Standard Mono-White Servos

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Happy Thursday MTG peeps,

Once more, we play our dangerous game, a game of Magic: the Gathering against our old adversary - The standard constructed metagame.  We will be heading to our local gaming store, OMG! Games, here in Barrie, Ontario with a new weapon sleeved up for tomorrow's Friday NIght Magic event.

If you've been reading MTG Realm for any length of time, then you may know that we do love the primal strategy of creatures turning sideways in the red zone.  Whether it is the achetype of white-weenies, or cheap tokens with a pump spells.  Today's post is the latter.  There is an opportunity here for the budget MTG gamer to get a 'foot in the door' as the expression goes for an opportunity to win some games at FNM with a decklist costing well under $100.

The Game Plan
Play a number of spells to create 1/1 colourless artifact Servos creatures and pump their base power / toughness.

21 Lands:
16 Plains
2 Westvale Abbey
3 Ruins of Oran-Rief

The mana-base is pretty straight forward - 16 Plains and 3 copies of Ruins of Oran-Rief to sneak an extra +1/+1 counter on (one) colourless creature which entered the battlefield that turn.  Two copies of Westvale Abbey is placed in the mix as we do expect to create a healthy number of token creatures which may be sacrificed to create the flip sided Ormendahl, Profane Prince.  A 9/7 demon with flying, lifelink, indestructible and haste seems like a solid plan 'B'.  Always pack a parachute. 

19 Creatures: 
4 Master Trinketeer
4 Chief of the Foundry
4 Metallic Mimic
4 Ornithopter
3 Hope of Ghirapur

Ornithopter is a shoe-in - a 0/2 artifact creature for zero (0!) mana which will get pumped up with other spells we'll yatter about soon.  As for Hope of Ghirapur, we already had these and for similar reasons for Ornithopter, not a bad choice.  The ability to sac this thopter to stymie your opponent's hopes to cast non-creature spells until your next turn seems good.

Metallic Mimic will, in almost all cases get cast while naming Servos so that you can then start piling on those +1/+1 counters on your Servo army.  Chief of the Foundry lends it self naturally as an 'Artifact Lord' to pump up those Servos and Thopters alike. The same holds true for Master Trinketeer, which also provieds a handy 'mana sink', later game to generate more Servo tokens. 

14 Spells: 
4 Sram’s Expertise
4 Servo Exhibition
3 Collective Effort
3 Built to Last

Built to Last may seem to most players not the best choice but we think it is well suited in our local game.  A one-drop for a +2/+2 instant pump and make the creature (if it is an artifact) indestructible is good, but may be side-boarded out for Stasis Snare likely for the second game.  Servo Exhibition is great value generting two 1/1 Servos for two mana.  Collective Effort gives a multi-tool to pump creatures, kill an enchantment or an opponent's creature with power 4 or more.  

Sram's Expertise just shines in this build - 4 mana for 3 Servos is sweet, especially so as this sorcery will also in most cases allow you to play a free card from your hand (with converted mana cost 3 or less).

6 Artifacts: 
4 Cogworker’s Puzzleknot
2 Animation Module

Cogworker's Puzzleknot is really essentially in this build.  We were not sold on this at first given that it basically costs 4 mana to produce only 2 Servos - but- after a good deal of playing, we really need those exra Servos.  Being able to hold back two mana to produce a surprise chump blocker at instant speed is also very good tech.  

At one point we did have a full deckset of Animation Module in an attempt to 'push' the combo of Animation Module and Metallic Mimic (produces a cycle of Servos as long as you have the mana for it).  After a number of games, the shiny just kinda wore off as the Module was a dead card on the Battlefield waiting for the Mimic to come down.

We hope this post encourages you to try this decklist or something similar.  There are two other very good posts online if you should be interested in perusing this :

• Budget Magic: $76 (15 tix) Mono-White Servos (Standard) by SaffronOlive on MTG Goldfish
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/budget-magic-76-15-tix-mono-white-servos-standard

• Mtg Budget Deck Tech: Mono-White Servo Combo in Aether Revolt by Strictly Better MtG

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paf9zAv6AQs 
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RU Bots

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Happy Monday MTG peeps,

Wow, what a weekend in Vancouver.  If you were a Magic: the Gathering fan who likes standard constructed and wanted to witness the full impact of all the new Magic Origins set cards in this environment, then you were likely glued to the Twitch channel for most of the weekend.  Before we get into that though, we have to talk about a Commander article recently posted over MTG Goldfish.

