MTG Rewards

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This is of course fairly old news but we wanted to yatter about the benefits of signing up for the Magic the Gathering Player Rewards (aka MPR) program. This is where you the player saunter in to your local game shop and sign up to receive sweet cardboard booty in the mail. Really can't go very wrong with that.

Briefly - Once you're in (we just said urine!) the system, for every 5 tournaments you participate in, you receive 1 random new textless spell and 1 random older card wrapped together; and for every 20 events (Friday Night Magic as an example), you receive a premium foil card.

Check out what we got from Wizards in the January 2010 mailing . . .

mmmm - textless Infest, Sign in Blood, Harmonize and a foil Lightning Bolt - really nice art on 'em too. On the back of the oversized new Worldwake Comet Storm (one of our first Worldwake spoilers), we have the following pre-relase (Comet Storm) and release cards (Joraga Warcaller) . . .

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With regards to yesterday's post (Joraga Green) we got a this comment from long time MTG Realm reader gregtron . . .

I love how dedicated you are to breaking Sigil Captain! This deck has me wondering if we might see the return of a viable black/green aggro elves deck. Even just a splash of black in Eldrazi Green would allow you to play Maelstrom Pulse to wreck the mirror.

We do realise that we have this thing for Sigil Captain - don't worry, we are going to therapy for this. This next casual MTG build we went big and stupid just to prove gregtron correct in his assessment of our mental state . . .

This deck features massive mana acceleration with Birds and Noble Hierarch to get an early drop of Mycoloth or Ant Queen. Pumps include Sigil Captain (of course) and Oran Rief, the Vastwood.

Playtesting this casual deck - Of course it lost more games than it won but the important thing, it was fun, and when it did win, it was just short of epic with dozens of pumped Saprolings and Insects.

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MTG Realm announcement . . .
Stay tuned for this Friday's post - we got goodies from Wizards !
Yep - that's right, we have four commons and one uncommon Worldwake spoilers right before the previews begin on Wizards.

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What I'm Playing 9

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Good Day my Peeps and welcome to another post as to what we're playing (Magic the Gathering of course!). We've moved along from our recent 'Sneak Kor' deck (post HERE) as it was rife with issues. We hope to revisit this build after further support (hopefully) is found in the next Zendikar expansions of Worldwake and / or Rise of the Eldrazi is released.


Anywhoos - the particular itch we had to scritch involved employing the power found in the cards Oran-Rief, the Vastwood, and Sigil Captain. Both these cards would love to dump extra counters on critters as they come into play. Specifically, Oran-Rief will drop one extra counter on EACH green creature which entered the battlefield and Sigil Captain will grant TWO additional counters for each 1/1 critter which entered play. With the right token producers and the correct planets aligned, the player would be able to puke out vast numbers of 4/4 Insect or Saproling creature tokens to outpace Rampaging Baloths or just simply overwhelm an opponent.






















Before we get ahead of ourselves, let's have a look at the build so far . . . remember that this is a casual deck that does not want to go anywhere but on the kitchen table or an FNM and more importantly, the 'fun' factor was at a satisfactory level.

Rief Captain

Creatures [25]
4 x Birds of Paradise,
4 x Tukatongue Thallid,
4 x Steward of Valeron,
3 x Dauntless Escort, 1
4 x Sigil Captain, 1
4 x Mycoloth, 3
2 x Ant Queen, 3

Other Spells [15]
3 x Path to Exile,
4 x Behemoth Sledge, 1
3 x Oblivion Ring, 2
2 x Elspeth, Knight-Errant, 2
3 x Martial Coup, X

Land [20]
4 x Oran Rief, the Vastwood
2 x Sunpetal Grove (cuz we only have two!)
7 x Forest
7 x Plains
(EDIT - there is 20 lands)
You will immediately note that there is only 20 Lands in the deck. We have not had an issue with manascrew yet in playtesting. What really helps is the 8 mana-accelerators in place with Birds and Steward. We have on several occassions dropped the Mycoloth on turn three which speaks onto the tempo of this build.


We have an issue with Tukatongue Thalid. Sure this this is fairly economical by providing two 1/1 critters for just one green mana, and it does reap the benefits of the Captain and Vastwood but we have a feeling we may be better served by something else in this slot. Send us your suggestions please.

Dauntless Escort is good economy (a 3/3 for 3 mana) and goes hand in hand with Martial Coup just like Spongebob and Patrick. We have yet to witness this combo go off in playtesting as we have usually won the game before we needed it (really, really), but we're cetain it is sound.

Now - the to the coda / finale of this opus in G () major . . . The most lovely synergy of Sigil Captain / Oran Rief, the Vastwood with the token producers Mycoloth and Ant Queen.


For 5 mana, you get a 4/4 Mycoloth with Devour 2 - which means for every creature you sac, this big Fungus comes into play with twice that many counters. We recall one particular game during playtesting that on turn five, we were swinging with a 10/10 Mycoloth which also happened to have a Behemoth Sledge attached to it. A 12/12 lifelinking trampler is rather a beautiful thing to behold in action.

We found that with the level of mana production available to us in this build, we required a safety valve come mid to late game. One should always attempt to avoid untapped mana (unless of course you are running counterspells or other strategic instants). The answer for this was found in Ant Queen, which not only takes advantage of the Captain / Vastwood synergy but also presented a convenient place to dump extra mana to generate additional tokens.

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Our Play-Testing results . . .

The deck performed very well against a variety of builds. We played against a mono-black Vampire deck, a Zendikar Ally deck, and an Esper Artifact / Control deck.

Very fortunate for us our opponent who was playing the Vamp deck did not get the opportunity to play Blood Seeker which certainly would have had a very adverse effect upon our life total given all the tokens we were throwing out on the table.

For the multiple matches we had against each of these decks, it appeared that the winning condition resided quite solidly in our ability to outpace the opponent and drop more creatures than they.

Even with removal of one of the token producers (Mycoloth / Ant Queen), there was either another one just around the corner or the tokens produced before removal was good enough to win the game. In one interesting game, we had our token engine removed but still had a handfull 4/4 Insect or Saproling creature tokens, one of which had the Behemoth Sledge equipped to still win the game. An Ant with a hammer is just plain funny.

Well, drop us a line and suggest some improvements to make this build either more effective or fun. Also - we are going to need some help generating a side-board with this.

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