Deckbuilders’ Challenge V: Future Playtest League

The Fiend, The Myth, The Legend:
4 Slag Fiend

Aggressive Artifacts:
4 Hope of Ghirapur
4 Signal Pest
4 Bomat Courier

Backup Plans:
4 Myr Servitor
4 Hollow One

Discard Spells:
4 Faithless Looting
4 Burning Inquiry
4 Goblin Lore

It's a Great Card:
4 Lightning Bolt

Land Base:
4 Darksteel Citadel
4 Great Furnace
12 Mountain

So as you might have guessed, the base inspiration for this deck is Slag Fiend, a Creature that costs and gets power and toughness are each equal to the number of artifact cards in all graveyards. Now, Magic is no stranger to cheap creatures that have large power/toughness values - Death's Shadow, Tarmogoyf, Kird Ape, Wild Nacatl, and Gurmag Angler come to mind. But all of those gets powered very easily off other great cards that involve simple things like damaging yourself and playing lands - both of which are covered by playing fetches, no less. So how do we turn Slag Fiend into a terrifying one-mana 5/5 play early on?


I started to get an idea for an answer when I noticed that one of the creatures in the challenge's pool was Bomat Courier, a creature that supports what Slag Fiend does in multiple ways - it aggressively attacks early on to pressure the opponents life total (and perhaps get itself killed), sacrifices itself to become a extra artifact in the graveyard, and lets you discard and refill your hand what ever it managed to find while attacking. The third part is especially important because sometimes we'll have a hand of artifacts like a Signal Pest or Hope of Ghirapur that could've been better in the early game as aggressive beaters but are better off in the graveyard right away to buff our Slag Fiends. As a bonus, both of them are highly evasive creatures with extra benefits - Signal Pest can buff attacking weenies in this deck to get in even more earlier beats, and Hope of Ghirapur can try to deal damage and sacrifice itself to protect your threats from getting wiped out too quickly.



Of course, Boumat Courier alone won't get the job done - we ideally want to dig through our deck very fast to buff up Slag Fiends as much as possible. To that end, we run a lot of discard! Many of our cards share the same role of being aggressive artifact creatures, so we don't mind if Burning Inquiry or Goblin Lore accidentally dump an aggressive threat or two so long as we're getting closer to closing out the game with 1 mana 4/4s.



In the event that we can't find or accidentally bin all of our Slag Fiends, we do have similar aggressive cards that can pick up the slack. If we dump a bunch of Myr Servitors and play one, we likely have spent 1 mana for a bunch of free 1/1s that can quickly turn into repeatably spawning 2/1s with a little help from a Signal Pest. Hollow One effecitvely doubles as our Slag Fiends 4-8 as they benefit off the same discard spells as Slag Fiend does in a very similar manner to slam 1 mana 4/4s onto the table - and the best part is, it's also an Artifact Creature, so if you discard it, it still buffs your Slag Fiend!



Darksteel Citadel and Great Furnance effectively function as lands that we can throw away for incidental free buffs when we no longer need to play lands. Since this deck runs mostly on 1 mana spells, you'll often find that beyond 2 or 3 mana you can start tossing these away with your discard spells to pump your Slag Fiends up or get other cards down faster!




Lightning Bolt is just a great all-around card that can be used to clear the way for massive swings to win. I admittedly considered cards like Magmatic Sinkhole and Lightning Axe, but the former just hurts Slag Fiend too much and the latter in testing was often not helpful enough - if we're playing a discard card, we want a lot more value than just a +1/+1 to Slag Fiend or a 2 mana discount to Hollow One. Sticking with Bolt gives us an option that can solidly hit most early game creatures and take out planeswalkers without worrying too much how to play around it.

And last but not least, Mountains are the real MVP, for letting this deck work.

