I played Fungal Sproutling when my Crusader was a 10/10, gaining 20 life in the process. It was hilarious!
Knowing full well I can't count on such shenanigans outside of the draft format, I've been inspired to make a G/B version of the deck.
The mana curve for this deck is ridiculously low. Duress serves as a first-turn cast to get out any enchantments, artifacts, sorceries, or instants we don't like. Tragic Slip and Deadly Allure serve as our creature destruction, and while Deadly Allure is an indirect way of approaching this, its flashback ability gives us card advantage. With all the black spells in this deck, Quirion Dryad has the potential of getting quite large, especially when we get our Roaring Primadox out.
Speaking of Roaring Primadox, he is the center of this deck and our main win con. With him, we can return creatures to our hand that have enter effects. Need to filter out the opponent's hand? Ping the Ravenous Rats and play it while giving our Dryad a counter. Need card draw? Return the Elvish Visionary. Undying Evil helps protect our Primadox if need be, but we can still win without him.
Should our creatures die to burn spells or aggro, I've included a couple of cards to help us get those creatures back. Gravepurge gets as many creatures as we want from our graveyard to the top of our deck. Driver of the Dead synergizes well with Deadly Allure as he must be blocked, and if he dies, we can return any of our creatures to the battlefield (except for the Primadox). This leaves our opponent with the option of either blocking him with a chump or just taking the damage.
I've also included Stirsdag High Priest here as a 3-of. Since most of our creatures will be sitting back, this gives us an opportunity to tap them with the Priest's ability after we kill creatures with our beefier guys. The 5/5 fliers he generates can help us deal with opponent's fliers while also offering evasion as we go in for the kill.
I notice this deck is weak to artifacts and enchantments. In that regard, I could use some help coming up with an effective sideboard. I am reluctant to include Acidic Slime even though he synergizes well with our Primadox. His 5cmc is a real drawback and I'm not sure we can afford to hang onto him for an extended period of time while we wait for our fifth land.
I've been testing this on a deckbuilding website and it seems to flow pretty well. Any suggestions?
Main Deck price per card (as of 7/22/12)
CREATURES (21)
4 Ravenous Rats 0.02
3 Quirion Dryad 0.20
4 Elvish Visionary 0.03
3 Skirsdag High Priest 0.10
3 Driver of the Dead 0.01
4 Roaring Primadox 0.03
Yeah, I keep forgetting it's a bad version of Overrun because it has no trample.
I think Revenge of the Hunted would be a great card to put our Primadox to good use. Also, I feel Soul of the Harvest fits the deck better since his ability is triggered when our creatures are cast as opposed to any creature dying. With Primadox, we will be drawing a card at least once per turn, and two if we play the Visionary! Plus he has trample. That would make him searchable by Mwonvuli Beast Tracker. Maybe replace our Timberland Guides and Quirion Dryads with three Beast Trackers, two Soul of the Harvest, and add a third Borderland Ranger? Then we'd probably want to replace our Young Wolves with Arbor Elves for ramp. For the Revenges, we could cut either the Deadly Allure or Prey Upon. Deadly Allure has flashback and can turn any of our creatures into killers, but with Prey Upon we can choose the target. Disadvantages of Prey Upon include lack of flashback and the fact that most of our creatures have low power. It would be more useful in the mid- to late-game though.
I'm still excited about the deck with Rats and Visionaries, but I'm just unsure of our ultimate wincon. Do we just overwhelm our opponent with creatures due to our card advantage? It seems extremely vulnerable to board wipes and aggro decks. I almost feel like we should run Predatory Rampage or just throw in some deadlier creatures.
I like both decks you've come up with, and think that both are a great start for a budget under $5. I would probably take the Dryads out of the second deck since we don't have as many black spells to play. As a matter of fact, I was attempting to play a deck similar to Flicker Slime where our Primadox would return Mwonvuli Beast Walker or Acidic Slime to our hand every turn, then continue the shenanigans with that artifact that exiles and returns a creature at the end of your turn (name escapes me at the moment).
I think we have a strong base here, but I'd like to look at what we could get with a slightly bigger budget, say $20 per deck. I think we could really get somewhere with making the first deck mono black and adding Geralf's and Gravecrawlers and maybe even the artifact described above with more undying creatures and other creatures with enter abilities.
