Deckbuilders’ Challenge IV: The Best of the Worst

{Decklist}Finishers that Cost You an Arm and a Leg:
1 Tomb of Urami
1 Emberwilde Caliph
1 Chronatog Totemp
1 Soul Seizer
1 Scrambleverse

Removal - Kill it with Fire:
1 Coastal Wizard
1 Assassinate
1 Hurly-Burly
1 Zephyr Net
1 Feebleness
1 Goblin Test Pilot
1 Torment
1 Extinguish
1 Flamecast Wheel
1 Merseine
1 Cradle to Grave
1 Metamorphose
1 Chill to the Bone
1 Frazzle
1 Mindstatic
1 Steam Blast

Discount Discard Package
1 Burning Inquiry
1 Horrifying Revelation
1 Delirium Skeins
1 Fires of Undeath
1 Dark Withering
1 Fossil Find
1 Psychotic Haze


Card Advantage Station - When even Divination is on Vacation:
1 Divining Witch
1 Dredge
1 Flare
1 Spell Snip
1 Spark Jolt

Mana Base - Surprisingly Affordable
7 Swamp
8 Mountain
8 Island
1 Castle Sengir
1 Henge of Ramos
1 Brink of Disaster
1 School of the Unseen

{Deck Breakdown}So first off: taking a Spike-y mindset on this challenge was pretty heckin' hard! While there some useful cards in the cube that have gone on to see play in older competitive formats like Modern and Legacy like Burning Inquiry and Divining Witch, the cards that they normally lead into payoffs of such as Hollow One and Thassa's Oracle are completely nonexistent, which feels like the main problem with this cube - the payoffs are pretty terrible, even for draft! The moment you bring this to any other kitchen table environment (which is likely the best use case for these decks post challenge, in a "Spike" context), chances are it's going to be competing with decks that have at least something as coherent as your average mono Green stompy, which means muscling out with subpar weenies and below average P/T creatures was pretty much out of the question for me after a few early attempts. Black in general seemed like the best color, having lots of creature removal that wouldn't look too out of place in a normal draft or even a lower powered Standard, but again, the lack of finishers or a consistent strategy made it hard to consider something like a Mono Black Control deck.



Eventually, I started getting an idea of where I wanted to go when I looked at Scrambleverse. The idea I figured was "If our cards are so bad, why not just try stealing our opponent's?" In fact, since many of these cards are deliberately meant to be some of the worst Magic: The Gathering cards of all time, it really doesn't mean much in the event Scrambleverse fails to work in our favor! Chances are if we were already losing when we cast it, we aren't exactly giving our opponent much with an unreliable Goblin Electromancer or two. Our odds of having Scrambleverse work even more in our favor improve if we're a control deck that doesn't run many permanents, which goes pretty nicely with the fact a lot of the most useable cards in the cube are removal!

Of course, since we're working within the context of the cube, we can't run 4x Scrambleverse and call it a day - so instead, we run Soul Seizer as a smaller stealing effect in the hopes that we can steal a big ground finisher at the table one way or another. This card in general describes the rest of the deck pretty well - we're just trying our hardest to 1-for-1 our opponent with a lot of removal, and hopefully sneak out/steal a finisher that can do a lot of damage quickly to end the game before the opponent recovers from topdeck mode.



Our other finishers are pretty straightfoward - other than the fact they give massive drawbacks in order to deal a lot of damage, they're still the best clocks available to us in the cube to help us try and beat out the opponent once we've hopefully killed/countered all their other options. Something really important I found about Emberwilde Caliph in testing is that if it brings the opponent to 0 while you're on 4 life or less, you win before the ability trigger resolves on the stack and kills you, so you really just have to race with it ASAP and keep the life totals relatively equal with burn.

