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BMoor's Magic The
Gathering
Deck Garage
Welcome to
Part One of Six, of the Five Colors, Six Choices
Contest conclusion! Entries are closed, and it’s time to
declare the winners! Alphabetically is as good an order as
any to do this, and so today we’ll be looking at the entries
for Child of Alara.
This will
also establish the format I’ll use for the other five
articles. First, I’ll present each entry along with its
author’s commentary. Next, I’ll measure them up against each
other using some common criteria—the same ones I’ll use for
all the submissions. A winner will emerge and be applauded,
and losers will be thanked for participating.
Then
finally, in the spirit of “I’m not asking you to do anything
I wouldn’t do myself”, I’ll build a sample deck of my own
that uses the card in question. Let’s get started! Our first entry comes from someone who didn’t give a name, but Yahoo! Identifies as “James”.
Hey BMoor,
I've never actually built a deck myself, but hearing your
renewed call for submissions based on the five-color cards
from Conflux I decided to throw in my lot. I always read
your articles for free so I figure this is the least I can
do. Here is my Child of Alara deck.
Our second entry has neither a name nor a Yahoo! Tag (I wish you folks would identify yourselves!), so we’ll call him T.J.K, derived from his E-mail address.
I was bored
today, so I put together this deck. It's an effort at
breaking the symmetry of the Child of Alara. The idea is
that, between Cauldron of Souls and Heartmender, you will be
able to shrug off the destruction of the Child with little
or no penalty. Admittedly, the Cauldron itself gets
destroyed by the Child, but if you're returning the Child of
Alara you shouldn't need much more help. Knight of New Alara
turns the Child into an 11/11 trampler, which can win all by
itself, and Meddling Mage is an early drop that can shut
down combos. After that, I just added the best kill spells I
could think of: Pernicious Deed and
Maelstrom
Pulse. I though of the Overbeing for card draw, and Wargate
to find an important spell, but I'm not sure how well either
would actually play.
And finally, we have Jason’s entry.
Without further ado, the deck i came up with.
Alara's Playpen
Land x25
4x Rupture
Spire 3x Seaside Citadel 1x Arcane Sanctum 3x Jungle Shrine 1x Crumbling Necropolis 1x Savage Lands 3x Forest 3x Swamp 2x Plains 2x Mountains 2x Island
Creatures x16 4x Vedalken Heretic 4x Dauntless Escort 4x Scarland Thrinax 4x Child of Alara
Other Spells x19 4x Trace of Abundance 3x Exploding Borders 4x Behemoth Sledge 4x Reborn Hope
4x Soul
Manipulation This deck, in case you couldn't tell from the subject line and the blunt allusion to children in the title, not to mention in the deck list, is about Child of Alara. The goal here is simple. beat face with the Child. stick him/her/it with a Behemoth Sledge and go to town. Vedalken Heretic is just there to draw cards. Dauntless Escort is there to protect the rest of my creatures from destruction (WoG, Volcanic Fallout, Child of Alara...) including my own Child of Alara. See the board wipe combo?
And i can use reborn hope/soul manipulation to do it again, not to mention Reborn Hope can grab back my Exploding Borders/Trace of Abundance for more mana fixing. Soul Manipulation stops nasty creatures such as Progenitis from coming in uninvited. So, 6/6 trampler carying behemoth sledge + repeatable board sweep combo should do nicely for kitchen table. For duels, it functions much like a mana ramp deck. You use Trace of Abundance + Exploding Borders to ensure you can drop your 6/6 WoG on legs on turn 4 or 5, swing, pop it with a Thrinax, follow up with a heretic or two and a couple sledges to stabilize/get ahead, then start the Escort/Thrinax/Child combo, swinging all the way.
Okay, so there are our contenders. Let’s get to the criteria.
1: How does
each deck win? Oddly enough, all three decks submitted seem to focus more on sacrificing the Child then on attacking with it, which just gives me Children of Korlis flashbacks about “child sacrifice” jokes. Is there a correlation between Magic: the Gathering and infanticide? The same people who pushed the Demon type out of Magic for six years would like to think so. But let’s move on.
James’s
deck seems to be a w/g midrange decks that uses Kitchen
Finks, Hierarch, and Escort to hold the line until the Child
makes its appearance, then sacrifice it to Ghost Council,
Miren, or what-have-you to wipe the board while keeping his
own board relatively intact via Saffi, Escort, or persisting
Finks. The major selling point over the other two here is
that James appears to have kept his mana base down to
focusing mainly on white and green, so that he can cast the
majority of his spells more easily. T.J.K takes a more comboish route, using Captain Sisay or Wargate to assemble his combo of Child, Cauldron of Souls, and Heartmender in order to pull off a one-sided Planar Cleansing, after which he proceeds with Child beats augmented by Knight of New Alara. The best thing about his deck seems to be his inclusion of ways to search his library for combo pieces. Finally, Jason’s deck is geared around sacrificing the Child to Scarland Thrinax, then popping an Escort to protect the rest of the team while wiping out the opponent’s board. At which point, Reborn Hope or Soul Manipulation will return the Child to his hand to be replayed.
2: What
flaws does each idea present?
The biggest
problem that strikes me with James’s deck is that he seems
to want to use Loxodon Hierarch to regenerate his team from
a Child tantrum, but the Child specifies “they can’t be
regenerated”. I also don’t get why he would use the Helm of
Kaldra when Shield of Kaldra seems to make so much more
sense. T.J.K. is relying so heavily on Ravnica’s shocklands and City of Brass to play out his technicolor spell base that I’m afraid he might take so much damage from his own lands, a fast opponent could kill him before he ever gets anything rolling.
3: You
never draw Child of Alara. Now what? James would be fine, he could just play like a typical W/G deck. In fact, you could almost argue that his deck would run better if he were playing Wilt-Leaf Liege instead of the Child. But then you never get the one-sided board wipe, so I won’t quite hold it against him. T.J.K. has way too many ways to tutor for a Child to ever worry about this. But worst case scenario, he has Heartmender to chump block forever, Cauldron of Souls to keep his army alive, and Overbeing of Myth beats.
Well, Jason’s deck just feels like it doesn’t have enough teeth to it. He seems so focused on ways to protect his team from the Child’s board wipe and return the Child from the graveyard, that he hasn’t really included anything worth protecting.
Now, for my turn. I mentioned earlier that I was surprised that everyone was so focused on cheating the “destroy all” effect. Think about it—people have been playing Wrath of God since it was printed in Alpha. They never felt the need to try and pull off a combo to protect their own cards so that the Wrath only hits the opponent. They just learn to play around it. Don’t play as many creatures. Bait out your opponent. Well, why not use the Child the same way?
4
Blightning 4 Countersquall 4 Soul Manipulation 3 Bituminous Blast 3 Deny Reality 3 Terminate 2 Double Negative 4 Child of Alara 3 Sedraxis Specter 4 Grixis Charm 4 Kaleidostone 4 Teramorphic Expanse 4 Crumbling Necropolis 1 Forest 1 Plains 4 Swamp 4 Island 4 Mountain
This is essentially a Grixis control deck that uses Child of Alara as a finisher/board reset. Use your disruption to stagger your opponent until you can stick a Child, which your opponent won’t want to kill because it’ll completely erase what he’s got, while you’ve got nothing at risk beyond Sedraxis Specters. And they have Unearth, so you don’t care anyway. Five colors, six cards, and one division down. Next time: Conflux!
~BMoor
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