ODBC! Sept/Oct: Balance: Machine v. Nature

[lord of 13]

Erm... quick aside: you aren't allowed more than one legendary creature on the battlefield [saving Hall of Mirrors], but you are allowed up to 4 in a deck, banned and restricted lists aside.

Other question: Are you following the Vintage or Legacy banned/restricted lists? Vintage allows more cards that Legacy in the sense that what Legacy bans outright, Vintage merely restricts. But both are eternal formats, meaning that all sets are legal.

[LokiUndergod]

What an excellent idea! I'm definitely going to put in some time on this one.

[Resonantg]

Thanks for the quick correction there Lord of Lo13.

As for Restricted/Banned Lists, I've been operating on what was the case a la Alliances/Homelands when I last collected. So... Since it's the most INCLUSIVE, we'll use the VINTAGE Restrictions/Banned List. Currently other than looking at card symbols, and I don't even know a quarter of them, you can't sort by set, it's the most fair. Plus, face it... some of the restricted and banned cards are kinda silly.

Loki... you've no idea how hard I've struggled with it so far, but am LOVING it! I think I have a lulu of a deck, but it needs more testing and thankfully the core card to it isn't restricted. HAH!

[LokiUndergod]

I already have about four deck ideas rattling around, but it's a lot harder to get that balance than I thought--and have a functioning, flavorful deck. Are we allowed multiple entries, or is it a one-shot deal?

[Resonantg]

1 per customer. I throw out at least 2 other ideas before choosing.

[LokiUndergod]

Oh man, that makes it even harder! I'm having a lot of fun with an Esper deck, but I'm going to try and tweak it before I commit. I almost feel like it's cheating since Esper has so many artifact creatures.

[Resonantg]

Artifact creatures are the essence of this balance. Trust me, what I'm concocting, if I can speed it up and increase damage... it's death on two legs.

[Mr.Chaos]

Artifact creatures are the essence of this balance. Trust me, what I'm concocting, if I can speed it up and increase damage... it's death on two legs.

You do realise that that last part forces you to include a shark fin in the deck. Queen rocks!

[psillusionist]

Weapon of Choice
Lands
4 Arid Mesa
4 Flooded Strand
4 Hallowed Fountain
4 Plateau
4 Sacred Foundry
4 Tundra
Creatures
3 Cunning Sparkmage
3 Flametongue Kavu
3 Lightning Angel
4 Razor Golem
3 Serra Avenger
4 Stoneforge Mystic
Artifacts
4 AEther Spellbomb
2 Basilisk Collar
1 Lightning Greaves
1 Loxodon Warhammer
4 Pyrite Spellbomb
1 Sword of Fire and Ice
1 Sword of Light and Shadow
1 Sword of Vengeance
1 Umezawa's Jitte

WeaponOfChoice.deck

(461 Bytes) Downloaded 596 times

Weapon Of Choice is an aggro-control deck that utilizes equipment toolboxing via Stoneforge Mystic. The idea is to play the Mystic to tutor for the equipment card that answers your current board problem. The equipments in the deck provide various abilities such as first strike, deathtouch, protection, life gain, lifelink, creature removal, direct damage, and recursion just to name a few. So if say you were facing a red deck, you can tutor for Sword of Fire and Ice and the tides of battle can start turning into your favor.

Concerning creature choices, half of the creatures have vigilance mainly because this deck's threats are mid-game cards. That being the case, it is important that you can start attacking the moment you reach the mid-game, but at the same time, you can still keep defending. I also added Cunning Sparkmage since it comboes nicely with Basilisk Collar. The Sparkmage-Collar combo is capable of removing even the biggest creature your opponent has thanks to deathtouch. Flametongue Kavu also serves as a nice creature removal spell apart from it being a 4/2 for only 3R.

For my artifact choices outside the equipment toolbox, the Spellbombs provide some early stalling and card drawing in some situations.

As for the lands, I just wanted to make sure that the deck can always play Razor Golem on turn 3. Based on the color choices, the deck can clearly benefit from cards like Academy Ruins but I opted to stick to dual lands and fetch lands instead to ensure an on-time Razor Golem.

