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BMoor's Magic The Gathering Deck Garage
Jordan Kronick's Urza's Guilt Deck
January 24, 2007

One of the best things about being a writer for Pojo is all the feedback you get about your articles.  I admit I don't get a whole lot of feedback besides more decklists, but the other writers on the site probably do.  Today, in an example of feedback turning Parallectric (or something) I'm getting a decklist based off one of Jordan Kronick's articles. 
I read Jordan Kronick's Urza's Guilt Deck and decided to make a similar deck of my own. Here is what my deck is composed of:

Land

10x Swamp

10x Island

Creatures
4x Fog Bank
4x Wall of Tears
4x Will-O'-The-Wisp
4x Hypnotic Specter
4x Cephalid Broker
4x Lore Broker

Spells
4x Megrim
4x Urza's Guilt
4x Recoil
4x Duress

In Jordan's article, it appears that the Abyssal Nocturnus is his main offense with just a couple of Urza's Guilt thrown in to finish the game. He mentions that the problem with most Megrim/Urza's Guilt deck is that it lacks defense but it his deck still seems to lack defense.

I threw out Abyssal Nocturns entirely and decided to make this deck a little more defensive minded. So, I put in Fog Bank, Wall of Tears, and Will-O'-the-Wisp to control the pace of the game.

How competitive is this deck in your opinion, and am I just throwing in too many walls?
How competitive is this deck?  Fairly so I'd say.  Are you using too many walls?  Yes.
 
Let me address the second question first.  Will-o'-the-Wisp I actually like a great deal-- it's very cheap to cast, and with regeneration it's very hard to kill.  It can hold off just about anything as long as you keep a Swamp open.  However, 12 walls is too many for any deck that doesn't use Rolling Stones or Wakestone Gargoyle.  Drop Wall of Tears and Fog Bank.  I am, however, going to give you some other walls to put in their place: Drift of Phantasms.  Why Drift?  Because they have Transmute, allowing you to search your deck for a 3-mana card.  And since some of your most powerful spells--Megrim, Hypnotic Specter, and Recoil--are all legal targets for Drift to search for, then I assume you'll want to Transmute more often then you'll want to play the 0/5.  So, in go 4 Drift of Phantasms.
 
That leaves 4 more empty slots.  What can you put in there?  Well, I personally like the idea of 4 Blizzard Specter.  You've already seen how good Hypnotic is in there, so Blizzard would be great too for keeping opponents' creatures off the board and repeated discard.
 
That covers your creatures.  How do your spells look?  Quite good, actually.  Recoil and Duress are probably better at what they do by a wide margin than any other card in the game.  Megrim of course makes a perfect kill card with all the discarding you'll be forcing, and Urza's Guilt is the kill card.  To be honest, I'm not sure if there's anything that would be better here than what you already have.  But there are so many cards it's tempting to add in.  Cards like The Rack, Underworld Dreams, the Hondens of Night's Reach and Seeing Winds, Seizan, Perverter of Truth, the list goes on.  But it is our job as deckbuilders to not go chasing every errant fantasy and find some common objective, and you've certainly found it.  I have a lot of hope for this deck.  Go out there and prove me right.
 
~BMoor


 

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