Our playgroup here at MTG Realm loves us some Commander games, and in fact have been playing the tall stack way back when it was called Elder Dragon Highlander.  We had not been able to wrap our (sometimes narrow-minded noodles) around 'group hug' Commander theory, but Tomer Abramovici on MTG Goldfish gave some suggestions on not too baaaad game-winning unbleatable plays using Zedruu and we now want to give it a hoof.

Anywhoos, back on track with what went down over the weekend - Here are the Top 8 Finalists from Pro Tour Magic Origins Vancouver, with our congratulations to Joel Larsson who took first place as well as a $40,000.

• Joel Larsson - Red Aggro
• Mike Sigrist -  Blue-Red Ensoul Artifact
• Paul Jackson -  Green-red Devotion
• Matthew Sperling -  Abzan Control
• Kentaro Yamamoto - Abzan Megamorph
• Stephen Neal - Red Aggro
• Patrick Cox - Red Aggro
• Stephen Berrios - Blue-Red Ensoul Artifact

Of interest to us are the 2 decklists (from Sigrist and Berrios) - Blue-Red Ensoul Artifact.  This was the first list we had built (we called R/U 'Bots) after Magic Origins and our variation was not too un-similar.  Here is our first iteration after the Magic Origins release on Tapped Out.

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Elesh Norn

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Happy Tuesday  MTG Peeps,

For those of you little scamps who, with bated breath, realise that it is only seven more sleeps to Christmas, we had posted some rather lovely Magic: the Gathering rarities on our Tumblr site here and here to help whet your anticipatory appetite.  For today's post, we were going to yatter a bit about some Modern format deck ideas and then kinda got waylaid by one the cards in it - Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite, so today's post is half flavour / half MTG brewing - strap in and let's go . . .

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Flavour First - 
The Grand Cenobite Elesh Norn, the Orthodoxy's highest-ranking Praetor, commands and guides this faction of Phyrexia, promising them a glorious future under the principles of the Argent Etchings. Everything the Phyrexians practice under the Machine Orthodoxy is designed to turn Mirrodin into a perfect new Phyrexian homeland, a kind of planewide phyresis.

Led by Elesh Norn, the white-aligned faction believes that Phyrexia must adhere to the teachings of the Father of Machines. They intend to indoctrinate everyone about the truth, even if it means tearing them limb from limb and reattaching the parts into a creation that is worthy of Phyrexia. They are dogmatic, hierarchical, and orthodox in their methods.

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The Modern format brew we were interested in is essentially a 'Tron' deck (aka UrzaTron) which featured Elesh Norn as a potential finisher.  Being able to mana ramp Elesh out early with a bunch of cheap critters or tokens is simply solid and sweet.

A bit more about this sort of deck - a main ingredient are select land cards form Chronicles / Antiquities such as Urza's Tower, Urza's Mine and Urza's Power Plant. They tap for one colorless mana each, but if all three are in play simultaneously, then both Urza's Mine and Urza's Power Plant are able to tap for two colorless mana and Urza's Tower taps for three colorless mana. This combination of cards provides the juice to churn out large amounts of colorless mana and allows the player to cast high-cost spells.  We were also interesting in combining Tron with a theme of affinity.  Affinity is a keyword ability that reduces the mana cost of a spell by the number of permanents of a certain type that player controls. The ability is always written as "Affinity for [something]". The most common instance is "Affinity for artifacts".  The thought here is to be able to cast fatties such as Darksteel Colossus several turns early.  We certainly don't have a finished list yet, just ideas on the drawing board but thanks for a few purchases from MTG Mint Card a while back we do already have the genesis of a potential build.
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Eternal Bargain

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Happy Wednesday MTG peeps, 

We have for you today part two of five separate articles we are doing on the new Commander 2013 decks just recently released by WotC to a very welcoming Magic: the Gathering fan base.  Each of these new Commander pre-constructed decks provides a ready to play stack of 100 cards including a choice of three legendary creatures to act as your general which may be also represented by an oversized foil card.  The card list is a solid foundation which you can easily adjust to taste - we'll likely throw a few of our nostalgic favourites we've picked up from MTG Mint Card into the original mix. 

