Type 1.5

This deck has several roots, most having to do with my trying to make something work that just shouldn't. I enjoy trying to make blue/green work in a type 1.5 or type 2 where those two colors are particularly weak together, lacking direct damage and card destruction cabability.

I have also been trying to make a working poison deck for some time. That is, a deck that kills via 10 poison counters, never via damage. So I found myself trying to crack two deck construction problems at once, poison and blue/green. I built a short lived deck called "Poison Control", using Marsh Vipers and Serpent Generators to poison them to death, and Control Magic, Clones and the like to hold them off and clear the way for my poison guys. It didn't work (of course) but on the way I found a nifty little card that I'd never thought about using before: Old Man of the Sea.

Old Man of the Sea is a 2/3 blue creature for 1. He's kinda neat in that he can steal your opponent's creatures, but only if his power is greater than theirs. But that's fine, we're playing green right? If there's one thing green is good at it's making creatures bigger.

Playtesting is where a number of kinks were worked out and the deck really started to evolve. The first was that, while it's easy enough to Giant Growth an Old Man to be big enough to steal a Sengir Vampire (or whatever), at the end of the turn it goes right back. Two solutions presented themselves, and I ended up using both. The first is to come up with something mean to do to those creatures you steal, so you can keep stealing more. Diamond Valley (sac a creature to gain it's toughness in life) proved just the place to dump the bodies. I also started to explore longer term enhancements for the old man. For example, Aspect of Wolf works better than Giant Growth because the old man can grab something and hold on.

But I generally dislike enchant creature spells. They are the easiest way to make something big fast, it's very easy to lose two cards for one if they kill the creature. Let that happen a couple times and you've lost. So I started looking in to alternatives. At about the same time I found another card, Tracker, that fits perfectly into this theme. He's a 2/2 for 2. For you can tap him to have him exchange damage with a target creature.

When I was in Maine a couple weekends ago my brothers showed me some of the latest magic cards. They have this new kind of artifact called "equipement." They're basically a bunch of pumped up varients on Tawnos's Weaponry, artifacts that enhance creatures in a semi-perminant manner, but don't die when the creature does. Leif uses them to great effect in a thallid deck, basically taking a dispossible 1/1 token creature and blowing it up to large proportions. Then if you kill the token creature he just recycles the equipment onto another token creature. A nice little decentralized threat concept.

So I did it, I actually put Tawnos's Weaponry in a deck, along with a few Giant Growths and Aspect of Wolf. Wyluli Wolf even made a showing, a little green guy that lets you pump up another creature +1/+1. Control Magic and Serendib Efreet give it that power edge it needed to contend with non-gimmick decks, while birds and elves give it the speed edge it needs. If you draw a mana creature in your starting hand you can play just about any card in the deck the second hand (Old Man, Tracker, Serendib). All in all, for a fun blue/green deck it can be rather effective and is just a blast to play.

posted by Nils T. Devine  # Monday, April 18, 2005