MTG Salvation

So this little bastard has been on my chopping block of cards to build decks around for a while, but despite his awesome ability he's been hard to exploit. I mean, the obvious choice is to use him with lots of tokens and then do some sort of mass overrun with Strength in Numbers, but then you're just asking for a blowout with any given removal spell. You can exploit him with your own removal spell to turn terminates into wrath of god, but then you just paid 6 mana and 2 cards for your wrath of god.

So, here's my solution, which naturally I figured out just as I was about to get to sleep last night. Enjoy.



In case you can't see it, the goal is basically to play Ink-treader asap, then use him to control your opponent via the stall cards (which ought to draw you tons of cards in the process). Once enough critters have hit the field (use forbidden orchard if he's not overcommitting) drop one of the wincons (target ink-treader) and deal a bajillion damage. Backlash is obviously a little subpar compared to the others, but it's tutorable with supply/demand, so learn to live with it.

P.S. I don't screw around when it comes to 5 color mana bases

I guess it's true that I don't have a ton, but FoF, Gifts, and frantic search all have, frankly, a redonkulous (now that I actually spelled that word I feel stupid) amount of synergy of the deck. Not to mention, the dredge mechanic in general provides me with tons of gas, thanks to toshiro. So I think draw shouldn't be a major problem, I don't see this deck having any lack of things to do in the late game.

Also, concentrate and promise of power are very anti-synergistic with the deck because they're sorceries, so toshiro doesn't get any use out of them. It'd definitely be worth the extra mana to use jace's ingenuity instead of concentrate, considering I could reuse it. That said...I think I'd rather have another FoF instead, if I was to add another draw slot. This deck is all about having lots and lots of tricky decisions to make, and pushing the limit of human magic-playing ability, so the complicated mess of FoF is far trickier to a straightforward draw effect. Also, you know, a better card.

If it runs out of gas in playtesting (dunno when that'll be, tbh, but this might be my favorite of the recent decks I've created) I'll consider adding more draw, but definitely an instant and probably something funky.

You've got a lot of cards that take advantage of the grave (including some pretty mediocre ones, like wreath of geists and grim flowering) but I don't see a ton of ways to load your grave up with creatures. I'd add more splinterfrights, and toss in some sakura-tribe elders. Also, allow me to introduce you to a little thing called dredge. You're welcome.

Toshiro Umezawa has always been a frustrating little minx - he seems like the perfect EDH general for a cool graveyard recursion deck, but without blue he's woefully short on self-mill and lacks many cool instants.

So, rather than ignore him (since his ability is way too cool), he's been migrated to a casual deck where he can be the awesome toolbox he was born to be.



The deck, obviously, revolves around self-mill to get lots of rad instants into your grave. Then you've got thug or grim harvest to get toshiro into your hand and into play, and then you can exploit him to use the myriad of instants in your graveyard.

Tbh cutting things down has been the hardest part, there are tons of awesome cards I'd love to use that I just haven't found room for.

looks way more like a midrange deck than aggro deck to me. only 20 creatures, and 6 of them cost 5+. I think it might behoove you to take out the expensive critters (especially charmbreaker devils since he doesn't even have an effect until next turn) and replace them with more cheap beaters. Intimidation bolt seems counterintuitive for aggro, too - if anything, you want them attacking you so they won't have blockers, if you're really an aggro deck.

On the other hand, if you like the big beaters and don't mind it slower, sunforger IS the coolest card in a game.

got my order within 3 days, nicely packaged, all around good experience. Prices are middle-of-the-road but selection makes up for it imo.

it's not quite as simple as making crackleburr the focus of my deck. That was, actually, in the vicinity of where I started, but it meant I was using lots of really boring creatures like crag puca, noggle bandit, riverfall mimic, or stream hopper. Or they're game centralizing bombs like niv, mindwrack liege, Dominus of Fealty, or Djinn illuminatus.

Crackle might be my favorite RU creature, but when I was looking for support critters for him, gelectrode and guildmage were among the only ones that weren't boring or bombs, but they also require a build around to not be pretty boring themselves. And they were also among my favorite cards, and crackle doesn't really need a huge build-around, so it only made sense, imo, to diversify the strategy a bit. Of course, that meant I also needed a significant number of instants and sorceries to make guildmage and gelectrode work. So it's not a one-card-focused deck (like my skill borrower is), it's more or less equal between the three.



