Let’s get all the comments that you’re likely to mutter while you’re reading this article out of the way now, shall we? That way, you can concentrate on the material at hand rather than having your natural instincts kick in and make you go deaf to what I’m trying to get across.

1. That deck is a pile!
2. Pass whatever you’re smoking to the rest of us!
3. You’re fucking insane!
4. This article is shit, you’re shit, and your shit is shit!
5. BAH!

That should just about sum it up. If I missed anything, just wait until the end of the article and feel free to add in your own two cents. They’ll probably just be different ways of saying the above five phrases, though.

Folks, I’ll freely admit that I’m not a big Standard player. The format hasn’t had any real appeal to me since my beloved Nether Spirit rotated out, and even the last few months where it remained playable weren’t all that exciting to me. To be completely honest, my interest began to waver when I could no longer blow up lands and swing for two with cards sporting Darwin Kastle’s mug, but I still stuck with the format afterward.

The problem is that, in today’s Magic society, it’s not kosher to dislike Standard. It’s the most-played format on the local scene, and finding a game of good Magic (read that as “Extended”) before late November is nearly impossible. Standard, however, is all over the place. It doesn’t follow the qualifier seasons; it just always exists like some sort of leech on the Magic community, sucking away the lifeblood of the game. Well, okay, that’s a bit harsh. Standard isn’t THAT bad, but I’m highly biased in the matter. I’m probably one of the few people in the world that tests Extended year-round, and sometimes it’s frustrating when you’ve created something disgustingly good and not having people to test it against. After all, what does beating Balancing Tings with SuperGro prove?

On the other hand, I’m forced to take a liking to Standard two times a year: States and Regionals, to be exact. I’m a highly competitive player, and when I’ve got the opportunity to become the State Champion or to qualify for Nationals, I have to seize that opportunity and give it everything I’ve got.

Regionals is coming, so that means it’s time to suck up my feelings on Standard and get down to business.

I was browsing through the various winning decks from the already completed Regionals, and I came across this little gem, played by Antonio Longo in San Jose:

1 Rakavolver
1 Anavolver
1 Desolation Angel
3 Utopia Tree
3 Spiritmonger
3 Birds of Paradise
4 Lightning Angel
3 Llanowar Dead
2 Laquatus’s Champion
1 Braids, Cabal Minion
2 Blurred Mongoose

2 Pernicious Deed
3 Armadillo Cloak
1 Vindicate
2 Phyrexian Arena
4 Terminate
2 Death Grasp
1 Diabolic Tutor

1 Caves of Koilos
2 Adarkar Wastes
2 Battlefield Forge
1 Treva's Ruins
2 Darigaaz's Caldera
3 City of Brass
2 Mountain
2 Plains
3 Swamp
4 Forest

Isn’t that the biggest pile of crap that you’ve ever seen? Thing is, it made Top Eight, so there HAD to be something that made it good. Although a friend of mine laughingly said that only nine people must have showed up for the Regionals, I think that it went deeper than that. How can you actually adjust to playing against this deck? The fact that nearly every card you draw is a bomb makes it difficult for an opponent to play around certain things. Hell, this is the perfect deck choice if you expect every deck at your Regionals to be packing Haunting Echoes. The Echoes would get, what, three cards max?

Seriously, though, if a deck makes Top Eight, there has to be a reason why. I put together the deck, using proxies for the cards that I didn’t own, and tested it out against a few other decks, played by a good friend of mine, Adam Loring.

I lost every game with the damn thing. Every single game. Yes, some of it was my inexperience with the deck, but a lot of the time I’d draw the exact wrong creature for a certain situation.

Now, I’ve made some money in the past playing various utility-based creature decks, and I’ve never been comfortable playing them without a Survival of the Fittest. In this case, I’m not talking about the card, but the concept: a card that will fetch you the creature that you need at any given time. The closest card in Standard to this right now is Eladamri’s Call, and while it’s not reusable, it’s at least playable.

