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by Christopher Askwith
Making A Lethal Tournament Deck
Putting Mirage and Visions into your deck
When entering a tournament, there is one maxim that everyone repeats to you: Make sure your deck is ultra-tight, ultra-fast and ultra-lethal. This is almost always a problem in the Type I environment, where newer players simply don't stand a chance against the older players with rainbow decks infused with dual lands and Moxes. However, in the Type II environment, where the newest rulings on restricted cards and the removal of Ice Age and Fallen Empires have given all you novice players a good chance at winning once in a while.
Now that you know you can win, you must of course, figure out how you are going to go about doing it. A first step would be to acquire a magazine that offers a list of Magic cards and what they do. Next, you should isolate the cards that are best for your deck: inexpensive, common, but good cards that you can just go and buy at the store for a quarter apiece, though some cards should be fairly rare, as many good cards are also harder to find (i.e. Counterspells, Sengir Vampires, Serra Angels, etc.). Lastly, you need to make sure that these cards are in Fourth Edition, Chronicles, Homelands, Alliances, Mirage, and Visions. The emphasis of this article is how to integrate Mirage and Visions into your tournament deck.
Now, we need to build a deck. Since my favorite color is black, let's see if we can make a deck that consists of mostly black spells, and, to give the deck flavor and protection, we will integrate some green into it. To finalize the process, we must make sure that a good portion of these cards come from Mirage and Visions.
- Land : Seeing as this is perhaps one of the more important parts of the deck, we should be sure to concentrate on this. Going for a deck of about sixty cards, we'll want twenty land. So, with a majority of black cards, we realize that the following lands may be useful: swamps, forests, and Everglades, a land from Mirage that produces one black and one colorless mana. Now, with these three land types in mind, it is now possible to begin making the rest of the deck.
- Creatures : One of the ways you will be able to slay your opponent, these will be particularly important. Here, I would suggest splurging a little and getting Sengir Vampires. Four would be in order, as then you will have the core of your force. For additional mana, a couple of Quirion Elves would fit in nicely. To complement the core, I would suggest easily-found Craw Wurms and a few Suq'Ata Assassins from Visions as well as a Woolly Spider or two for defense.
- Offensive Spells : As a means of damaging or destroying an opponent's forces, there are indeed no spells that can compare to the core of this group of spells: Dark Banishing and Terror. Having a few of both is good. Also, Drain Life is a great spell, as it takes life from opponents or their creatures and gives it to you! Perhaps no green spell can really go into this category except for Giant Growth, which will allow your creatures to become quite a good deal larger. Howl from Beyond is also useful in this manner.
- Defensive/Miscellaneous Spells : Here you will find the classic green anti-enchantment spells, Tranquillity, Tranquil Domain and Serene Heart. Also useful are such spells as Dark Ritual, for quick mana, and Forgotten Lore, to get cards from the graveyard. Also, a couple of Whiteouts and Streams of Life will be of great use here.
- Sideboard : No tournament deck is usually complete without a sideboard. Here, I would want to have such things as an Ihsan's Shade or more, a few Walls of Corpses, Hurricanes, and maybe those rares that we want to avoid, but are still good enough to go into the deck: Baron Sengir, Autumn Willow, Spirit of the Night and Shauku, Endbringer.
So, now, with a black/green deck idea and some cards to boot, we can assign numbers to names and see how things work out.
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Black
4 Sengir Vampire
3 Dark Banishing
2 Suq'Ata Assassin
3 Terror
3 Drain Life
4 Dark Ritual
3 Howl from Beyond
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Green
2 Quirion Elves
4 Giant Growth
2 Craw Wurm
2 Woolly Spider
3 Tranquillity
3 Whiteout
2 Forgotten Lore
3 Stream of Life
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Lands
10 Swamps
6 Forests
4 Everglades
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Sideboard
2 Ihsan's Shade
1 Spirit of the Night
1 Baron Sengir
1 Shauku, Endbringer
3 Wall of Corpses
2 Tranquil Domain
2 Serene Heart
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This deck should be fairly quick, and it also should be able to defeat many of your opponents. Because it does not employ any enchantments itself, it does not suffer when you use a Tranquillity or another such card. There are plenty of methods to gain life, and also to blitz through an opponent's forces. So, try this deck out and hopefully, enjoy!
About the Author : Christopher Askwith is respected among his cousins and Magic-playing friends as a master of strategy. He himself does not own or use any of the decks he presents in his article(s), but instead goes to the store, gets a magazine after a new expansion comes out, and learns how the cards work alone or in combination - in short, he is a Magic magazine junkie, "Because without 'em I couldn't make my strategies, now could I?"
[ Back to March 1997 Table of Contents ] [ Back to Beyond Dominia ]
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