As for the second deck, maybe a strong Flicker Slime? I bet we could make one and it end up being much cheaper than the mono black deck.
Correct. I'm just using the convention used in previous budget deck threads (low value for card via tcgplayer).
I'm thinking this deck over more, and I feel like it might be a little vulnerable to aggro. The more I do dry runs on mtgdeckbuilder, the more it seems like Skirsdag High Priest is the actual staple of the deck. In that regard, I need more creatures to play. I'll need to narrow down the spells to fit more creatures in the deck.
As for the splicer, we really don't want to be recasting a 4cmc creature every turn with this deck. I think with a more control-oriented Primadox deck this would be a good fit though. This deck is more of a midrange deck with a very low mana curve.
4 Young Wolf
4 Butcher Ghoul
3 Quirion Dryad
3 Skirsdag High Priest
4 Roaring Primadox
4 Tragic Slip
4 Deadly Allure
4 Altar's Reap
2 Gravepurge
4 Essence Harvest
2 Demonmail Hauberk
2 Grim Backwoods
12 Swamp
8 Forest
I've added two Grim Backwoods to bring our land total to 22. As suggested above, it serves as a morbid trigger and also gives us late-game card advantage. Adding Young Wolf gives us a turn one creature that can be sacrificed and pinged by the Primadox and replayed for cheap. I've added Altar's Reap to add card draw while providing a morbid trigger, and Demonmail Hauberk as another morbid trigger while pumping one of our beefier creatures to massive proportions, be it one of our 5/5 flier tokens, the Dryad, or even the Primadox. Essence Harvest is a good card for fending off aggro decks since we gain life and deal damage, and is particularly effective with the aforementioned Demonmail Hauberk.
Sideboard considerations include:
1) Bone Splinters for creature-heavy decks to provide creature destruction for one mana.
2) Deathmark for G/W decks that, according to my research, are quite popular in the national metagame (rotating in Oct).
3) Appetite for Brains and Duress for control decks.
4) Despise for creature decks, especially beefier ones (rotating in Oct).
5) Naturalize and/or Acidic Slime for enchantment/artifact destruction, however, I fear Acidic Slime may be too mana intensive to be effective in a timely manner for this deck.
6) Rancor to give our deck greater aggro so we can race control decks.
After adding the two Grim Backwoods and removing the other cards, the deck now comes to $2.00 exactly! Now we just need to tune the sideboard.
Thoughts? I think to begin moving the budget up, this deck REALLY wants some Gravecrawlers to use as morbid bait. Pretty funny that the deck I've posted costs less than half of what one Gravecrawler is worth!
Thanks for the suggestions! I've been away from Magic for so long I'm still trying to get acquainted with the Standard cards. Grim Backwoods should definitely be in here! Beast Tracker is a good idea as well. I thought about running him and throwing in some Vampire Nighthawks and Acidic Slimes as budget and then taking a couple out for a Thragtusk as the deck evolved. Then we could get rid of the Gravepurges.
All of these cards would increase our mana curve significantly, so we would definitely need some ramp at that point. I've also been considering putting in some cheap Undying creatures like Young Wolf and Butcher Ghoul as I could use them as attack/sac bait while activating my Morbid abilities and then return them to my hand with the Primadox when they get a counter on them. Being able to recycle our creatures like that would present us with significant card advantage.
Bolas is a neat idea, but I feel like he doesn't fit here, especially if we bring in some Vampire Nighthawks for lifelink. I feel like our potential card advantage is so strong in this deck that Bolas would be overkill even in a deck with a higher budget.
You might be right. If not for the 4 drops I could probably get away with 20 lands. I've been playtesting on mtgdeckbuilder and 20 has generally been enough, but I might consider taking the deck up to 22-24 lands.
I could put in some Arbor Elves as mana dorks as it would give me a much-needed 1cc creature drop, which I feel the deck is lacking. To go with the theme of the Primadox, I could alternatively throw in a few Bond Beetle.
4 Young Wolf
3 Ravenous Rats
3 Elvish Visionary
3 Skirsdag High Priest
4 Strangleroot Geist
4 Borderland Ranger
4 Roaring Primadox
3 Skinrender
4 Tragic Slip
4 Rancor
2 Conjurer's Closet
Lands (22)
11 Forest
9 Swamp
2 Grim Backwoods
3 Acidic Slime
3 Silklash Spider
3 Knight of Infamy
4 Duress
2 Doom Blade
Total cost (including sideboard): $8.50 (8/24/2012, 9:32 AM Central)
NOTE: Rancor had jumped up to over $1.00 in this iteration, requiring an extra $0.80 more than the previous timestamp for Rancor.
