Thursday, July 23, 2020

Old School MTG: Colorless Colossus


Here's a version of my colorless Old School deck that includes a wider variety of cards I like. It's way less consistent like this, but also way more fun! Besides, every once in a while I get to punch someone's Angel out of the sky with a Ring.

I was playing with this deck when the crazy opener finally happened. Here's a pic.


Turn 1: Workshop --> Forcefield
Turn 2: Second Workshop, Lotus --> Colossus of Sardia!

If that's not one of the best uses for Black Lotus, I don't know what is. I mean, I had no way of untapping the Colossus after that. But I dodged removal and got a big swing in with it. Worth it. :)

I ended up drawing Arena (and some actual lands) a little later and used the tapped Colossus as terrible creature removal. Killer combo.




Sunday, July 12, 2020

Solving the Crystalline Giant Problem With Token Creatures

Crystalline Giant (IKO)

When Crystalline Giant was spoiled, I knew I wanted it for my Commander deck. The theme of the deck is: "Creatures that are clearly Robots except that Magic is a fantasy game so there are no Robots."

Crystalline Giant is clearly a giant robot.

Okay, maybe not. Maybe it's a giant crystal being that is not a Robot. Except!

Thanks to the Godzilla crossover promotion, we got this beautiful version of Crystalline Giant to play with: Mechagodzilla! (Clearly a Robot. It's got lasers and rockets and stuff.)

Crystalline Giant (IKO)

There's a problem with Crystalline Giant / Mechagodzilla, though. It's a pain to handle the random abilities that get assigned to it every turn. Rosewater suggested using the punch out cards and putting all the abilities in a bag and drawing them out at random. I'm not going to do that. Instead, I came up with this.


I looked through all of my token creatures and grabbed the ones that had the abilities that need to be chosen at random for the Robot. I didn't have a token creature for every ability, so I also used some regular Magic cards. The Servo token is the +1/+1 counter. I'm pretty sure tokens exist for every ability. I just didn't have them in my collection. Here's the full list.


This makes it easy to randomly select the ability without any overlap. No dice rolling. No bags. No punch out cards. Easy.

It ends up looking something like this.



This Mechagodzilla has Flying, Vigilance, and Deathtouch. Watch out.

Lasers!