There’s an almost overwhelming presence about a large body of water, and Lake Erie is no exception. I’d forgotten how calming just sitting by the water and listening to the waves could be until today, when my friend Adam and I made the trek down to the beach. I had originally intended to write this article while there, actually, but it didn’t work out that way.

I think that maybe I’m starting to finally understand the Wakefield method of writing. It wasn’t some way to distinguish himself from other writers or even an effort to explain things to someone. It was an attempt to put a shred of the joy that can be derived from one’s life into emotionless text. He wrote about his wife and his beloved dogs because they were far more real to him than a card game. The reason that no one has ever been able to really duplicate his style is suddenly rather obvious: most Magic players don’t have the same outlook on life as he does. To a lot of Magic writers, it’s all about the technology, not the person behind it.

I had the pen and paper ready to go to start writing up the next article in my current Extended series, and yet I couldn’t find the desire to start filling in the lines. It was the first time since I began writing strategy articles that I couldn’t focus on Magic. There was a feeling of familiarity in me on that beach, a sense of having come full-circle. I lived a block away from that beach for the first eleven years of my life, and in a very real way I was raised on that beach and the never-changing lake. While Adam soaked in the atmosphere, I found myself dealing with a wide variety of emotions, the first and foremost being nostalgia.

When I was little, I looked at the lake as an immovable force. To me it had always been there and it would always be there. I think in another lifetime I would have made a good sailor. The open water is a force of its own, and she demands a respect that only the immovable forces of the world can. You have to love the water to truly respect it, and I do love the lake. No matter how much things change, she doesn’t. It’s nice to have a constant in life.

On the other hand, the open water is the only mistress that a true sailor needs. As much as I love the lake, I can’t stay that faithful to her.

As is becoming the tradition, Dawn made her way over to my apartment at an ungodly hour of the morning. It’s a three hour drive from her dorm at college to my place, so she was a bit tired from traveling. I managed to make her something resembling a meal (I get my next paycheck in two days, so the food stock is a bit low currently) and we sat together on the couch for a while. I was still a bit thoughtful from earlier in the day, and somehow she managed to pick up on that and asked me what was on my mind. Dawn really amazes me sometimes.

“Why don’t we go out for a drive?” I suggested, ignoring the fact that it was nearly four in the morning.

When we finally stepped out of the car, we were standing at the top of the porch-like stairway leading down to the beach. It was definitely colder than it had been during the day, so I threw on my jacket and took Dawn’s hand in mine. It had rained earlier in the evening and I was doing it to make sure she didn’t slip on the stairs, but her grip clearly told me that she didn’t plan on letting go any time soon.

Not that I minded one bit.

We walked along the beach for a while, and I tried to explain exactly why the lake was such a large part of my past and why it still holds a certain amount of influence over me. I’m not totally sure if she understood the whole thing, and in truth I’m not sure if any woman would have known where I was coming from. I’m not being sexist in the slightest; women think in a different way than men, so I wasn’t sure how much was lost or changed in the translation from one mindset to another. I stumbled my way through it eventually, though, and I think I got most of my points across.

“Do you know why I like Magic so much, Tim?” Dawn asked out of nowhere. When I replied in the negative, she stopped walking and looked up at me. “Magic is a game of absolutes. You win when your opponent is at zero life or can’t draw a card. There’s an obvious line between the winner and the loser. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it.” In an apparent random act, she kissed me. “Life isn’t like that. We still look for those absolutes, though, and the lake is one of yours.” She kissed me again. “You play Magic because you have a competitive spirit, and I play because I want to be challenged. But we’re just playing a game when it comes down to it, Tim. This lake is reality.” She cuddled up against me. “It’s kind of cold out here.”

“You want to leave?” I asked.

She pulled my arms around her. “No, I wanted this. Now hush.”

As I’m typing this, Dawn is asleep under a small pile of blankets on my bed. I think that she was only partly right when she said that I play Magic because I have a competitive spirit. When it comes right down to it, I’m a far better theorist and deck designer than a player. No, I don’t lose as often as many and I’m normally at the top tables of tournaments I attend, but I find it even more fun to try breaking a metagame or creating new archetypes. That’s probably what drew me to Extended in the first place. Type One is a rock, slow to change and locked into some inescapable truths. Standard doesn’t have enough of a card pool to allow me to really think outside the box. I’m probably stronger at the Limited formats than Constructed, but the random element of the game is really enhanced there.

Extended is my home, my absolute. No matter what rotates in or out the format will always remain the one with the most creativity present. The rotation in November should bring proof of this with it. People have asked me how I can possibly hope to break a format that won’t even exist for another four months. The answer is by trying to cover all the bases. Most people don’t realize that a tentative environment has already been created due to the various columnists around the internet. As it stands, the top decks in the format will be Reanimator (I’m hesitant to say Benzo specifically, as a number of different versions seem viable), Tinker, Welder, and The Rock, along with various aggro decks like Sligh and White Weenie. The part that can’t really be determined easily is exact which of these decks will be Tier One and which will just fall along the wayside.