Possible candidates for a higher budget:
1) Thragtusk: pretty obvious choice here. With Roaring Primadox and Conjurer's Closet in play, we will gain 10 life and get a 3/3 wolf token every turn. Unfortunately, Thragtusk is a $10 card all by himself. However, if you can set aside $5 per week and ignore the itch to build more budget decks or buy boosters, you can have two of these in a month!
2) Go for the Throat: Better than Doom Blade but also much more expensive. This card will be rotating soon anyway and Murder will likely go in its place.
3) Woodland Cemetery: dual lands are a good idea in any deck.
ORIGINAL POST:
I had a couple games at the M13 draft that inspired this deck. I was playing W/G with two Roaring Primadox. In one particular game, I was facing a nasty B/G deck with all sorts of deathtouch creatures, fatties, and other nasties. What ended up saving me was a combination of Roaring Primadox, Attended Knight, Crusader of Ordic, Quirion Dryad, and Healer of the Pride. I would return Attended Knight to my hand during every upkeep via the Primadox, play the Knight to get a token, which would add more power to the Crusader, and gain 4 life with the Healer, as well as add a counter to my Dryad. I was able to stall the game this way until eventually I played Fungal Sproutling when my Crusader was a 10/10, gaining 20 life in the process. It was hilarious!
Knowing full well I can't count on such shenanigans outside of the draft format, I've been inspired to make a G/B version of the deck.
4 Ravenous Rats
3 Quirion Dryad
4 Elvish Visionary
3 Skirsdag High Priest
3 Driver of the Dead
4 Roaring Primadox
4 Duress
4 Tragic Slip
4 Deadly Allure
4 Undying Evil
3 Gravepurge
12 Swamp
8 Forest
The mana curve for this deck is ridiculously low. Duress serves as a first-turn cast to get out any enchantments, artifacts, sorceries, or instants we don't like. Tragic Slip and Deadly Allure serve as our creature destruction, and while Deadly Allure is an indirect way of approaching this, its flashback ability gives us card advantage. With all the black spells in this deck, Quirion Dryad has the potential of getting quite large, especially when we get our Roaring Primadox out.
Speaking of Roaring Primadox, he is the center of this deck and our main win con. With him, we can return creatures to our hand that have enter effects. Need to filter out the opponent's hand? Ping the Ravenous Rats and play it while giving our Dryad a counter. Need card draw? Return the Elvish Visionary. Undying Evil helps protect our Primadox if need be, but we can still win without him.
Should our creatures die to burn spells or aggro, I've included a couple of cards to help us get those creatures back. Gravepurge gets as many creatures as we want from our graveyard to the top of our deck. Driver of the Dead synergizes well with Deadly Allure as he must be blocked, and if he dies, we can return any of our creatures to the battlefield (except for the Primadox). This leaves our opponent with the option of either blocking him with a chump or just taking the damage.
I've also included Stirsdag High Priest here as a 3-of. Since most of our creatures will be sitting back, this gives us an opportunity to tap them with the Priest's ability after we kill creatures with our beefier guys. The 5/5 fliers he generates can help us deal with opponent's fliers while also offering evasion as we go in for the kill.
I notice this deck is weak to artifacts and enchantments. In that regard, I could use some help coming up with an effective sideboard. I am reluctant to include Acidic Slime even though he synergizes well with our Primadox. His 5cmc is a real drawback and I'm not sure we can afford to hang onto him for an extended period of time while we wait for our fifth land.
I've been testing this on a deckbuilding website and it seems to flow pretty well. Any suggestions?
Main Deck price per card (as of 7/22/12)
4 Ravenous Rats 0.02
3 Quirion Dryad 0.20
4 Elvish Visionary 0.03
3 Skirsdag High Priest 0.10
3 Driver of the Dead 0.01
4 Roaring Primadox 0.03
SPELLS (19)
4 Duress 0.03
4 Tragic Slip 0.10
4 Deadly Allure 0.02
4 Undying Evil 0.01
3 Gravepurge 0.01