Old School MTG: Colorless Candelabra Shops

This deck is based on a deck I saw in a Timmy the Sorcerer video on YouTube by Anne J called "Big Boys (Don't Cry)." You can see one of the game play videos by clicking here. 

Anne J's version is for SWE rules, so I was able to make a few changes. I also didn't like the way the Jalum Tomes worked in that list, so I switched them for Jayemdae Tomes. I'm guessing Anne J was using the Jalum Tomes to filter cards to get Tron online as soon as possible. I haven't needed to worry about that since I can run all four copies of Mishra's Workshop under the rules where I play.

The deck is silly. It's either explosive and does crazy things right away or it doesn't do much. It's also easy to disrupt by anyone packing Disenchant, Shatter, etc. So, basically every deck I run into. But when it works, it's spectacular!

The sideboard can be transformational, turning the deck into a parfait Vise deck. Winter Orb, Black Vise, Howling Mine, Icy Manipulator, and Relic Barrier can give a lot of decks headaches and attacks from a different angle.

Click here to test it out on TappedOut.com if you want to see how explosive it can be with the right openers.

Eric's Simple Guide to Casual MTG Deck Construction

 

Here's a simple way to construct your casual deck!

Many of us play MTG across a wide range of formats, but if you're new to building a deck from scratch or you're looking for a way to build a deck for casual spell-slinging, give this guide a try. The idea here is to build a deck that "plays to the table." Your games will be interactive and revolve around creature combat. Of course you can make these decks "better." That's not the point. Instead, think of this as your second deck, the deck you use between rounds at a tournament.

General Deck Construction Guidelines

As you build your deck, lay it out on the table as demonstrated above. Think of your deck being in 4 parts: mana sources, creatures, support spells, and card advantage.

Put in 24 mana sources. It should fill up the entire left side of your deck. Keep your land count high, but throw in a few non-land mana sources too if you have them.

Next, put in 20 creatures. Vary the mana costs so that you have creatures at 1-2 mana, 3-4 mana, and 5+ mana.

Now, put in 12 support spells. These are non-creature spells that help your creatures do damage. Removal, evasion, bounce, or counter spells are all good choices for this part of your deck.

Finally, put in 4 card advantage spells. These can be spells that draw you cards right away or give you access to more cards over time.

Deck Construction Do's and Don'ts

If you are building your deck for a tournament, all bets are off. Build your deck to win! However, if you are playing a casual game of MTG and want to have some give and take, consider these deck construction tips.

First, the DON'Ts.

• DON'T build a land destruction deck.
• DON'T build a discard deck.
• DON'T build a hard control deck.
• DON'T build a combo deck.

Now, the DOs.

• DO build a deck that wins with creatures and combat damage.
• DO build a deck that has a variety of spells and creatures.
• DO build a deck with synergistic cards that create incremental value.

That's it! If you follow these simple deck construction guidelines, you will end up with a casual deck that plays out over a series of turns with a focus on combat damage. You'll notice that the games are interactive and have time to develop. This method allows each color to shine with creatures and support spells that bring a unique flavor to the match-ups. Give it a try!

F.A.Q.

I can't use counter spells, discard, or land destruction?! Those are my favorite things!

You can use all of those things, but they should not be the focus of your deck. Those spells will all fit in the 12 support slots. However, for many casual players all three of those strategies quickly become "unfun." Having a few discard spells in your list is one thing. Having all 12 slots devoted to it is something else.

Do I have to strictly follow the guidelines? For example, can I put in fewer creatures and more non-creature spells?

Of course you can, but the further you deviate from these guidelines, the more your deck will naturally shift away from something casual. By sticking to the guidelines, it forces you to build a certain type of deck, one that is more focused on creature combat and requires the board to develop.

Don't these guidelines just make it so that everyone is playing a mid-range deck?

Essentially, yes. You can lower the curve and build an aggressive burn deck, for example. You can increase the curve and play a more defensive control deck. But yes, decks built using these guidelines are almost forced to be somewhere along the continuum of a mid-range style deck. Again, this is all about playing a casual game of MTG where a board develops and creature combat is the focus.

Does this mean I can't play a combo deck?

Don't build a combo deck for casual games. There are exceptions to every rule, but most casual players do not enjoy watching you figure out the best way to kill them over a series of infinite turns. Instead, if you want to scratch that combo itch, find strong synergies between cards that can give you an incremental advantage.

The End of an Era

Do I still love MTG? Sure, I do.

MTG has been a big part of my life for more than 25 years. I've met friends, traveled, competed, stayed up way too late, collected cards, made trades, and agonized over how many lands is optimal in my deck list more times than I can count. I've spent hours organizing trade binders, cracking booster packs, and watching MTG matches late into the night. Heck, this blog has several hundred posts!