I feel like I'm repeating myself here, but Kiln field doesn't fit this deck because it's a control deck. Yes, gelectrode and guildmage like cheap instants and sorceries like kiln fiend does, and yes, kiln fiend is a stronger card than either of them, but he'd centralize the deck and pull it in another direction. Not to mention, he doesn't really want guildmage, gelectrode, or crackle around because they're all slow control cards and he's a fast aggro card. He's got synergy with the grease of the deck - the instants and sorceries - but not at all with the core of the deck.

Quote from Rubishod

Activated abilities contain a colon. They're generally written "[Cost]: [Effect]." Some keywords are activated abilities; they have colons in their reminder text.

The Oracle doesn't 'activate' anything, she just 'is'.

To the OP, you may want to think of what to do with all these high costing dead draws once the top of your library goes into your hand. I don't have much suggestion for this without changing your deck ... a lot. Just, sayin'.

Yeah, that is a problem for this deck, but the scroll racks help a lot, as can the brainstorms.

spiny starfish seems pretty mediocre, all it provides is regeneration. In general I'd say the safekeeper is more effective, and don't forget that top = protection. pop top, then pop skill borrower. And of course academy ruins can recur it indefinitely.

Tough call between avatar and minion, but I think I prefer minion BECAUSE it's so crappy (also the land thing). Avatar I'd be tempted to actually cast (if I had the mana base) whereas minion is purely skill borrower fodder). Anyway at pure creature removal, Shauku is better than either of them.

Aerostat I don't want because it would allow the deck to win in a different way - I want it to work in the toolbox way, not the timmy way.

shapesharer is cool, not super strong but funny, so it might be worth a shot. Sylvan library is definitely strong and is probably worth a go too...that or mirri's guile.

Quote from Stubborn Boy

Sorry if you took offense to the suggestions. I don't think it's about being hardcore competitive, but isn't posting a decklist so that others can help strengthen its idea? Your deck seems to be built largely around Gelectrode as the core, hence Crackleburr seems out of place.

It's not so much 'trying to make the deck competitive' as 'trying to make the best out of the deck'.

Anyway, thanks for posting, maybe someone else will take an interest in it. Maybe you could post your sister's vampires so it won't end up being massively one-sided.

I don't mind the suggestions (of course I reserve the right to disagree with whether they belong in the deck, this isn't a GMaD), nor do I really mind attempts to make it more competitive (and all of your suggestions were constructive, btw). To some extent, the goal of most of my casual decks is to try to make a stupid premise as competitive as possible - the part that's harder to express, or for suggestions to take into account, is how closely I want to stick to the premise, and what the premise is. So I'm sorry if it sounded like I was getting annoyed at suggestions, those are all fine, I probably didn't do a great job of expressing the premise of the deck very well, which makes it harder to find suggestions that fit inside it.

The goal was to make the deck equally-ish around the 3 cool creatures, but gelectrode and guildmage both like instants and sorceries, and most of the other cheap RU creatures are pretty lame, so 16 RU creatures is probably as much as crackle is going to get. Still, he's got fun synergy with the pingers since he can untap them so it's not totally unsynergistic.



Anyway, what actually annoys me isn't being told how to improve the deck, but being told that I don't know how to build a deck. I know quite well that this deck isn't competitive against tier 2 legacy decks, it was never supposed to be. This is a casual deck. If the assumption in a casual forum is that I'm building a deck for budget legacy, then I'm wondering who decided that good deck builders couldn't build silly, funny decks when it's for CASUAL.

Skill Borrower always struck me as a cool card - you can get all of the sweet abilities with none of the downsides (including, obviously, cost) of some of the biggest, stupidest creatures in the game. Sure, Infernal Denizen is a massive pile of crap, but he looks a lot better when he costs 3 and doesn't do all that annoying swamp nonsense.




DISCLAIMER: since apparently there was some misunderstanding about my last deck, let me be clear: this isn't intended to be at all competitive, or win on turn 3, or anything else that most people would find really annoying in a casual environment. I realize the deck would be much stronger with 4x kiki-jiki to go infinite combo, but that's a boring way to use a cool card (and, ultimately, still way less consistent then other kiki combos), so I'm not using it. The goal is to win by manipulating the top of your deck to use skill borrower as a crazy sort of toolbox, not to win the same way every time.

That said, anything that helps the deck grease the wheels better (in terms of draw, mana, topdeck control, tutor) is absolutely up for suggestion, I threw this together pretty quickly. Also, better activated ability creatures are totally up for suggestion, obviously my list isn't super well optimized, I just picked some of the beasties with the splashiest abilities.