Oddly enough, Tomb of Urami and Chronatog Totem arguably have less strings attached in the context of this deck - with Tomb of Urami, I found that it was best in the lategame when everyone was flooded out and there was nothing left to play. You can just hold onto lands and drop Urami, doing a much safer rush to kill the oppponent (hopefully they haven't rebuilt with the next 4 cards they draw). Chronatog's drawback might seem daunting, but when you're capable of using instant speed removal and counterspells to blank opponent's turns, suddenly it's just another big 4/5 that can help you finish the opponent. (In general, you want to Chronatog as early as possible and rush the opponent if their board is full of smaller creatures - I've found the damage is usually worth it because you spend the later game trying to slowly get the opponent down to zero.)



Our removal comes from all walks of Magic's history and powerlevels, from Goblin Engineer and Steam Blast to try and take down waves of aggro weenies to Flamecast Wheel just being something we can do on turn 1 to Cradle to Grave and Zephyr Net being the closest things we can get to Doom Blade. We generally try and keep our removal broad so that we're prepared to handle anything, with 3-4 anti-weenie cards and a lot of 2-3 mana killspells that at least stop attacks if they don't kill creatures outright - we mostly care about getting to a win condition that is either a noncreature or can muscle its way through any smaller enchanted creatures, so as long as our life total stays high we don't mind if those creatures can still block - like most control decks, we only care about stabilizing early in the game (though our general gameplan of 'grinding the opponent out of cards' might look closer to a plan like 8rack or Jund). In fact, Metamorphose pulls double duty in this deck, being a card that is extremely good removal once we've reduced our opponent to a near empty hand with situational/uncastable cards and a way to bait out big creatures that can be stolen viable Scrambleverse or Soul Seizer.



A notable chunk of our removal and card advantage also comes from being able to do some discarding, which turns Dark Withering into a decent Fatal Push impression. There's enough removal in the form of Fires of Undeath and Psychotic Haze to try and justify our Madness 'Splash' so that Burning Inquiry is sometimes actually a one mana card 'draw' spell as opposed to just being a really bad filtering spell. We're also keeping excess lands in our hand in the event we draw Urami, making Delirium Skeins' ability to further chunk the opponent out of options look not so bad. Fossil Find ends up being akin to a bad Snapcaster Mage that tries to get back something useful, and since the majority of our deck is card draw or removal, chances are it will.



The remainder of our deck is just focused on digging through it as fast as possible to find better cards. Divining Witch's real goal in this deck is to ensure we get more lands (we have plenty of basics, so we can minimze the number of cards exiled) to recover from Urami, fix our mana, or just feed other discard spells in the event we don't have a graveyard payoff. Heck, our card draw options are so limited Dredge and Flare actually look good! We're really just trying to make this deck as consistent as possible, and any cheap card draw (or Scry, in the case of Spark Jolt) effectively serves the same role Opt would in other decks, to keep us drawing into actual value cards and to virtually thin our deck.




The land base isn't much to write home about (other than the fact we are a little land-heavy on purpose to prevent mana screw and get punished less by Urami), but hey, it is the first time I've used Castle Sengir in a deck. We mostly rely on our card draw and generally not-restrictive mana costs to get away with running a Grixis Control deck, but in a pinch, sometimes our mana-fixing lands can help us if we're flooded with the wrong land types.

{Spoiler}Despite having been built from the ashes of strict worseness, this deck does have its merits:

- First off, it is actually pretty cheap, falling within Lady Mapi's 20 dollar budget deck threshold at roughly 16.25 USD. If you really wanted to just play a casual control deck at the kitchen table vs. some friends, this deck will be able to manage it - I've tested it a few times and all that removal does do work.

- Playing with this deck will test your skills as a control player. Because many of the removal cards have conditions like "nonblack" or "nonsnow" or can only hit certain P/T to some effectiveness, you can spend a decent amount of thinking about what removal to use on what creature and which creatures you have to let go especailly if you have Scrambleverse in hand. Tomb of Urami and the various discard spells also all add an element of knowing when not to play extra lands just because you can, and resource management is key to squeaking out a win with this deck due to the creature-based finishers costing you land/life/turns to efficiently threaten to win the game.