This deck's strength should be fairly obvious - all of its threats are one mana beaters that can explosively win a game by turn 3 with some luck. If you can keep the path clear with a bolt or two, your opponents won't have much room to respond. On top of that, because of how Slag Fiend works, it doesn't care much for most boardwipes either - if anything, you should be pretty happy if your early Signal Pests, Hope of Ghirapurs, Myr Servitors, and Bomat Couriers die! They're eating up precious removal that won't hit your Slag Fiends later on, and possibly even put them out of a damageable range from enemy Bolts or 5-damage burn spells like Magmatic Sinkhole(s). You might think that Fatal Push is a concern, but that's exactly what the plan B of Hollow One is here to answer, by being a one mana or even zero mana creature with a CMC of five.

However, this deck really, and I mean really does go all in on the fact that it's using a ton of one mana beatsticks to try and win the game before the opponent can do anything. While Slag Fiends can stick it out into the long game, the lack of a source of Trample in the deck does mean they'll be victim to chump blocks in a situation where you've likely run out of Bolts. You should aim to close the game quickly with Signal Pest, Hope of Ghirapur, and Lightning Bolt hitting face before your opponent gets to build a bigger board state or assemble a larger gameplan. Having two or more discard spells on opening hands is almost mandatory to have an explosive start, which is why we're packing so many of them and so many discard payoffs.

To play Urabrask's Slagheap in Modern, simply replace the four Great Furnaces with Mountains and four Faithless Looting with the discard spell of your choice: Insolent Neonate, Merchant of the Vale, Carthatic Reunion, etc.... That said, be warned that this hurts the deck quite a bit - because Slag Fiend is so dependent on you hitting artifacts with your draw and discard spells ASAP, having less lands to throw away and less fast discard to immediately buff Slag Fiend will make the deck less explosive. In regards to the Furnaces, You could try 4x Mishra's Bauble instead if you're feeling lucky on going down to 16 lands - after all, most of the deck only runs on 1 mana. I'd also consider 1x Blood Moon to replace one of the Hopes simply because Blood Moon just randomly wins games in Moderns sometimes when you slam it at the table. Unfortunately, there isn't a true replacement for Looting, so you'll either have to take the hit in terns of how much you can loot (Insolent Neonate, Merchant of the Vale) or how quickly you can loot (Carthatic Reunion). If you're feeling bold, Ox of Agonas might not be a bad idea.

For playing on a budget, there's a number of changes you could make to both cheapen and customize it further - here's one such example build that tries to take advantage of its budget nature:

Urabrask's Slagheap - Budget Edition

Creatures
4 Clockwork Beetle
4 Bomat Courier
4 Signal Pest
4 Slag Fiend
4 Myr Servitor
4 Hollow One

Spells
4 Lightning Axe
4 Faithless Looting
4 Cathartic Reunion
4 Thrill of Possibility

Lands
4 Darksteel Citadel
16 Mountain

This deck, as of the time of this posting, clocks in at about $18-$19 (USD). That may change in the future but given the nature of most of these cards, I'm confident that price will stay roughly the same.

The most notable change in creatures is the replacement of Hope of Ghirapur with Clockwork Beetle. Clockwork Beetle, while not particularly great in a vacuum, does fulfill the role of an aggressive above-rate creature that gets itself killed to further power up Slag Fiend (bonus points for being a Mirran construct, no less). In more casual games where the removal is slower or more expensive, it getting in for a few hits and dying quickly after is probably still going to help your plan. Everything else stays in because it's either cheap enough or an important backup plan (Hollow One).

Going down to spells, we replace the more expensive Burning Inquiry and Goblin Lore with Cathartic Reunion and Thrill of Possibility. While they don't discard as well, they do have their own individual advantages, such as Carthatic Reunion getting you up one card and Thrill of Possibility's instant speed. Dangerous Wager does exist, but I find it inconvenient when you often want to try and keep a Hollow One or Slag Fiend in hand. Rift Bolt

Because we're discarding less overall and games will likely run a bit longer, Lightning Axe becomes a possible consideration as well. You can replace this with other budget bolt variants such as Rift Bolt if you feel it's not your style.

There are definitely more ways to customize the deck than what I've suggested here, but hopefully this will inspire someone to play around with the deck a bit!