I admit I'm hard to give suggestions to, I usually do a pretty thorough job of card searching before posting a deck anywhere so usually 90% of the cards people suggest are cards I already considered. In this particular case the number is a bit lower because I was mostly building it on my decked app instead of using magiccards.info, and the search options are a lot more restrictive. So a few good ones (scepter and collar, for example) made it by my search filters.

That said, I haven't added or removed anything from the list yet because I have yet to actually play this deck (bought it on Sunday from strike zone so it's still in the mail), so although cerulean wisps may well be a bad card for the deck, considering it could easily be dishing out a split lightning bolt with a cantrip for 1 mana (and can often be used as just a throw away spell targeting an opponents creature on T1 if you need to dig for gas), I think it's at least worth a shot. Once I've been able to actually playtest the deck and get a feel for it, I'll have a better idea of where I need to add more slots, what to remove, etc. And it may well be that the deck does feel weak in the endgame and that adding a fast finisher would improve it, and maybe kiln fiend will get added. But until I've playtested it and decided where I want it to go, it's hard to know, so I'm going to tend to go with my original vision until I get to try it out (also, obviously, adding any more cards would just delay me getting the deck completed and make it take longer to playtest).

So, in short, I apologize for being a bit unyielding in my deck modification at the moment, but your suggestions are being tucked away for later, after initial playtesting. I probably won't add cards like kiln fiend that radically change the nature of the deck, but if it turns out to be unfun to play, then maybe.

Also, kiln fiend does intrigue me, but I think he needs a deck all his own. gelectrode, guildmage, and crackle would just slow him down. Could be modern competitive, who knows. I could use a decent modern deck.




All that said, I'm kind of shocked that you would assume anything about the play environment for a deck posted in the casual forum. I made this deck because I thought it would be fun, which, since there aren't any prizes on the line for the competition, is sort of the point. Casual magic is the one place that all the cool, weird cards (like crackleburr) can actually be used, so I'm very depressed at the mere concept of setting a defined power level for something as undefined as casual. If you want to play a format with a power level restrictive enough that most cards are unplayable, then imo you should play real legacy or standard, and leave casual to be the format where anything is possible.

I've got a competitive legacy and standard deck and I play drafts at least once a week, so I enjoy competition as much as the next guy. But when you're just playing to have a laugh and make silly stuff happen, I think it's a damn shame that you'd want to ruin that fun with a deck that can win on turn 3. Seriously, shame on you.

/rant.

i disagree about not having a wincon. gelectrode can easily be pinging for at least 3 damage a turn, and crackleburr a lot more, and guildmage can just beat for 2, with a copied lightning bolt finisher. Are these fast wincons? Well no, not really, that's why it's a control deck and not an aggro deck. There aren't a lot of combos or fatties that can survive the sorts of pinging damage this deck can throw around, but if they are, it's probably because they built their deck for a more competitive environment. I built this deck solidly on a foundation of S&G.

I'm not really sure why, but there seems to be some implied assumption around this subforum that everyone going to be playing against legacy competitive decks or something that are planning to combo out with double FoW backup on turn 3. That's not at all the intention of this deck. This deck is designed to play against random people I meet in stores to have a bit of a laugh before drafts and what have you. If someone's got a turn 5 combo that can withstand my counters/burn/bounce, then good for them, but I wouldn't call that casual, and then I'd pull out my own legacy deck. This deck isn't aiming for a win any sooner than turn 10, and with the board control critters like crackleburr offer me, that's just fine.

does the deck fold to *** or cursed totem? Well, maybe, if I don't have a counterspell, also who the hell plays cursed totem? hell, volcanic fallout is probably worse. But I'm not trying to build a tank here, I'm trying to build a rickety go-kart that will be awesome when it works and go down down in a pile of flames when it doesn't, and either way is basically fine because it's goddamn casual and there's nothing on the line. frankly this deck is already probably going to be massively OP against my sister and her friends and their jank vampire decks that they use for casual.

I'm not trying to optimize this deck to perfection while selling out the theme.



I'll consider cutting wisps but I'm going to try it out first.

Quote from Michealmas

Or maybe it just has nice synergy with the rest of the deck. There is a reason a lot of people suggest the same cards, Kiln Fiend is proven in competitive play and offers to your deck something that it needs. A cheap, reliable damage aspect, that synergises great with the rest of the build and will feed into your main wincon.
You don't have to sacrifice control if you don't want to, but if your deck is lacking in a certain area and multiple people agree on a card to bring it up to par. Chances are they have all noticed the same flaw with the same simple solution.

