Magic the Gathering

Casual

Ben Pilots Progenitus in EDH

By Ben Mcdole ⋅ October 27, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

When Trick approached me to write arti­cles for ManaNation.com, I was extremely excited for the oppor­tu­nity and, truth­fully, I still am. There is a lot of Magic going on and Florida Magic specif­i­cally is grow­ing by leaps and bounds. The last two months have lit­er­ally involved me spend­ing every week­end at a pre-release, GPT, PTQ, PT, GP, or some other alpha­bet soup style acronym. For the bet­ter part this hasn’t been trou­ble­some as far as arti­cle dead­lines are con­cerned, how­ever my flight back from Austin was delayed, which became an issue last week­end. As such I missed my Tues­day arti­cle and would like to apol­o­gize to my read­ers. That being said I have a fun con­test at the end of the arti­cle which will hope­fully make up for my lack of an appear­ance last week.

But first, some EDH dis­cus­sion! I’ve been try­ing to find the pieces to update my monoblack list we’ve been work­ing on. It seems as though Cof­fin Queen is quite the prob­lem card to locate. That being said I think I’m going to shelve the MBC list for the next week or so in favor of my sec­ond favorite EDH deck, Prog­en­i­tus. I’ve made a few changes to the list in the past few weeks and I’d like to give you the updated deck:

As you can see Zendikar has been good to Prog­en­i­tus. Zendikar gives Prog­en­i­tus the full com­ple­ment of ten fetches to really bling out the mana base. In order to make room for the extra fetches I’ve removed the Shards block tri-lands and the two Vivids which were in the deck. I have noticed the extra point of pain isn’t a big deal and the abil­ity to make sure you keep tempo is just too impor­tant to ignore.

In addi­tion to the fetches Zendikar has also given the deck a heady new way to fin­ish off play­ers, Sorin Markov. Sorin com­bines the abil­ity to drain some­one for thirty life with my favorite card in EDH, Mind­slaver. In our league if you Mind­slaver some­one and use their turn to take out another player you get the points for the kill, adding a very strate­gic aspect to tak­ing some­one else’s turn. It’s also dif­fi­cult to over­look the fun of using someone’s own cards against them!

There’s also a rather pricey new addi­tion in Grim Tutor. Grim Tutor offers a saucy boost to our already potent suite of tutor effects. For those of you who are curi­ous, I picked up Grim Tutor at PT Austin. Work­ing an event like a Pro Tour you are given a box as com­pen­sa­tion for your time for the week and a pack of judge foils. While I cer­tainly keep most of my judge foils, the ones I do sell I feel oblig­ated to spend the money on some­thing magic related, in this case, a Grim Tutor. I hope to be upgrad­ing to an Impe­r­ial Seal as well in the future.

I’ve had a few peo­ple ask me how and what you should be doing with this deck, so I want to run through a few strat­egy ele­ments. The first few turns are all about accel­er­a­tion and smooth­ing. There are a few ele­ments in the deck meant to sim­ply fix mana and cre­ate some accel­er­a­tion. Prog­en­i­tus com­mands some pow­er­ful spells, but they’re also very mana inten­sive. Be sure to think care­fully when using fetch lands and search out­lets, as the wrong color mana can really set you back.

Once the deck has been thor­oughly accel­er­ated it’s really pretty hard to go wrong. Every­thing in the deck is fun to cast and planeswalk­ers are essen­tially free sor­ceries and force­fields every turn. There are plenty of recur­sion effects in the deck, so do not be too con­cerned when your planeswalk­ers get attacked. They’re just tak­ing one for the team to let you sur­vive to a dev­as­tat­ing late game.

While I did say that it’s hard to go wrong, there is an ideal sit­u­a­tion, which is first tutor­ing for Mael­strom Nexus. Nexus allows nearly every spell you cast to become a two for one, which can be a real dis­as­ter for your oppo­nents. Bitu­mi­nous Blast cas­cad­ing into Ajani Vengeant, Sorin cas­cad­ing into Void, the absolutely absurd amount of card advan­tage gen­er­ated by Nexus makes it a big tar­get, but if it stays on the board for longer than one turn you prob­a­bly win the game. A side tip, Nexus only affects the first spell you cast on your turn, so instants such as Putrefy will give you cas­cade on your oppo­nents turn. Remem­ber that the cas­cade abil­ity lets you cast the spell dur­ing the res­o­lu­tion of the trig­ger, so you get to ignore tim­ing restric­tions and go wild!