The is the overview / review for Commander 2013's 'Evasive Maneuvers' deck and we've prepared a video with our good friend Jon from 'Command Tower' on Tumblr.  

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See the rest of the videos in this series:
• Evasive Maneuvers
• Eternal Bargain
• Mind Seize
• Power Hungry
• Nature of the Beast

 This Esper deck (white/ blue / black) has the following Commanders to choose from:

Oloro, Ageless Ascetic
This legendary Giant Soldier costing six mana (3 colorless and an 'esper' gives you a 4/5 body on the field and has a lifegain theme in each of the cards three abilities.  Ability one nets you two life, while the second one allows you to pay one coloress whenever you gain life to chip one life off your opponent.  To ensure the life train keeps going, you also add another two onto your total even if Oloro is in your command zone.
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Sydri, Galvanic Genius
This Human Artificer costs three (one 'esper') and provides a 2/2 onto the battlefield.  Both activated abilities are all about artifacts.  For one blue mana, you can turn a target noncreature artifact into an artifact with p/t equal to the cmc.  The second ability allows you to pay a white and black to give a target artifact lifelink / deathtouch until end of turn.
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Sharuum, the Hegemon
Here is the reprint - for six mana (three colorless and an 'esper') you get a 5/5 flying artifact Sphinx creature.  The enter the battlefield effect has the ability to return an artifact card from the 'yard back onto the battlefield, which can get really crazy if you develop a strategy to cheat huge fatties or other high costed artifacts onto the field.
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This is certainly not an 'all in' artifact deck and frankly the list developed by WotC is not meant to be that but rather yet another robust list able to adapt to the game situation and happens to have an artifact theme.  Having just said that, we are keen to develop a major artifact theme with this deck at it's base - we would want to consider both Tezzeret the Seeker and Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas in this mix along with similarily themed card choices.  One concern we have is that should you play Oloro in multiplayer, you could get hated on simply because of his lifegain potential.  
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Artifact EDH

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Happy Friday MTG peeps,

Here in central Ontario, Canada-Land, all that rain courtesy of the rain-bands of Hurricane Sandy has now abated and we are getting snow.  We looked out of the window this morning at our MTG-Realm-mobile to see it covered in white stuff.  At first we thought it could be ash from a nuclear accident but it was worse - snow.  The weather may be craptastic and we've not really see the sun in the past two weeks but we're going to OMG! Games to cheer ourselves up and get take some notes on how our newer standard constructed decks fair against the metagame.

Anywhoos, MTG Realm member RetroTech wanted to build an Commander / Artifact stack.  She had always had a soft spot for artifacts since Alara block.  Here is the linky to some previous posts - Myrball and post-M11 standard arifact builds.  To this end, we all sat down, and given the limited resources of what goodies were on our shelf (essentially almost all of it from sets past Lorwyn), settled on Sharuum the Hegemon as general or commander and started filling in the 99 blanks in an Esper (white / blue / black) artifact-centric strategy.  Let's have a looky-loo at what we've come up with so far.  We encourage you to provide suggestions and we'll start making a list of purchases to make at MTG Mint Card.

Sharuum may not be the best card for the command zone but it at least meets our requirements of being a legendary artifact creature in the correct colours.  We may think of including some blink effects like cloudshift or Ghostly Flicker to maximise artifact recursion from the yard.  Master Transmuter was also an 'auto-include' for either 'comes-into-battlefield' effects or to cheat a high cmc critter into play.

To ensure we tutor the cards we want during game play, we are considering cards such as Treasure Mage, Trinket Mage, Fabricate, Sphinx Summoiner, and Kuldotha Forgemaster.

