I'm going to break formula here and present an idea for a deck rather than a playtested and polished one. Here's the idea: if you sacrifice a mana producing artifact to a Priest of Yawgmoth (1, 1/2 creature, Tap to add an amount of black mana equal to target artifact's casting cost to your mana pool) you can double the artifact's mana production. Sacrifice a Basalt Monolith after tapping it and you'll have 3. Even better, sacrifice a Su-Chi and you'll trigger it's mana production side-effect and get 4.

I've learned a few lessons from the deck prototyping that I've done with this concept so far. First is that if you're playing with Su-Chi you'll want to have someplace to sink the mana should it go and get itself killed before you get a chance to sacrifice it to Yawgmoth. Mishra's Factories work well for this. Second is that of the three creatures just mentioned, the Priest of Yawgmoth is the most vulnerable, enough so that some Animate Dead might be warranted. Third, and this is probably the most obvious, have plenty of spells with X in the casting cost. Fireball is the most obvious, but Rock Hydra also works rather nicely. Using a prototype deck I cast a 21/21 hydra.

If anyone would like to share a deck they've developed from this concept either post it in the comments or email it to me. I'll refrain from posting my version (should I even have a chance to finish it) for at least a week so that you won't be influenced by anything more than my ramblings in the above paragraph (making the deadline Sunday, May 22nd for you last-minute folk).

posted by Nils T. Devine  # Sunday, May 15, 2005