Deckbuilder's Challenge XVI: Unusual Strategies

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"Arclight Phoenix" Package
4 Bladewing's Thrall
4 Woodland Changeling
4 Changeling Outcast

"Faithless Looting" Package
4 Cryptbreaker
4 Lazotep Reaver

"Thing in the Ice"
4 Lord of the Accursed

Additional Enchantment/Graveyard Synergy
4 Brain Maggot
4 Sinister Concoction
4 Commune with the Gods

Manabase
4 Tainted Wood
4 Hagra Mauling / Hagra Broodpit
6 Swamp
4 Woodland Cemetery
6 Forest

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Designing this deck was a real journey and a half - in more recent challenges, I've been leaving the original or previous incarnations for a deck I've made out of the writeup because they don't usually last long enough to be remarkable, but trying to figure how to convincingly mimic a strategy more associated with Color Pair A without straight up turning it into an entirely different existing strategy in Color Pair B proved to be fairly difficult. Like I mentioned in the first post I made there actually exists a lot of cards like Sunlance and Psionic Blast for a convincing Burn archetype, but I really wanted to try something different this time - when 2, maybe even 3 non-Red colors of Magic can replicate Burn as an archetype, it starts to feel too predictable.


I knew I wanted to try making a spellslinger deck, still, so I turned to trying to make a deck based around Myth Realized and Deeproot Champion with cards like Thing in the Ice and Mardu Pyromancer. Even if the deck's obvious problem of being unable to run Lingering Souls was put aside, there were several problems with this approach - the first being that Deeproot Champion generally flat out wasn't worth it in this deck. What ended up happening was that the deck would end up converging towards a Populate tokens style build which was very typically , or a more spell-slinger-y approach that tried to use Battle Screech but ended up tripping on itself because Acorn Harvest and Deeproot Champion are green creatures, and Myth Realized needs mana investment to be a creature every turn.



This led me to start thinking about what cards we were trying to replace in particular - as stated at the beginning, one possible route spellslinger decks go is to run and try to land a fast kill with Arclight Phoenix rushing you from the graveyard in one turn. We also want a way to throw Phoenix into the graveyard, such as Faithless Looting, which its known for both its cheapness and flexibility as both a discard outlet and card draw. Lastly, we want a way to mirror Thing in the Ice being used as a cheap creature that rewards playing a lot of spells that Phoenix would also want and is also capable of wiping the board. The rest could generally be summed as up as general removal/value that we only had to find broader equivalents for.

{Spoiler}So now that we've established the key elements of a Phoenix deck, we want to try and replicate these key elements with appropriate packages in our own deck. What sets us apart from Reanimator is that we're more interested in jamming a bunch of cheap spells that generally aren't as good at their own to quickly create a board state that favors us. To that end, we can break down our deck into the following packages:

"Arclight Phoenix" Package

The main reason we're playing this deck. Our goal is simple - to put 2-4 Bladewing's Thrall in the graveyard, and then play a Changeling spell like Changeling Outcast to bring them back and threaten a game winning turn out of nowhere. While we don't have haste, we also only have to cast one Dragon spell as opposed to three instant and sorcery spells, which works out for us as our Changelings can't cantrip into other cantrips like spells like Serum Visions tend to do. Our next goal is to figure out what kind of cheap spell would let us easily put Bladewing's Thrall in the graveyard.

"Faithless Looting" Package


Cryptbreaker is one of our best options here seeing as all of the cards we run for the Arclight Phoenix package all happen to be Zombies. It discards our Thralls early on, and lets us draw more of our useful cards as the game progresses, effectively mimicking Faithless Looting's repeated draw/discard use to fuel the graveyard and the player's hand. To speed things along in the card draw area, we use Lazotep Reaver to ensure we can start drawing cards by turn 2 if we don't see an early Thrall + Changeling in our hand.

