Last week Trick and I were chatting and he mentioned that he had received an e-mail about a rebuttal article to my Spikey EDH list. I must confess I was excited. First, I've been itching to start a nice writer war with someone and I figured this was just the thing. Second, it means someone is in fact reading and cares enough to actually write a counterpoint article! I count both of those things as being positives, or at least indicating that I'm doing my job.

With those things in mind, I sat down to light up my competition. Then an odd thing happened, I read the rebuttal. What is this crazy talk?! Humility and politeness, are not at all what I expected. How am I supposed to fight with someone who is making cohesive points? Better to simply make some counterpoints I think.

I think that in a multiplayer game Vendillion Clique does not have the lasting power to finish 3 other players. There are simply too many spells that will kill a General, particularly one with a fragile body for the Clique to go 15+ turns. Also, though there are more answers in your deck I do not think that the number of counterspells will be able to take on the threats of multiple players. Even if there are enough counterspells to answer one for one I do not think there's enough mana to cast them all in the early turns. Unfortunately the later the game goes the worse of this becomes.

Taking those things into consideration I truly believe that the best option is to be fairly innocuous during the early game and then take infinite turns. Many players will be less likely to attack a player who has done nothing for the first several turns, in my experience. I think that no matter how competitive the deck there still needs to be some aspect of social contract that we can use to our advantage. Of course such a trick will only work a few times, players will adapt and realize that the deck is just too powerful to be left unchecked, but that is the nature of any format.

That being said, I also created a spike deck that might be tainted by my metagame. I know that the deck I created will clean up in our league where we base victory on points. A big part of the league is racking up different game instances and sort of checking boxes. If the only thing I do is kill my opponent while taking infinite turns then I probably lose the league, even if I win a table. It's a delicate balance of being able to accomplish things other than eliminate players that keeps spike decks in check to some extent. Up until now it has been fairly effective, but I might pass my deck on to someone to have them run the gambit during the next league night. If I can convince my friend to run the deck then I will have some details next week!

This week has mostly been about recovering from Amsterdam and some judge certifications and has not been the most productive of EDH weeks. Instead of sleeving up the hundred, I found some time on Saturday to sleeve up sixty cards and do battle with legacy Dredge. Dredge is a much trickier deck than I anticipated and each week I'm surprised by the subtlety of the interactions. For those curious I used a pretty much stock dredge list and ended up coming in second losing to Merfolk in the finals. I misplayed the second game by playing the wrong land turn two and then in game three I had my initial two dredge outlets countered and had to resort to discarding at eot to get dredge cards in the graveyard.

The real story here though, is a fun deck that we began working on for Legacy which just took on a life of its own. The concept behind the deck is of course a combo and even better, one that does things before your opponent would have a chance to respond. The deck runs 32 Leylines with Opalescence as the kill condition. From what I understand this deck has been floating around in various incarnations since Leylines were originally spoiled. I think that now could be the time for the deck to really take off. I put forth our list:

[cardlist]

4 Leyline of Lightning

4 Leyline of Punishment

4 Leyline of the Void

4 Leyline of Anticipation

4 Leyline of Lifeforce

4 Leyline of Vitality

4 Leyline of the Meek

4 Leyline of Sanctity

4 Enlightened Tutor

4 Opalescence

4 Land Grant

4 Crop Rotation

4 Serra’s Sanctum

4 Windswept Heath

4 Misty Rainforest

4 Savannah

[/cardlist]

Clearly the deck is a work in progress. We absolutely beat up on Zoo, Burn, and any strategy not strongly entrenched in Force of Will. There is certainly room for changes and we will be working on adapting and adding strategies this Friday, perhaps even a secondary win condition. I hope to post the updated list next week along with a sexy new EDH strategy based around one of my favorite cards of all time, Fork!

Until then this is Benjamin McDole giving you a hundred (and sometimes sixty!) reasons to play Magic.