RetroTech's fav strategy back in the day involved pumping smaller artifacts and swarming.  She typically used Master of Etherium as an anthem / monster or Tempered Steel with Voltaic Key . Unwinding Clock to untap the Overseer and load up with +1/+1 counters again.  With Lodestone Golem on board to punish non-artifact spells, she was often able to outpace opponents.

As we are clearly with artifacts here, why not a Stoneforge Mystic package?  So far we like Bonehoard, Batterskull, Sword of Body and Mind, Sword of War and Peach, Argentum Armor, Basillisk Collar and that very nasty Quietus Spike.

As we said, we are still early in development on a list and invite your input.  We also have on the table for possible inclusion that monstrous 11/11 Infect Blightsteel Colossus, Platinum Angel, Akroma's Memorial, Magister Sphinx, Myr Battlesphere, Sharding Sphix, Wurmcoil Engine, Eldrazi Monument, and the very unfair Scourglass.

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Artifact Aggro

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Happy Thursday MTG scholars,

Today we are asking for your input on a casual standard artifact aggro deck. With the vast cumulative experience of great number of Magic the Gathering players who read this MTG blog regularly, we think that we should have a fun build to win a number of games tomorrow at Friday Night Magic.

We are often limited to what we design by simply what we have on hand in our binder. What we do have is a deck set of Steel Overseer, Voltaic Key and Tempered Steel. This should (we hope) be a decent enough core to build around. Here is what we have so far.


3 x Golem Artisan
3 x Lodestone Golem
2 x Etched Champion
4 x Tempered Steel
4 x Steel Overseer
4 x Myrsmith
3 x Silence
4 x Voltaic Key
4 x Origin Spellbomb
4 x Memnite
4 x Ornithopter
= 24 Creature and 15 Other Spells (39 cards)

2 x Emeria, the Sky Ruin
2 x Sejiri Steppe
17 Plains
= 21 Lands
Total = 60 Cards

We have 8 zero costing artifact creatures. Origin Spellbomb not only allows a card draw but provides another cheap Myr token to get onto the game table. Myrsmith is certain to provide several more Myr tokens to be generated. With this small army of artifact weenies we hope to pump some decent power into them with the help of Tempered Steel and Steel Overseer to overrun our opponent's defences. Hopefully no Day of Judgment is waiting in the wings but if there is a board-clearer, we should be able to recover in relatively short order.

By mid game, we hope to put a wrench in our opponent's tempo with Lodestone Golem which will increase the cost of their spells (providing they are not playing a mainly artifact deck). We rather like Golem Artisan which provides repeatable options to swiss-knife your artifact critters by pumping them or giving them flying, trample or haste (or perhaps all of the above if the mana is available).

As for the Sideboard, we have this initial list which we hope also to tweak . . .

3 x Devout Lightcaster
3 x Kor Firewalker
3 x Emerge Unscathed
3 x Journey to Nowhere
3 x Revoke Existence

Drop us a line (eMail or comment below) to send us in the right direction.

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And finally, a reminder about the promo MTG Mint Card is having - its a Thanksgiving Sale with 7% Store Wide Discount from today until the 25th November. Just enter coupon "THANKSGIVING" during checkout. You may want to use this when purchasing the new MTG Premium Deck Series : Fire & Lightning.
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Myr Ball

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Happy Thursday MTG peeps,

It's rainy and cold up here in Canada-Land which gives us plenty of opportunity not to go outside and play but to stay inside and give thought to developing the next coolest casual Magic the Gathering Deck.

There have been quite a number of decklists we've seen building around the new Scars of Mirrodin Myr and we first started to give it some serious thought last month in this post. Some lists are mono-white, some red-white and others almost every colour in the rainbow. We should think that this decision is best left to you as you consider supporting cards for your ball 'o' myr and your local meta-game.

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We've just about de-listed Tempered Steel for a pump and have decided that the best course would be Steel Overseer whose effects are repeatable and can be scaled to your available mana. We've done rather well in several games before the SoM release using the Overseer and Voltaic Key to puke +1/+1 counters on a group of underwhelming critters (some literal funny slang - machine à percer or boring machines).