"Thing in the Ice"


This was a tricky replacement because at first it seemed like there was no real direct replacement for this role - part of the reason Thing in the Ice is a mainstay to spellslinger is because few other cards can be played for 2 mana and then suddenly flip into a soft boardwipe. Noxious Ghoul might seem like a direct mechanical replacement for example but because of the 5 mana cost, it probably comes down too slow to match with the intent of rest of the deck, which is trying to quickly put down several Thralls to close the game. Lord of the Accursed thus represents a more creature-based take on the idea - instead of mass-bouncing creatures, we are giving our Zombies menace to try and push through any potential boardlocks/flyers to close out the game, similar to how a Thing in the Ice usually tries to flip to get rid of a foe's oppressive creature boardstate when it's not on beatstick duty.

Additional Enchantment/Graveyard Synergy


After this point it was mostly just a matter of picking cards to reinforce the strategy of the deck in similar ways. After mulling over whether I wanted Gather the Pack or Commune with the Gods as Faithless Looting 4-8, I went with Commune with the Gods because we already use a lot of creatures (so Gather the Pack's spell mastery doesn't trigger very often) and because it lets us dig for removal in the form of Enchantments as well - in this case, I use Sinister Concoction because it gives us yet another opportunity to discard a Thrall and when we're not doing that it lets us technically hold up instant speed removal for 1 mana, which is something Oubliette can't do. In the event there are noncreature threats we can't deal with or outrace, we can instead go for a Brain Maggot.



Lastly, while not in any particular category, I included Hagra Mauling because I wanted to include some additional removal without risking the deck's manabase too much. While the curve of the deck is fairly low, we do want a black and green source coming down on turn 1 and turn 2 respectively so to maximize those odds and keep our options open, an MDFC seemed like a pretty safe bet.

For commentary on the lands used, check out "Budget Considerations"! The lands are fairly flexible here and you can upgrade/downgrade as you like to suit your preferences.

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Lands
Funnily enough, this deck is almost a true budget deck, being composed primarily of draft chaff/low power old border cards. I mostly put in Tainted Wood and Woodland Cemetery because it's really rare for me to get a chance to feature the tainted or checkland cycles in my builds. You could probably replace them with Forests/Swamps without much trouble as much of this deck runs on having just one Swamp and 1 land of any other kind in play.

1-USD Utility Cards
The 4x Hagra Mauling are flex slots that can be replaced with any combination of creatures/spells/lands that support the overall strategy - I was mainly interested in giving the deck more options to shoot down creatures because the extremely low curve means it's more likely to be able to support a 20-land land base, but didn't want to risk missing the 3rd land drop for Lord of the Accursed either. If you want to cut the price here I'd suggest Pelakka Predation or Zof Consumption.

You can replace Lord of the Accursed with Liliana's Devotee though be aware Liliana's Devotee not giving Menace really hurts this card's ability to play the Thing in the Ice role and your main win condition will be primarily trying to swing with Thralls.

Woodland Changeling is surprisingly expensive for what looks like a draft chaff common, falling within the 1 USD range. You can replace it with Universal Automaton.

Cryptbreaker

This is the hardest card to replace - we rely on it being our Faithless Looting equivalent as a card that can discard and draw cards that we can play on turn 1 and manipulate the graveyard with. That said, it's roughly 4 USD per copy. In this case I would add 4 Gather the Pack instead, so that the chance of you starting with a spell that can get Thralls into your graveyard is high. You could also consider Dark Tutelage and other Bob ripoffs but I think it's more important that we maximize the chances we are getting a Thrall in the graveyard.

The result is a list that costs around 8-9 USD and should still work fairly well:

4 Changeling Outcast
4 Universal Automaton
4 Bladewing's Thrall
4 Lazotep Reaver
4 Liliana's Devotee
4 Brain Maggot
4 Sinister Concoction
4 Commune with the Gods
4 Gather the Pack
4 Pelakka Predation / Pelakka Caverns
10 Forest
10 Swamp