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by James Greenwell Destroying Your Opponent's Cards This month I thought I'd examine a subject that I touched on in my February article concerning manipulating the play environment. For those too lazy to look up old articles, (they can be found off the main page) the general principle is this. Focus on one facet of the play environment, and build a deck which will take advantage of that part of the environment. For example, in February I focused on life advantage, but there have been many successful decks built around other facets of the environment. Many deck types give away what area of the environment that it focuses on. Hand destruction, land destruction, red/green speed, armageddon decks, vice decks, etc. all deal with certain areas of the play environment well. The focus of this month's deck is to create "dead cards" in the opponents deck. Most tournament decks rely on different types of cards to deal with the widest array of opponents threats. A good deck has ways to deal with artifacts, special lands, enchantments, creatures, and instants/sorceries. This month's deck makes many of the basic cards in an opponents deck have no use, therefore making normally useful cards "dead". How to do this? First, focus on the most resilient permanents available. For example, most good type II tournament decks have some form of spot land destruction to deal with the dude ranch and thawing glaciers. As it is impossible in type II to prevent land destruction (I sure do miss consecrate land and equinox) , provide your opponent with only sub-optimal targets (all basic land). This way your opponent will either hold land destruction in his or her hand, or waste it on land that you can easily replace. Next, is artifact and enchantment destruction. These two areas are lumped together for obvious reasons. to make your opponents disenchants and emerald charms as ineffective as possible, eliminate all artifacts and enchantments in your deck. At the time of this article, there are currently very few, extremely focused ways of dealing with instants and sorceries in print. There are things like Honorable passage and shadowbane, burnout and the five different circles of protection. But the use of instants and sorceries as a main way to defeat an opponent is minimal, and does not, In my opinion, require the inclusion of focused cards such as these to counteract the possibility that your opponent will be using this as his or her way to kill you. The last, and most difficult area to make dead is creature removal. There are three separate ways that can make creature removal ineffective. First is the creature swarm approach, the theory being if you provide your opponent with to many targets that they will run out of removal before you run out of creatures to remove. The main problem with this strategy is the wide use of the multiple creature removal spells such as savage twister, Wrath of God, and Nevinnrral's Disk. The second choice is to play a creatureless deck, however, the current trend is toward a creature heavy environment, and dealing with an opponents horde of creatures is difficult at best in type II. Which leads to the third way of making your opponents removal ineffective, choosing extremely hard to kill creatures. Creatures like Ogre Enforcer, Joreal's Centaur, Brood of cockroaches, and Ivory gargoyle to name a few. also, playing creatures with a Higher than average toughness can help reduce the effectiveness of you opponents removal. Although some of these things are ideas which are addressed by good tournament deckbuilders, Asking yourself if these things are addressed in your deck can help tune your deck and help you spot what your decks problem decks could be. Whew!, enough of the soap box, and onto the deck. This deck tries to implement the ideas which are expressed above. See you next month!
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