- You get to play a bunch of cards like Goblin Test Pilot and Fossil Find that are actually quite interesting to deal with but you normally wouldn't consider at all due to the presence of much better cards.

Of course, in terms of performance, though, this deck has its limits:

- The flipside of the deck's sheer amount of resource management is that there will be instances where you don't have enough lands/turns/cards in hand/luck available to to execute what you need to do. As rough as it seems, that's the compromise the deck makes to squeeze as much out of its cards as possible. Sometimes that Fossil Find will just get you a Swamp you lost to Urami back or sometimes you'll realize your Chronatogged too early or too late for the damage you got in to be worth giving your opponent the turn. You do need a bit of practice with this deck to get the most use out of it possible.

- This is less a weakness and more a Spike-y consideration, but it's probably best to keep in mind this deck was built from a cube and is really best geared to try and win in casual play. It might be able to hold up against some of the weaker Standard decks as well or maybe even get a win vs a Pioneer deck with some luck, but don't go in expecting this to beat say, Modern Humans or Vintage Shops. After a certain point, you're honestly better off playing the appropriate variant of Esper or Grixis control in the format.

So this leads into the "use cases" aspect, aka what this deck is best going to handle. If you really want to maximize the amount of interesting gameplay and interactions with others, I'd suggest sticking to cheap kitchen table decks like those you'd find in the Budget Decks Thread. This deck does have a lot of decisions to make and does reward/punish you for good/bad assessments of the board state and I find the big "Spike"-esque appeal here tends to come from those repeated 1-for-1s and realizing you're going to really win the game with something like Emberwilde Caliph slowly knocking the opponent down while leaving you at death's door. It's a satisfying experience in the sense of you wrestling a bunch of difficult to coordinate cards together and making them capable of being the winning team at the table.

{Spoiler}Last but not least, for those of you who are interested in the idea but might not want to deal with a singleton experience or want something that can stand more evenly alongside your friends' Standard/Pioneer decks, I'm going to present some more competent variations on the deck that follow less of the contests's guidelines. While the 'uniqueness' of the deck does fall down a bit, I feel like it's in my best interest to talk about upgrades partially because I'd to show the user how this deck can be customized and partially to demonstrate how the restrictions of the challenge make you approach deckbuilding differently.

Scrambleverse Creature-Hating Edition:
3 Divining Witch
3 Dark Withering
3 Fossil Find
4 Steam Blast
13 Mountain
4 Spark Jolt
3 Fires of Undeath
3 Tomb of Urami
4 Cradle to Grave
3 Scrambleverse
4 Burning Inquiry
13 Swamp

If you want the core risky experience of the deck, this will fulfill your needs just fine without being that much more expensive (Burning Inquiry is the money card here, with 4 of them being about 7 USD, otherwise the deck is roughly 22 USD total). I felt that out of all the finishers used, Tomb of Urami is the one that is the least annoying to play around while still keeping the 'resource management' feel with managing lands as needed. Between that and multiple Scrambleverses, we pretty much eliminate the need to run blue finishers to begin with (Though we run 3 copies of each to minize the chances Burning Inquiry and Divining Witch bin all of them). We also eliminate the Blue removal aspect (most of the 'good' counterspells were 4 mana to begin with, and by good, I mean they made Cancel look like Crytpic Command) and replace it with more copies of cheap efficient Black/Red instant speed removal to better catch our opponents off guard. While this leaves you with more dead cards against fast combo/spellslinger type decks I think the better consistency and the reduced risk of being mana screwed is generally worth it, plus from my experience casual decks tend to favor creatures (especially since the more recent eras of Magic push them to be a part of every deck).

If we're talking throwing restrictions to the wind entirely, well, to be quite frank, you're probably best off looking up a budget Esper/Grixis control list or Izzet spellslinger list. The former caters better to the idea of resource management, boardwiping away any opposition and stabilizing to drop a big finisher creature, while the latter can use proper card advantage cards like Opt and proper burn like Wizard's Lightning to fulfill the roles that many cards like Flare 'mutlitask' at to make up for their general lower power.