When Commander was new, it was a heck of a thing. It was a social format that opened up tons of deck building possibilities. I like big spells. The Commander format let me play almost all of them. And I did. I built tons of Commander decks, too many. I built Commander cubes. I went way down the rabbit hole on foils and foreign cards and signatures. I had a lot of fun.

But they broke it.

Well, they broke it for me. You may be having a great time with it and that's awesome. But for me, once they started designing cards for the format, a lot of what made it special went away. It got too good. Too focused. Too consistent.

I get it. It's business. They are in the business of selling cards. And if something is popular, it makes business sense to cater to it. And they did. Big time. It wasn't about digging up a suboptimal pile of jank rares anymore. Entire decks were available to buy right off the shelf. This made the format more accessible, which is great! But it took away some of what I thought made the format special. It was inevitable.

I stuck with it. I still built new decks. I still played. But the pandemic pushed it over the edge for me.

I was already not thrilled to play online games of MTG. I totally understand that online is the only option for some of you. That's certainly better than nothing, but I want to see and talk to the people I play with. That's my thing. MTG:Online doesn't scratch this itch. Arena doesn't even have a Commander option and feels even less like I'm playing with a real person. Webcam Commander games are unwieldy at best. And I no longer have the time or inclination to play long Commander games at my LGS, even if it was open.

That leads me to a rough conclusion.

I'm basically not playing Commander anymore.

Typing that hit me like a ton of bricks. The reality is that I wasn't really playing Commander anyway. I was just thinking about it a lot and that was giving me a vague sense of still being connected to the format. When I did play the occasional Commander game with friends, it was always 1vs1, which isn't really "my" Commander format anyway. That's just competitive MTG with more variance and the mini-game of trying to keep your opponent's Commander at bay.

Will I still collect and play MTG? Sure, I will.

I see more Old School cards and games in my future. No particular Old School format. Just trying to build something interesting. Trying to get a few weird synergies to work. I have cards in my binders I've never cast before going all the way back to Alpha. That's a great place to start. 

Old School MTG: Colorless Battlebots vs. Aisling Leprechaun

A short while back, I ran my mono-white Bottle of Suleiman deck into Ben's Aisling Leprechaun deck. It was fun! But I didn't really get to see the Leprechaun do it's thing. So, I went back to the drawing board, dusted off my Battlebots deck, made a few updates, and once again launched into the fray.

Behold!

Battlebots (2021)

Could the deck be better? Oh, yes. More Mishra's Factory is almost certainly better. But could the deck be cooler? I'm not sure, but I don't think so. Okay, maybe finding a slot for Sword of the Ages would be cooler. You've got me there.

Ben's Leprechaun deck uses the little guy to turn creatures green, then uses other cards like COP: Green and Lifelace(!) to deal with opposing threats. It's fantastic and weird and wonderful all at once.

Ben, excited about Leprechauns.

At one point in the game, I was in top deck mode. Things were looking dire for team robot. I ripped an Aeolipile off the top. It was enough to win me the game and get me out from unrelenting Ernham beats. But, then this happened.

As an aside: Look, I understand that this isn't really how the rules work. That's not the point. The point is that the way this played out was way more fun.

I cast the Aeolipile. Ben used Lifelace to turn it green. Then used his COP: Green to prevent the damage.

Hey, hey! Lifelace!

I reality, I could have responded by sacrificing the Aeolipile. Sacrificing it is part of the cost, so it wouldn't have been on the battlefield for Lifelace to change the color. But still. I feel like that was the originally intention of how Lifelace was supposed to work. It was an interrupt. I certainly wasn't expecting it. And it made my night (and the game).

It was rad.

 

 

Hope of Ghirapur: Colorless Proliferate Commander

 

Click here to see the current list on TappedOut.

I build colorless commander decks. I wanted a deck for Hope of Ghirapur, but I didn't want to go down the road of sticking equipment on it and swinging. My budget Traxos deck mostly goes in that direction. It's powerful (sometimes), but that box was already checked. For Hope, I wanted to try something different.

+1/+1 counters and proliferate.

Hope is a 1/1 flyer for 1 mana. The deck has a low curve. There isn't an unlimited budget, but it's not a low-cost deck, either. I'm trying to keep the cost it in the range of a typical EDHRec deck. For the first draft, I stuck in as many cards that have counters or care about counters as I could find to make the theme more obvious. The deck is lousy with cards that either get counters, give counters, or add counters. Modular creatures are everywhere.