Eladamri’s Call (Rare- Planeshift)
GW
Instant
Search your library for a creature card, reveal that card, and put it into your hand. Then shuffle your library.

At Regionals last year, I tinkered with a version of Red Zone that ran Eladamri’s Call, but opted at the last minute to play Probe-Go instead. I kept finding that my fragile manabase was too harsh when playing against the raw power of Fires, and if you couldn’t beat Fires you shouldn’t have been playing at Regionals. Now, though, Fires doesn’t exist anymore, leaving more room for tinkering. After some serious brainstorming, I came up with the following decklist, which is what I’m still using at this moment:

THE FIX

Green
4x Birds of Paradise
2x Utopia Tree
1x Kavu Chameleon

Red
4x Flametongue Kavu
2x Thunderscape Battlemage
1x Kamahl, Pit Fighter
1x Tahngarth, Talruum Hero
1x Rakavolver
4x Urza’s Rage

White
1x Cloudchaser Eagle
1x Worship

Black
1x Laquatus’s Champion

Gold
2x Rith, the Awakener
1x Spiritmonger
2x Shivan Wurm
1x Questing Phelddagrif
1x Fleetfoot Panther
2x Pernicious Deed
4x Eladamri’s Call

Land
3x City of Brass
2x Darigaaz’s Caldera
2x Brushland
1x Dromar’s Cavern
1x Rith’s Grove
3x Karplusan Forest
1x Coastal Tower
6x Forest
5x Mountain

I’m not done with the deck, not by a long shot. Especially the manabase, which, unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out before taking the deck for a few test drives. I need to up the white mana count somehow, for one.

The creatures create that toolbox feeling. Kavu Chameleon is a maindeck solution to everything that happens to have “Counter target spell” attached to it. Kamahl is a Lightning Bolt attached to a Ball Lightning, a combination that can absolutely wreck G/R and G/U in the right situation. Tahngarth plows through small creature hordes, and he often stops Nantuko Shades from ever being pumped as an additional bonus. Rakavolver is the nail in your opponent’s coffin during heated damage races, and Cloudchaser Eagle says, “What Arena? Worship who? Compulsion to do what?”. Questing Phelddagrif is a silver bullet against all things red and black, and Fleetfoot Panther might as well have a creature type of Cat Counterspell. The beatdown comes in the form of Spiritmonger, Shivan Wurm, and Rith. Plenty of Flametongues and Rages try to hold the fort down before you start an assault, and they also provide a means to clear a path in the late game. Laquatus’s Champion was a late addition to the deck, but the fact that you can Tutor for a targeted Inferno, one that forces a loss of life instead of damage, made it perfect as a finisher. For those of you counting, that’s one less swing with Rith or a Spiritmonger.

As I mentioned before, it’s going to take a lot of work to get this deck to optimal, but the current results are encouraging. I’ve taken this deck to two tournaments (with Llanowar Elves in place of Utopia Trees, because I couldn’t dig any up), and I made Top Four in the first and Top Eight in the second. Luckily, there were a wide variety of decks present at both tournaments, so I managed to encounter the majority of the popular archetypes between the two tournaments. Tog, Balancing Tings, G/U, the new Machinehead, mono-black control, Enforcer, B/W…they were all represented, and I played against them all. I can’t really comment on testing results, because there’s no way to tell what wins were the result of taking my opponent by surprise, but I will say that with the exception of one game against a rogue R/B deck based around Recoup, every game I lost was due to mana issues. Ironically, it wasn’t due to color problems, but quantity of lands. In one of the rounds I lost (which was a total of three between the two tournaments), I drew a total of four lands…the entire match. I almost pulled out game two of that match, actually, but a Mutilate wiped out my mana critters the turn before a Shivan Wurm came down to reek havoc.

Hopefully I’ve got some wheels turning in your head, and, as always, comments are welcome.

Tim Sprague
tome_scrier@lycos.com