For the sake of completion, here's the balance breakdown:
16 Creatures
4 Artifact Creatures
16 Artifacts
24 Lands (non-man lands and non-artifact lands)

Enjoy.

[LokiUndergod]

Nice deck, man! I just downloaded the decklist and I'm going to check it out right now.

[LokiUndergod]

A simple affinity-like build... just w/o noncreature, nonartifact cards like Tez.

• 1 Keiga, the Tide Star
• 4 Master of Etherium
• 4 Trinket Mage
• 1 Mox Sapphire
• 1 Frogmite
• 4 Helm of Awakening
• 4 Defense Grid
• 4 Seat of the Synod
• 3 Tolarian Academy
• 4 Darksteel Citadel
• 4 Myr Enforcer
• 4 Etherium Sculptor
• 4 Qumulox
• 3 Academy Ruins
• 4 Dread Statuary
• 4 Mutavault
• 3 Arcbound Worker
• 4 Steel Overseer

I've been playing around with this deck, and it's a lot of fun. Affinity is ridiculously broken--but I'm sure you knew that already.

Makes me intimidated to post my idea.

[psillusionist]

Broken? Trust me, that decklist, that's just a merciful version of an affinity deck.

I used to play in tournaments back when Mirrodin was Type II. Back then, if you weren't playing affinity, your deck had better be designed to the core to stop affinity. It was the unfriendliest Type II environment ever. So maybe "broken" is probably an understatement.

[Resonantg]

Is anyone else getting this error from downloaded decks??

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Gui_DeckEditor_Menu : importDeck() error, java.io.StreamCorruptedException: invalid stream header: 57656170


Version:
Forge -- official beta: $Date: 2010-05-01 03:21:42 -0400 (Sat, 01 May 2010) $, SVN revision: $Revision: 916 $

OS: Windows XP Version: 5.1 Architecture: x86

Java Version: 1.6.0_17 Vendor: Sun Microsystems Inc.

Detailed error trace:
java.lang.RuntimeException: Gui_DeckEditor_Menu : importDeck() error, java.io.StreamCorruptedException: invalid stream header: 57656170
at forge.Gui_DeckEditor_Menu.importDeck(Gui_DeckEditor_Menu.java:457)
at forge.Gui_DeckEditor_Menu.access$2(Gui_DeckEditor_Menu.java:415)
at forge.Gui_DeckEditor_Menu$14$1.run(Gui_DeckEditor_Menu.java:1141)
at java.awt.event.InvocationEvent.dispatch(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForFilters(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForFilter(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(Unknown Source)

I'm having to reassemble decks by hand. Grrrrr.

[zerker2000]

Define "by hand":
A dck file(the ones decks are stored in) is pretty simply formatted, just open one with a text editor to see.
For example, to use the Weapon of Choice deck, save this:

Code: Select all

WeaponOfChoice
[general]
constructed
[main]
4 Arid Mesa
4 Flooded Strand
4 Hallowed Fountain
4 Plateau
4 Sacred Foundry
4 Tundra
3 Cunning Sparkmage
3 Flametongue Kavu
3 Lightning Angel
4 Razor Golem
3 Serra Avenger
4 Stoneforge Mystic
4 AEther Spellbomb
2 Basilisk Collar
1 Lightning Greaves
1 Loxodon Warhammer
4 Pyrite Spellbomb
1 Sword of Fire and Ice
1 Sword of Light and Shadow
1 Sword of Vengeance
1 Umezawa's Jitte
[sideboard]


to forge/res/decks/WeaponOfChoice.dck

[Chris H.]

Is anyone else getting this error from downloaded decks??

I'm having to reassemble decks by hand. Grrrrr.

`
I tried to import the WeaponOfChoice deck and got the same error. I then loaded this deck into a text editor, and the file is not a ".deck" file that we should import. It is a ".dck" file that we can copy over to our decks folder and use as is, but we must change the extension to ".dck".