I've only had the chance to play a few games with the deck. It's fine. It sometimes does things. It needs more testing, for sure. And card draw. It doesn't recover from a board wipe. I hesitate to think about going up against multiple opponents. There are some great colorless cards that didn't make it into the deck. But it's tough to start cutting "on theme" cards to fit in cards that are objectively better. At some point, the theme goes away.

Old School MTG: Mono-White Bottle of Suleiman

 

It's genie time.

Over the years, I've built a mono-colored artifact-focused deck for each color (and colorless). The white deck was always a prison deck, but I wanted something more aggressive. Behold! Bottle of Suleiman.

There's a lot of words on that card, but basically 50% of the time it does 5 damage to you and the other 50% of the time you get a 5/5 flyer. At 4 mana to cast and 1 mana to activate, the rate is good if you can figure out a way to avoid the damage. It gets better if you can figure out a way to reuse it. That's where the other cards come in.

Before I go on, I want to be clear that I've tried a lot of different configurations of this deck. It's not good. It's not even remotely good. It's super casual. You could probably start splashing colors and make it "better," but the underlying combination of cards is weak. There are better combos and synergies in the format. It is fun, though. Well, fun when it works.

This guy. This guy along with COP: Artifacts is how I avoid taking damage from the Bottle. This creature is also reasonable at stalling creatures on the ground, but doesn't show up early enough in the game to really set an aggro deck back.

Then there's this guy. This guy is how I reuse the Bottle to keep trying again to get a genie.

There's a couple of cutesy things going on with the deck as well. This card transmografies a creature into an artifact, which is handy if you have a COP: Artifacts out. Should it simply be another Swords to Plowshares in this slot? Of course it should! But this is more fun.

This deck suffers from the classic problem of needing a lot of things to go right. There are combinations of cards that can become... not powerful. But better. If they show up together. Your opponent will be actively trying to kill you and disrupting your plan. It's common to draw the wrong combinations of cards. I frequently die to desperate Bottle flips with no way to avoid the damage, for example. Most of the cards are not great on their own, so it's a catch-22 to put more of them in.

I'm 100% open to a different way to approach this deck (still in mono-white). Maybe someone has a good setup out there. Maybe I've forgotten a key card. But if you're looking for something fun and casual to bring to an Old School event, take this for a spin!

Here I am losing to my own Bottle flip (twice). One flip failed and I took 5 damage. Then I brought the Bottle back, recast it, then failed the flip again taking another 5 damage. It was that or die to the threat on the other side of the table. This is one of those scenarios where if I had a way to mitigate the damage, I might have been able to pull ahead with an endless stream of genies.

Here it is working. Combo assembled. Bottle+Archaeologist+COP:Artifacts. Plus, I had a Chaos Orb in the graveyard for shenanigans with the Archaeologist! My daughter doesn't play Old School decks, but she is a good sport. And she wins most of the time!

Update: August 1, 2021

The stars aligned and I was able to play some Old School with Ben. It was my Mono-White Bottle of Suleiman deck vs his Aisling Leprechaun Ward deck. It was a blast. It was the perfect match of weird decks!

The deck he was playing words on this great synergy. The Leprechaun makes any creature it blocks or that blocks it become green. As long as he's got a Green Ward enchanting the Leprechaun, it has protection from that "green" creature. :) He also runs Circle of Protection: Green so that he can prevent the damage from all of the creatures the Leprechaun is turning green.

Here I am getting smashed to pieces by Ben's Force of Nature.

Here I am with the "combo" in full effect. The candy is a 5/5 Genie token!

Here's Ben getting hit by the Copper Tablet while my Bodyguard blocks for me.

Ben thinking about his next move. Does he play the fearsome Leprechaun?

All in all, it was the kind of fun I've come to expect from janky Old School duels. I lost a bunch of coin flips, as expected. I mostly took the damage from the Leprechaun rather than let Ben turn all of my creatures green. Bottles were flying in and out of the graveyard at one point.

Old School MTG: Revisiting Yawgmoth Reanimator (Again!)

 I've played this deck a few times over the years, but it was time to make a few small changes.

Old School Yawgmoth Demon Reanimator

I included the Coffin combo, Hell's Caretaker, Fallen Angel, and the Su-Chi / Priest dynamic duo. This deck is fun because it has so many lines of play.

This is me losing despite having a board like that!

The deck still lacks real card drawing. Ideally, reanimating creatures would create enough virtual card advantage to make up for raw card drawing, but in practice it doesn't always work out that way. Even though the Jalum Tomes can throw cards in the graveyard to get the undead party started, those should probably just be Jayemdae Tomes or split with Greed if I want to get fancy. I'd also swap out a Swamp for a Diamond Valley for those times when I just need the life boost or have an Animate Dead stranded.