Alex Hockey's Deck Garage
11.15.02 The Allure of Slivers

Hello all!

After a weeks break during which I was recovering from the flu, I now return with another deck garage.

Firstly there is one thing to clear up from 2 weeks ago (in the article entitled GW enchantress). Basically, whenever I wrote Lithatog, I meant Thaumatog. Fortunately, my description of what the card did allow most people to figure out what card I meant. The only excuse I can give is that I had the flu. Thanks for all the people who pointed out my mistake though.

Anyway, onto the article. This week its slivers.

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Apparently, slivers are coming back in some new expansion. With
that
in mind, I decided to try and reassemble my old sliver deck. The list
is as
follows:
4- Metallic Sliver
3- Clot Sliver
3- Heart Sliver
4- Muscle Sliver
3- Talon Sliver
4- Winged Sliver
4- Crystalline Sliver
4- Spined Sliver
3- Victual Sliver
3- Sliver Queen
3- Aluren
2- Heartstone
5 of each basic land type except 6 forest

As I recall, it never really seemed to get in trouble mana- Wise and if
I got
Aluren out I could really mop up, putting out all but the queen in play
for
free. I have been thinking about getting rid of the queen and maybe
the
heartstone. But one problem with the deck is it is a little slow. I
have
thought about putting Rites of Spring in, or something, but I never
liked
discarding cards, and I wouldn't mind just being able to draw cards,
especially with Aluren out. Just thinking of ways to speed the deck
up.
I also thought of adding the lairs, to avoid possible mana
problems.

Thanks for your help,
Kip

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First off, I don’t know whether wizards said they were resurrecting slivers or that slivers were the kind of thing they would re-do. Either way, for the time being they live in extended so I’ll build an extended deck.

Kip’s deck is slow despite the fact that almost his entire deck is made up of 2 and 3 cc creatures with 26 land. This is probablt because he isn’t getting the right cards at the right time. Slivers are quite old now so for the benefit of people who are not that familiar here are my views on slivers.

Individually, they are overcosted weak creatures that only really start to kick ass when you get more than two on the table. This means you really don’t want your opponent to be able to kill your slivers as this will mean that the slivers you play in the future will all be weaker than they should be, ie you must be able to protect your slivers.

This means that the crystalline sliver is a must in the deck and we will keep all 4 copies. Muscle sliver is the only sliver to give cumulative benefits so we want 4 of these as well. Finally, winged sliver gives us much needed evasion so we want 4 copies of them as well.

Ideally, you want to be able to play 2 lands and a crystalline sliver all in your first 2 turns. This means we have to be sure that there aren’t even the slightest hint of mana problems in the deck – this means I am going to keep the deck to 3 (maybe 4) colours. This means that for the time being, the heart, clot, talon (because they’re kak), spined and sliver queen all go out.

Most extended sliver decks are counter sliver decks. This deck uses aluren though and I want to keep to this theme. This means sliver queen goes out for good as you can’t play her via aluren.

There is one sliver that will combo with aluren very well – hibernation sliver. This guy allows all your sliver to “blink” back to your hand. Usually this will mean expending mana to replay them, but not with aluren out. This will really give control players headaches as their wrath of gods won’t actually end up killing any of your creatures.

So far the deck looks like this:

4- Metallic Sliver
4- Muscle Sliver
4- Winged Sliver
4- Hibernation Sliver
4- Crystalline Sliver
X- Victual Sliver
4- Aluren

Some land

Note that I’ve upped the number of alurens to the maximum and put a variable X for the number of victual slivers. I’ve also temporarily removed the heartstones.

I’m going to put some talon slivers back in. Although they are poor in the traditional type of sliver deck (ie counter-sliver) in this deck they are essentially another body on the table. I’ll put 3 in to make sure that I’m unlikely to draw 2 of them opening hand.

The original deck had no instants or sorceries which could be a mistake. The reason many aggro decks end up being too slow is that they play all the cards out of their hand and then simply run out of cards to play. Seeing as we’ve made a commitment to blue we can use the mother of all (extended legal) card drawers – Fact or Fiction.

Just to round off the deck I’ll bung in 2 disenchant (feel free to use naturalize instead).

Last but not least we have the land. This week I’m just going to give some guidelines. I could give you a list of 7 or 8 different non basic lands that could work in this deck but I won’t. Instead here is my advice.

Use 24 land
At least 9 lands must produce blue mana.
At least 9 lands must produce white mana.
At least 14 lands must produce green mana.
Pain lands are Ok.
Don’t use lairs.
Remember to include black mana producers

Depending on your card pool these restrictions may be hard to meet so do the best you can. If you can meet these restrictions you probably won’t have any mana problems (fingers crossed).

Finally here’s the finished deck (without the land)

4- Metallic Sliver
4- Muscle Sliver
4- Winged Sliver
4- Hibernation Sliver
4- Crystalline Sliver
3- Victual Sliver
3- Talon Sliver
2- Disenchant
4- Fact or Fiction
4- Aluren

24- Land

I’ve tried to stay with the theme on this deck. If I had made the ideal modifications it would probably have ended up as a standard counter-sliver net deck. Where’s the fun in that?

See you next week!