That’s where extreme amounts of playtesting comes in.

However, everyone once in a while I break away from the established metagame and work on something for myself. Whether it’s meant for tournament play or not doesn’t really matter. I’ve noticed that if I stay in the playtesting mindset too long I begin to get tunnel vision. Everyone has their little pet decks, really, and every so often one of these pet decks explodes to the front of the pack (think Sol Marka’s The Rock or Jamie Wakefield’s Secret Force). There’s one such deck that I’ve been working on recently, one that is sort of a rehash of an older concept. Here’s the decklist:

Da Nutz (for lack of a cereal-related name)

Creatures
4 Birds of Paradise
3 Llanowar Elves
4 Phyrexian Ghoul
4 Academy Rector
1 Spike Weaver
1 Avatar of Woe
1 Verdant Force

Spells
4 Vampiric Tutor
4 Duress
4 Pattern of Rebirth
3 Saproling Burst
1 Pernicious Deed
1 Seal of Cleansing
1 Confiscate
1 Pandemonium

Land
4 City of Brass
4 Llanowar Wastes
3 Brushland
2 Caves of Koilos
2 Phyrexian Tower
5 Forest
2 Swamp
1 Plains

Keep in mind that this is the first draft of the deck, and it’s not being played as if it’s the final copy. It is, however, already quite good against a number of the aggro decks that it’s been put up against, and it gets the occasional turn three kill even though I’m attempting to move the original deck concept (called Mindless Oath back in the day) farther into the utility category. Besides, I enjoy beating people down with their own Morphling (remember, a Rectored-in Confiscate doesn’t target).

For those of you that haven’t figured out the turn three kill, it goes something like this:

First turn- Land, BoP/Elf

Second turn- Phyrexian Ghoul

Third turn- Academy Rector, attack with Phyrexian Ghoul. Sacrifice Academy Rector to get Pattern of Rebirth and put it on BoP/Elf. Sac the BoP/Elf and get another Academy Rector with the Pattern. Sacrifice Academy Rector to get Saproling Burst, make and sacrifice six tokens. Exactly twenty damage to your opponent’s skull.

It’s surprisingly efficient, as there are currently very few ways to break the combo once it’s begun. Of course, all of this is assuming that your opponent has no blockers to speak of, or that they don’t exactly understand how the Ghoul can kill in one turn and decides not to block. This is one of the reasons I’m trying to work in a few Edicts or something along those lines.

However, this isn’t the only way to kill someone in this deck. Those Pattern of Rebirths can be used to find rather large creatures in the form of Avatar of Woe or Verdant Force (and they can also be used to bring in a Spike Weaver to improve board position). A Pandemonium can be brought into play with a Saproling Burst to go a bit old school and PandeBurst out an opponent. Confiscate can take an opponent’s largest creature and run it into its original master’s face. A number of decks just have no good way to deal with Saproling Burst itself, so a resolving one can often be game without having to get fancy.

I’m not satisfied with the manabase currently. That’s an awful lot of pain, and there have been games against Sligh where that’s really been dangerous. It’s not fun when you have to allow Browbeat to be an Ancestral Recall. However, it’s a tad trickier to work out than it first appears, and it’s going to take a while for me to get it where I want it. Of course, I can’t really work with it much until I decide on the final maindeck.

The great thing about this deck is that it has a shot against everything due to its diverse nature. It definitely has its bad matches, like The Rock (Pernicious Deed is hell on this deck if used correctly). However, even in the bad matches there isn’t an autoloss. The legendary “autoloss” in Extended currently is Suicide Black when it sits down across from Sligh.

Silly Suicide Black, being burned out is for kids.

In any case, I’ve decided to start shifting the focus of this article series away from the known archetypes into the more obscure, as every writer and their mother seems to be talking about the Big Four (Tinker, Welder, The Rock, and Reanimator). It just wouldn’t make any sense for me to go over the exact same things as everyone else. So I guess for one of the few times since I began writing this column over two years ago I’m a rogue player. Don’t think that I’m a fanatic about it, though. I’m not going to go on senseless rampages against netdecking and using other people’s ideas; I consider those things to be perfectly acceptable parts of the game. In fact, I’m currently playing a Mono-Black Control deck in Standard for local tournaments, and it’s a shameless (though not card-for-card) rip-off of the Japanese Nationals deck.

I’ll probably go into something using Armageddon in the next article, because frankly I really love blowing up every land on the board and swinging with creatures that there suddenly isn’t an answer to anymore. Quick preview: Erhnam Djinn, in my opinion, is NOT Extended worthy, and I’ll expand on that thought next time.