Type 1.5

This deck has a bit of a story behind it. It started last October when my old high school roommate sent me this deck: Josh's Moat and Castle. Since then I've been considering building a competitive version of the deck.

I'll skip the part where I explain that decks must contain 60 cards, no more, no less, I've covered that before. First thing then was to make all the cards play well together. If we're playing with Moat (and of the two theme cards it's by far the better card) then we can't play any land bound creatures. So what does that leave us with for white creatures? Mesa Pegasus, Osai Vultures, and Serra Angel. Clearly the Serras are going to stay (earlier drafts of the deck contained 4), but the other two creatures just don't hold up on their own. They need supporting enchantments in order to survive creature combat with anything, and cost too much mana to be really fast. Supporting enchantments (except global ones like crusade) are a no go. So I fished around and found Thunder Spirit (tip: use the Advanced Search to generate a list of white creatures with flying) and then started thinking about adding another color.

Blue was the obvious choice for dominant flying creatures. I added Serendib Efreet and Phantasmal Forces. The Serendibs are huge for 3 mana, and at 4/1 the Forces have power equal to their casting cost, and the Castles could make them slightly less disposable (though unfortunately they were eventually squeezed out of the deck). Blue also let me play another fun card, Siren's Call, which works well with both Castle and Moat.

I started playtesting the deck at this point. It was on the right track, but just wasn't fast enough. I'm on a Type 1.5 kick, so there were no moxes for fast mana. I was playing Mana Vaults, but the trouble with them is that you have to draw them in the right order, a Vault followed by a Serra or Phantasmal Forces. Even adding in the Flying Men that I had forgotten wasn't enough. Unless I'm playing a reactive deck I want an opening move first hand every time. So I dipped in to a third color: green.

Green gave me the speed I was looking for. Scrybe Sprites clearly fit right in, Giant growths let my small/mid-sized creatures take on the big boys, and Birds of Paradise in my starting hand lets me play a Serendib or Thunder Spirit on my second turn, dominant creatures at that phase of the game, flying or no.

So that's the deck. If it weren't for the origin I'd probably ditch the Castles in favor of either the Phantasmal Forces, or a Jalum Tome or two to burn through the extra land in the middle to end game. Other than that I'd say this is a very solid deck, capable of taking on just about anything in it's class (it's about three for five against the Plague Rat test deck).

posted by Nils T. Devine  # Thursday, May 05, 2005