For the record I rarely play my Kiln Fiend deck as it is not so effective in multiplayer games which make up the bulk of my meta.

please don't ignore my reasoning. this is a control deck, packed full of instants because I want to be able to cast them eot, which kiln fiend doesn't jive with. my control deck is lacking in aggro creatures because it's just not aggro. This is the casual subforum - my goal here isn't to make a competitive deck, here, I just want to exploit some of the cooler RU cards, and crackleburr is one of my favorites. So, as I said before, if the deck doesn't work well with him, then the deck will change to fit his needs, not the other way around. A kiln fiend deck is probably stronger than this deck is, but if I were building a kiln fiend deck, i'd make it modern legal, toss out the slow gelectrodes and guildmages, and go all-in with cheap instants and sorceries to try to make it competitive. Which I might do for a modern deck. But this deck isn't intended to be competitive, it's intended to be fun. If it can be improved while sticking with my core creatures, then I'd be happy to do so, but I won't make it something it's not.

tldr: kiln fiend is a strong card, but he doesn't not fit the theme of the deck, and anyone suggesting him is correct that he is a good card, but wrong about him fitting this deck's theme.

and since you brought it up, I do intend to use this for multiplayer.



I don't really like sigil too much since it's easy to get 2-for-1ed, but basilisk collar is probably worth a try. To some degree I'm kind of guessing that once the pinging starts, most things will die with or without deathtouch, but if I feel like the deck is lacking power I can add it in. It does fit fairly nicely into my curve.

Isochron is a good idea and does fit into the deck's theme, I'd have to think of something to cut, though. And maybe kick up the counterspell count a bit? hmm.

Quote from Michealmas

I agree with the other guy; Kiln Fiend+Flamekin Harbinger is too good to pass up

I'm sure that has nothing to do with the fact that you have your own kiln fiend deck I know how it goes, you've got a favorite deck and it looks like everyone wants the exact same thing. But I'm not generally an aggro player, and the idea of casting my brainstorm on my own turn makes me shudder.

kiln fiend has synergy with the instants and sorceries in the deck, but they aren't really the focus of the deck, they're mostly just there to make gelectrode and guildmage work, and grease the wheels for a later-game crackleburr. It also means you're casting those spells at inopportune times, and makes the counterspells pretty worthless. This is more of a control deck, it wants to cast its instants at eot and keep protection/threats up at all times. Kiln fiend is a fine card for a similar-looking aggro deck, but he's not really at home in a control deck.

I really don't want to cut crackleburr. He's one of the 3 favorite critters I built the deck around, so if anything, the deck would have to change to work around him, rather than removing him. Although of course I can't make it 60% creatures since that makes guildmage and gelectrode less useful.

that said, barring significant removal, he seems ok to me. Yes, the creature count isn't high, but there's no reason to need more than 2 other creatures on the field with him. 16/60 means that by turn 3 you've hit 2.66 creatures simply by topdecking, but with brainstorm, looting, and wisps all digging for you, you're likely to have seen more like 15 cards by the time crackleburr hits the field, for an average of 4 critters.

I don't really like dragonauts much simply because the deck is already pretty heavy on the 3-mana slot (of course, getting rid of crackleburr frees it up), but also because the deck is really a control deck at heart, whereas dragonauts (and kiln field) are more aggro cards. Don't get me wrong - they do synergize decently with gelectrode to blast things out of the way and swing for the fences - but I think I prefer going with crackleburr for the added reach instead of beaters for a more aggressive build.

Cerulean wisps might be subpar, i haven't gotten to try it out yet (in the mail atm) but it totally fits the gameplan. untaps gelectrode twice or hunter once, can be copied with guildmage, and cantrips. late-game it could very easily get me 2-3 cards and 4 damage spread around. I at least owe it a playtest.

faithless looting is partly in there for the dig, I also like that it adds another decision to your gameplay that preordain doesn't - do you play those lands asap to feed mana-hungry crackleburr, or save them to pitch to the looting so you can get more gas for gelectrodes and guildmages? It's a card quality spell that can turn the useless stuff in your hand into useful CA from your deck. It also triggers gelectrode twice with the flashback, and, for what it's worth, it's modern legal. Obviously preordain is a great cheap dig spell, but my preference, if for no other reason than because it's harder to play, is looting.

Burst lightning is fine, just not super exciting. copying a kicked spell at 5 mana seems a bit idealistic, though.