Showing posts with label dragons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dragons. Show all posts

Thursday, 16 August 2012

New deck!

So, it's been a while since I posted something! To tell the truth I've simply been a bit carried away with levelling a new goblin priest in World of Warcraft! Currently level 70 my hopes at having 85, and all professions maxed out for Mists of Pandaria!

Well enough of my priest! Last couple of weeks has been a bit of a slow one for magic as Chris' nan had been ill we had to do a lot of rescheduling. I have in the mean time got my hands on a Horde deck, which I must say is pretty nasty! Proved by our test run of playing against it! Deck ideas too haven't been too forthcoming for me. Chris had a butchers through some of my collection and suggested a sacrifice deck, which I'm currently working on!

What I have put together is a different deck, I was looking through my artifacts and multi-colours and I thought 'why not?' you can have a look at the deck list below. Bare in mind however it's built out of what I had available in approximately half hour! There's not a lot of land but plenty of mana producing artifacts!
I've tried to balance what I had, tell me what you think, play testing will have to wait til next magic night!

Full spectrum.

3 Island
3 Mountain
5 Forest
3 Plains
4 Swamp

18 lands


1 Perilous Myr
1 Autochthon Wurm
1 Valeron Outlander
2 Thundering Tanadon
1 Nacatl Outlander
2 Izzet Chronarch
1 Sylvok Replica
1 Gloryscale Viashino
2 Assault Zeppelid

12 creatures


2 Azorius Signet
3 Trace of Abundance
1 Leap of Flame
1 Mycosynth Wellspring
1 Sylvok Lifestaff
1 Ring of Evos Isle
1 Executioner's Capsule
1 Blinkmoth Urn
2 Obelisk of Esper
1 Vessel of Endless Rest
1 Trepanation Blade
2 Sangrite Backlash
1 Golem's Heart
1 Pain Magnification
1 Vengeful Rebirth
2 Slave of Bolas
2 Simic Signet
4 Obelisk of Grixis
2 Obelisk of Jund

30 other spells

As you can see its a work in progress, anyone have any ideas?

Well that's it for now I guess, and I'll post an update for my sacrifice deck at some point!

Thursday, 19 July 2012

Horde Rules!

So during my trawling through the Internet I came across a multiplayer magic format called 'Horde'. It's a format that essentially pits up to four players against a 100 card horde deck. This format is something that I can't wait to try! So I think I'll pose it to my group as a format we should try, in the meantime i'll build a deck or two for the format!

In Brief:

Horde Magic is a multiplayer variant where all players work together as "Survivors" to defeat an opposing "Horde" deck.

Rules Rundown:

There's a lot going on in Horde Magic. We'll break it down into Game Play, Player, and Horde rules.

Game Play Rules:

The objective is for the allied team to survive, and eliminate, the Horde. Survivors win when the Horde deck has no cards remaining in its library, no cards in hand, and controls no creatures.

If the Survivors deal damage to the Horde, that number of cards are put from the top of the Horde's deck into its graveyard.

Player Rules:

Up to four players total, and each player brings his or her own deck.
All players share their turns, a la Two-Headed Giant, and contribute 20 life to the starting total (one player is 20, four players is 80).
The Survivors takes the first three turns, then alternate with the Horde.

Horde Rules:

The Horde is a hundred-card deck. (Take away a random twenty-five cards for each Survivor less than four on the team; three players face seventy-five cards, two players face fifty.)

The Horde is both token cards as well as regular Magic cards; the standard is fifty-five 2/2 Zombie tokens, five 5/5 Zombie Giant tokens (from Zendikar), and forty assorted Zombies and other spells.

The Horde's turns start by revealing the top card of the library. If it's a creature token, it is set aside. This process repeats until a nontoken spell is revealed. Then, all of the creature tokens are cast (as a Zombie creature spell that costs ). Finally, the revealed spell is cast.

The Horde will only cast spells once per turn, at the start of the turn. (Anything that is returned to the Horde's hand remains there until the next turn, when it is then cast after the revealed spell for that turn.)

The horde deck has any amount of mana needed and will always pay additional costs required (such as from Sphere of Resistance; Propaganda; and Kazuul, Tyrant of the Cliffs).

All creatures the Horde controls have haste and must attack each turn if able.
If there is a choice presented for the Horde, such as when a Survivor casts Fact or Fiction, the choice is made randomly.

Tokens put into the graveyard, returned to the Horde's hand, or exiled, disappear from the game as per normal token rules.