We've decided eventually to take an unconventional path (we never take the popular routes) and attempt some limited Myr token generation with Myrsmith and Origin Spellbomb to move into an Eldrazi Monument flavour. The monument will pump 'em +1/+1 and give them indestructibility. Other pumps are provided by Myr Galavanizer, and of course Steel Overseer. Taking advantage of Eldrazi Monument, we felt it apropos to to have a quasi- one-sided wrath with a Day of Judgment.

As we like recursion, and could not fit Sun Titan comfortably into the deck, we went with Salvage Scout who is more than willing to take a dirt nap while chucking out an artifact fatty from the graveyard.

Also - just because we love the flavour text on Lux Cannon, we invited him to the deck party as well. As we did not want anyone to crash the party, we are considering Indomitable Archangel to act as bouncer and provide a metalcraft-enabled shroud for our artifact dudes.

Lastly, the Battlesphere - yep - it is so bombtastic, we decided to play only foils in this build. It rolls and collects myrs and 7 mana not only provides the 4/7 construct but 4 1/ myr dudes too. The awesome sauce here is that it will burn your opponent as well for the additional number of tapped myr you bring to the party.

Anywhoos - drop us a line or comment below and tell us how you built your Myr-centric deck.
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Post M11 Artifact Deck

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We are going to yatter about a post M11 artifact deck today. Quite a few cards in this build will not be around when they Shards of Alara block and M10 rotate out of standard this fall so we suggest, get in the best 3 months of gaming right now while you still are able.

Anywhoos - starting off, let's have a peak of that metallic angel found inserted in your M11 boosters. The art suggests a new Platinum Angel art, or a new Angel not seen before (most likely). Some rumours insists that we could see a return to coloured artifacts.

Text : Scars of Mirrodin

The corrosion begins October 2, 2010

Journey back to this harsh metallic Plane. This time, will you leave in one piece?

We many hints from all quarters that Scars of Mirrodin will be artifact heavy, we ensured we had our deck set of Steel Overseer now for $4 before it jumps to $14 this fall. Speaking of artifacts, and Steel Overseer, we had a great weekend testing a post-M11 artifact deck, starting at Friday Night Magic, and then a few times throughout the weekend at the kitchen table going up against a variety of different decks. We had a blast, not only was this deck fun to play but also performed not badly.


Here's the deck list - as usual, we ask you the readers to help us out and provide suggestions as to what you would do . . .


38 Spells
3 x Ornithopter
3 x Elixir of Vitality
3 x Voltaic Key
4 x Etherium Sculptor
3 x Metallurgeon
4 x Steel Overseer
3 x Oblivion Ring
3 x Fabricate
4 x Master of Etherium
3 x Lodestone Golem
3 x Scourglass
2 x Platinum Angel

22 Lands
11 x Plains
7 x Islands
2 x Gargoyle Castle
2 x Dread Statuary

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Right off the bat - Our original build had the Ornithopters sitting in the sideboard - that was a mistake. Since main-boarding, we count over half the games won by a pumped-up Ornithopter. The exilir of Immortality was good as well and saved our butt a few times by supplying a quick life boost.

Voltaic Key and Steel Overseer are at the heart of this deck and makes everything bad-a$$. We especially loved any game which had Etherium Sculptor and Lodestone Golem out - cheaper artifacts for us and more expensive spells for our opponents. Fabricate performed well by allowing us to look for an artifact in our deck and Master of Etherium was always a solid drop. The big kick to our opponents was Scourglass which wiped their side of the game table but left ours intact. We never really got a chance to play Platinum Angel which means we need more play-testing - we feel that having the Anel out along with the Exilir of Immortality could save us from otherwise stalled games.

The number of mana appeared to be good as well but we did not really get a chance to use Dread Statuary of Gargoyle Castle which means more play-testing again which we will not mind at all given the big fun factor of this deck.

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And lastly, we suggest you get over to MTG Mint Card - this is your LAST CHANCE to get the discounted M11 Card Sets from only $29.99 ! Check out this solid deal for Magic 2011 Core Set M11 Uncommon & Common Set X4.

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