Another piece of strat­egy advice is to remem­ber that the spell being cas­caded into resolves before the spell caus­ing cas­cade. I have ended many games by cast­ing Prog­en­i­tus and cas­cad­ing into either Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker or bet­ter yet, Oblit­er­ate. Gen­eral dam­age has taken home many a pod for me. Unless your name hap­pens to be Brian Kibler it’s very dif­fi­cult to race Prog­en­i­tus, par­tic­u­larly when it is essen­tially unblock­able. Let the hydra seal up the late game. On a side note, Prog­en­i­tus has pro­tec­tion from every­thing, which means it can’t be blocked, enchanted, dam­aged, equipped, for­ti­fied, or tar­geted (remem­ber the acronym BE DEFT). Prog­en­i­tus won’t be dam­aged by global dam­age effects (Earth­quake), but will be killed by global destruc­tion effects (Wrath of God), or even a suf­fi­cient num­ber of tough­ness reduc­tions (Muti­late).

One notice­able change is the lack of Phage the Untouch­able in the deck. Phage won me a few games on the back of my oppo­nent try­ing to Telemin Per­for­mance me and com­ing up lose, or try­ing to Bribery me and com­ing up empty, but the gim­mick got a lit­tle stale. There were a few times I cast Phage and actu­ally swung to vic­tory, but those times are far out­num­bered by the amount she spent being Mind Con­trolled, Con­trol Magicked, Sower of Temp­ta­tioned, or some other such nonsense.

I also find that Phage doesn’t play well with my sec­ond favorite win con­di­tion, Oblit­er­ate. I’ve been in love with Oblit­er­ate since I started play­ing dur­ing Inva­sion block. It just struck me as such a great spell to com­bat those uppity blue mages with their Absorbs and their Under­mines and their fast cars and loud music. Oblit­er­ate man­ages to make short work of what­ever resis­tance your oppo­nents were plan­ning while keep­ing your planeswalk­ers around. There’s some­thing par­tic­u­larly sat­is­fy­ing about Oblit­er­at­ing then using Liliana’s ulti­mate abil­ity and beat­ing some­one with their own crea­tures. Funny story though, if Phage is in your grave­yard it’s not such an instant win at all! Unfor­tu­nately for Phage she had to go so Oblit­er­ate could stay.

If you have the incli­na­tion to play big Timmy splashy spells then you should give this deck a shot. Don’t let the price tag scare you off, I built this deck piece by piece and it’s come a long way since its hum­ble begin­nings. There’s some­thing very sat­is­fy­ing about cas­cad­ing off every spell you cast.

Next week I’d like to show­case an old favorite that has got­ten a lot of new toys recently, a semi-budget mono-blue EDH deck called Layer1/Layer2. It’s named after the infa­mous judge lay­ers from the inter­ac­tion of con­tin­u­ous effects. It’s a ton of fun and not too pricey either so I think every­one will enjoy it.

While I have the oppor­tu­nity I’d also like to announce a con­test I’m hold­ing. While in Austin I got to meet a few of my favorite magic writ­ers Nick Sabin, Riki Hayashi, Max Knowlan, and James Elliott. They write for a vari­ety of sites and usu­ally alter­nate their arti­cles, but they all have one thing in com­mon, a neat end­ing catch phrase! James has “may your next topdeck be lucky,” Riki has “always call a judge,” Max has (my favorite) “stay out of the penalty box.” Ok, so Nick doesn’t have a cool say­ing, but you get the idea. So I’ve decided if I’m going to write for Trick I need a cool slo­gan. This is where my read­ers save the day!

For the next two weeks I’m going to be tak­ing sub­mis­sions for a cool end of arti­cle slo­gan. At the end of two weeks I’m going to be announc­ing a win­ner. The win­ner of the slo­gan con­test will receive one judge foil Demonic Tutor! All you have to do is give me the coolest sound­ing slo­gan and I will help you pimp your EDH deck to show off to all your friends. Here’s how you enter, just e-mail me your full name and the slo­gan to Ben.McDole@gmail.com and I’ll do the rest!

My name is Benjamin McDole and I’m a level 2 judge from Tampa, Florida. When I’m not teaching math at a local college or spending time with my wife I’m usually playing EDH at Armada Games or running some events. My long term goal is to make sure everyone enjoys Magic and especially EDH as much as I do. I’m a member of a few organizations, Team Lives in the Red Zone and the American Association for the Advancement of Pie (I’m the only member!)

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