Looking over the rules it'd be easy to adjust to make a game that pits you against a horde that is not necessarily a zombie horde, perhaps a siege style gameplay would be interesting!

Perhaps I'll go away and work out the details!

Wednesday, 11 July 2012

Dragon fail!

Well it's another week gone by and another magic night gone, this week I only won 2 games and to be honest it was sheer luck! I played my dragon deck repeatedly and repeatedly found myself respectively short on mana! Though seven mana would be sufficient in my other decks, it isn't in this deck! Most of my dragons are 6 or more mana, and I wasn't drawing my little 1/1 1cmc cards until late in each game, nor did I see Kuldotha Rebirth!
This needs addressing!

I think I will be looking at rethinking the deck and maybe splashing some mana ramping cards as the two main non land mana sources weren't viable during the games Infernal Plunge was useless as I didn't have a creature to sac and battle hymn was pointless spending 2 mana for only 1 in return!

So all in all Dragons needs more work!

On the other hand South of Heaven. My white and blue deck had me bring Chris to a standstill which led him to finally concede. However I would say that although I found the going tough this evening and competition from james was as consistent as ever, I have learnt more and more from them just where my decks flaws are! However even in the face of almost certain defeat South of Heaven really pulled through for me and at this time I'm still happy with the deck in general!

That's it for now! Happy reading!

Friday, 6 July 2012

There be Dragons down there...

So Wednesday this week saw the rise of one of my new decks, a mono red dragon based deck. I also used the opportunity to try out my green and white deck, my white and artifact deck and my red and green anti-curse /combo deck. Yes that's right anti-curse! One of the players in our group plays a particularly nasty deck filled with curses, so I built this deck to counteract his decks mechanics.

But on to the main event! The deck simply called dragons saw two victories out of three games, in the first game I was pretty much mana and creature screwed, the second game was a one on one against a black deck which lasted all but 7 turns. And the final one saw my utvara scalpers snatch a victory as sheoldred came into play on my opponents side of the field. All in all I was very happy with the way it worked after it had been shuffled properly!

The main purpose of the deck is to throw out a high powered dragon around turn 4/5 and create havoc for opposing players. Balefire Dragon is particually useful for this as it'll destroy all creatures a player has as long as it has dealt combat damage to that player. Assuming of course they don't have a 6/6 flyer/reach equiped creature with which to deal with it or indeed anything with 7 toughness or greater as it only deals out 6 damage to each creature.


















Another Dragon which comes in handy is Hellkite Charger. 6 mana to get out and 7 mana to use its ability which allows you to untap all creatures and gain a second combat phase, a nice game changer. The obvious draw back is the fact that it is expensive, but thats what Infernal Plunge and Battle Hymn are for, extra mana generation. But all isn't lost, there are some 4 cmc cards in the mix in the form of Whelps and some Goblins for fodder!



Meet the Utvara Scalper, providing a good base of continual damage dealing throughout the early turns, this is down to the fact it attacks if able every turn and has flying! What more can you possibly want. Oh, perhaps throwing a Fencer's Magemark onto the card to make it just that little bit more threatening! At least that's what I did!

Working through this deck during its construction stage, I was seriously concerned with the mana costings and didn't think I could make it work, however after the playtests I will definately be leaving it as is and throw it up against a larger multiplayer game to see how it holds out! Perhaps this time next week i'll be saying something different, but for now i'm pretty happy with the results.




Deck List:

Land:
20 x Mountain

Artifacts:
Obelisk of Jund x2
Dragon Claw x2

Creatures:
Ancient Hellkite x1
Archwing Dragon x1
Balefire Dragon x1
Flameblast Dragon x1
Hoard-Smelter Dragon x1
Hellkite Igniter x1
Hellkite Charger x1
Furnace Whelp x2
Volcanic Dragon x2
Goblin Fireslinger x2
Goblin Piker x1
Goblin Tunneler x1
Utvara Scalper x2
Grotag Seige-Runner x1

Spells:

Hostile Realm x2
Battle Hymn x4
Mana Geyser x1
Infernal Plunge x3
Thunderbolt x1
Fencer's Magemark x2
Fatal Attraction x2
Soul's Fire x1
Lust For War x1
Kuldotha Rebirth x1

Well, feel free to comment on the deck and any suggestions to strengthen it would be obviously welcome! I'm always open to suggestions, and look forward to anything that anyone may like to contribute, if you think its a rubbish deck please say so, but take the time to at least say why you think so.
That's it for now!