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Main » Articles » Five Decks You Can't Miss This Week

Five Decks You Can't Miss This Week

Carlos Gutierrez
Posted on March 16, 2013
 Reddit

Welcome back! We've had some time to play with Gatecrash; time to find out what the big players are and how the metagame plays out. What comes next is the best part; once people know what the metagame looks like, they can build sweet decks that come from new and unexpected angles to steal games and tournaments. This week we've got five sweet decks to take a look at, so let's get started!

Let's start with a Standard deck from Chris Lansdell (@Lansdellicious) which will be featured on ManaDeprived.com this coming week. His favorite card from the new set is Immortal Servitude and he's been trying day and night to break the card. Here's where he's ended up:

[Cardlist Title=Immortal Servitude Combo - Standard | Chris Lansdell]

I'll let Chris take over from here, here's his rundown on how the deck operates:

This Immortal Servitude deck takes advantage of sacrifice abilities with the well-known powerful drain ability of Blood Artist. Conveniently, Blood Artist and Bloodthrone Vampire both cost 2 mana. Also at 2 mana, we have a creature to ramp us (Dawntreader Elk), one to draw us cards (Elvish Visionary), two to fill the graveyard (Lotleth Troll and Pack Rat) and even a couple of Undying creatures to extend our reach.

Our gameplan is to get to 5 mana, fill our graveyard with 2-mana creatures (including at least one sacrifice outlet and one Blood Artist), cast Immortal Servitude with X=2 and win the game. Often you will be able to re-sacrifice your entire board to drain them down to 0, but you can always swing with your now-giant Bloodthron Vampire. Providing it didn't just come back into play, of course.

The deck is capable of doing early damage as just a GB Zombie beatdown deck, but it can also chump block against the faster aggro decks if necessary until it is able to win.

You can even go the Return to Ravnica limited route and win off a turn 2 Pack Rat. It's very satisfying to do that in constructed, I assure you. Don't forget that sacrificing makes your Bloodthrone very large, which has saved me on defence more than once by blocking giant Craterhoof Behemoths. Nothing says you HAVE to go for the win right after you cast Servitude, and sometimes it makes sense to wait for another Blood Artist. Also make sure you use your Alchemy carefully, and remember that it flashes back. You never WANT to hit seven mana, but sometimes you just do...

This deck is a blast to play and takes people by surprise quite often. Winning out of nowhere is a great feeling!

What about Modern? What's happening in that format now that we're nearing the end of the PTQ season? Surely something awesome has happened, right? I certainly think so. In the last few weeks we've seen a rise of Gifts Ungiven, either in decks built around the card or as a small package that just wins games sometimes. Let's take a look at Michael Hetrick's (@theshipitholla) take on the deck that he played in a set of videos for ChannelFireball.com.

[Cardlist Title=U/R/W Gifts - Modern | PauloCabral_Br, 4-0 Standard Daily Event]

In some ways, this is nothing new. People have been splashing black in their UWR decks for a Gifts Ungiven/Unburial Rites package almost since the beginning of Modern as a format. However, there are a handful of unique pieces about this deck that make it more exciting. I don't want to go in depth too much, since Michael Hetrick does an incredible job of explaining the deck in his videos, but let's review what makes this unique.

First, Cavern of Souls is a big deal. This lets you win Snapcaster Mage battles, resolve Vendilion Clique and Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir in control mirrors, or just jam your Godo, Bandit Warlord through countermagic.

Speaking of Godo, let's talk about him for a second. Batterskull is insane in modern, and is frequently the card that wins drawn out midrange battles. If Batterskull is good on its own, how much better is it when it comes with a 3/3 Relentless Assault attached?

Last, and perhaps most importantly, he included artifact mana. This lets you cast Gifts Ungiven on turn three instead of four, which is often the difference in aggressive match ups. These cards have taken the place of the Geist of Saint Trafts that the UWR decks are frequently built around, and demonstrate a clear shift to the Gifts Ungiven plan.

The next deck we're going to take a look at is a new take on spell-based combo in Modern. Storm was a popular deck before the banning of Seething Song, but has seen a significant drop in play in the weeks following. This is the Pyromancer Ascension deck that kbr3 took to a 3-1 finish in a Modern Daily Event:

[Cardlist Title=Pyromancer Ascension - Modern | kbr3, 3-1 Modern Daily Event]

Is this the new Storm deck in Modern? This deck takes advantage of the fact that the metagame has shifted towards creature decks and Leyline of Sanctity rather than graveyard hate and countermagic. Once you resolve a Pyromancer Ascension, you can just kill all of their creatures or sit back and cantrip until you have an active ascension, and then it becomes pretty difficult to lose.

It's important to note that this deck is less of a combo deck and more of a UR control deck that burns its opponent out with Pyromancer Ascension. If this were a storm or combo-based deck, there would certainly be copies of cards like Manamorphose that better enable that sort of strategy.

Out of the sideboard, there are two awesome things that you can do. First, you have Blood Moon to crush the decks with greedy manabases. Since you're strait UR, Blood Moon does very little to your mana base, but just shuts off other decks. Second, you can board into the Splinter Twin combo once people board out all of their removal. This is something that Storm decks did to some success before the bannings, so there's no reason it shouldn't work here.

Let's head back to Standard for our fourth deck. Standard is all about powerful cards right now. The mana is good enough that you can play any combination of powerful spells almost regardless of their color commitments. Farseek does a lot of work in this format. Why then is Geralf's Messenger seeing so little play? Whenever Pillar of Flame becomes less popular, you'd think everyone would be trying to jam as many Geralf's Messengers as possible. That's exactly what bittermelons did in this Standard Daily Event.

[Cardlist Title=UB Zombies - Standard | bittermelons, 3-1 Standard Daily Event]

There are a few cool things going on here. First and foremost, you have the Bloodthrone Vampire/Gravecrawler engine. On its own, you can pretty easily one-shot opponents with a gigantic Bloodthrone Vampire. Throw a Blood Artist or Diregraf Captain into the mix and we barely have to bother with a combat step.

Let's also take a look at how good Duskmantle Seer is in this deck. You don't want too many copies, since you don't really want to flood out too much, but curving Geralf's Messenger into Duskmantle Seer puts your opponent under a ton of pressure.

Out of the sideboard you have access to all of the tools you could need to make sure you get to aggro your opponents out. You might have some trouble against other aggro decks or combo decks, but you can just make giant Zombies and kill them. Against the midrange decks, you have all the discard and countermagic you could need to keep them off of the spells that will stabilize them.

I wanted to continue taking a look at mono-colored decks this week, likely with a mono-black list since that's another color combination I haven't had a ton of success with. That plan didn't last through Monday. If you haven't taken a look at Jules Robins's article on Mishra, Artificer Prodigy, then you should take the time to do that. He managed to take a Commander that's largely considered unplayable and do something very unique, exciting, and powerful. Let's take a look:

[Cardlist Title=Fresh Perspective - Commander | Jules Robins]

  • Commander (0)

Jules does an awesome job of explaining what the deck is designed to do in his article, but I'll give you a quick rundown. There are two important things that Mishra does. He lets you tutor up a second copy of any artifact that you cast and he lets you shuffle your deck.

With regards to Mishra's first effect, Jules built his deck to maximize his ability to cast other players' artifacts, and made chose his artifact suite such that he was playing copies of some of the more powerful artifacts. This maximizes your chances of generating free cards off of Mishra, which is absolutely awesome and earns maximum style points.

Jules tries to maximize Mishra's second effect by adding cards that care about the top of his library. Being able to shuffle your deck at will is a powerful effect that should not be underestimated, particularly when you play cards like Scroll Rack. There's certainly plenty of room left for development of decks in this vein. Depending on the artifacts that your friends play, there's near infinite room for adding small interactions that won't work in other groups. That's part of what makes a deck like this so awesome. The way you build, play, and experience this kind of deck will be completely different depending on who else is playing.

TAGS articles, standard, constructed, current events, deck lists, legacy, commander, modern, carlos gutierrez, decks of the week

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