Magic the Gathering

Casual

EDH Deck Layer 1/Layer 2

By Ben Mcdole ⋅ December 22, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

The fact that I’m writ­ing about this deck after Prog­en­i­tus and Phage is fairly ironic since I had been using this deck long before the other two. The name of this deck is Layer 1/Layer 2, and the gen­eral is Sakashima, the Imposter. I know that a good por­tion of the read­ers here are prob­a­bly rolling their eyes and glar­ing at a mono-blue gen­eral, but hear me out! There are very few coun­ter­spells in this deck, and the ones that are there are just made for amusement.

Before I jump into the deck and it’s sub­tleties I should prob­a­bly present the list:

The name of the deck is layer 1/layer 2, which comes from the “lay­ers” for the inter­ac­tion of con­tin­u­ous effects, some­thing that most judges dis­like greatly. Ever won­der what hap­pens when you copy a land that’s been ani­mated then stolen by another player, then had a counter placed on it, then been lig­ni­fied? Well the inter­ac­tion of con­tin­u­ous effects solves that rid­dle for us. Luck­ily inter­ac­tions don’t get quite that wacky for this deck, but they can be rough.

As you’ve prob­a­bly sur­mised by look­ing at the list above, layer 1 is the copy layer and layer 2 is the con­trol layer, both of which guided this deck’s con­struc­tion. Nearly every­thing in here aims to copy or con­trol some­one else’s items and then promptly use it against them. The unwrit­ten rule of our EDH group is that if you steal someone’s per­ma­nent you need to use it against them, and if you live by that prin­ci­ple you’ll find this deck to be great fun. We will go over a few of the trick­ier rules inter­ac­tions that can come up, but first a few of the card choices.

Being the per­son at a table play­ing the blue deck usu­ally means you’ve got a tar­get on your head. Blue is lit­er­ally a four let­ter word! Face it, no one likes hav­ing their spells coun­tered (or at least not every sin­gle spell). Notice the coun­ter­spells in this deck, Deser­tion, Spell­jack, Com­man­deer all steal your opponent’s per­ma­nents when they counter the spell. Cryp­tic Com­mand is the only “pure” coun­ter­spell in the deck, and really it’s just there because it’s the swiss army knife of coun­ter­spells. Once play­ers see the pur­pose of your deck they are usu­ally a lot more will­ing to ease up and let the fun happen.

A big advan­tage for this deck is also the abil­ity to use every­one else’s crea­tures at a pretty sweet dis­count. Why tap out like a sucker to play some giant mon­ster when you can just clone it for four mana? Also, with the recent rules changes and the gen­eral no longer being immune to the leg­end rule this deck is also packed full of strip mines for gen­er­als. Just remem­ber to pay it for­ward! If you take/copy some­thing from some­one you need to attack them with it. Killing some­one with their own gen­eral (yes it is gen­eral dam­age) gets you some seri­ous style points!

I’d like to make a few quick notes on some of the more expen­sive cards. Timetwister orig­i­nally was not in the deck. The EDH rules com­mit­tee banned Gift’s Ungiven and so I dropped Timetwister into the slot. I’m sure there are a few good replace­ments out there, Roil Ele­men­tal def­i­nitely being one of them. Addi­tion­ally, I’m run­ning Mana Crypt because it is absolutely absurd in the early game. There have been sev­eral occa­sions of cast­ing a turn two Bribery using Mana Crypt, which to me makes it worth hav­ing. That being said, Cold­steel Heart and Mind Stone are both fine replace­ments at a more rea­son­able price.

And now on to a few tricky rules inter­ac­tions that can come up. If you copy a per­ma­nent with an enter the bat­tle­field trig­ger (exam­ple, Solemn Sim­u­lacrum), then you will get that trig­gered abil­ity as well. So Clone, Shapeshifter, etc will all get you that addi­tional land, and bet­ter yet, draw you cards when they leave the bat­tle­field. Turn­ing up a Vesu­van Shapeshifter, on the other hand, will not get you the enter the bat­tle­field trig­ger since the Shapeshifter is already on the battlefield.

I should also note the way per­ma­nents are copied. Clone type effects like to use “copi­able val­ues,” which means a great many things. Rather than have to mem­o­rize all the copi­able val­ues, just think of the copy as lit­er­ally being a Xerox of the card being cloned. So any extra enchant­ments, coun­ters, bonuses aren’t copied. The only excep­tion (and this one does come up), is that if you make a copy of some­thing that’s already copy­ing some­thing else you get two copies of the same­thing. So if I clone your Griz­zly Bears and then Shapeshifter the Clone I essen­tially get two copies of Griz­zly Bears.

Another unique inter­ac­tion that can come up is what hap­pens when a player con­trols another play­ers per­ma­nent and then one of the play­ers leaves the game. Well, it really all depends on how the per­ma­nent got there in the first place! If I have used Sower of Temp­ta­tion to con­trol someone’s crea­ture and then I leave the game the con­trol effect ends and they get their crea­ture back. That’s a lit­tle dif­fer­ent from some­thing like Bribery. If I have someone’s crea­ture through a Bribery type effect and then I leave the game the crea­ture becomes exiled. Notice the dif­fer­ence, one crea­ture was under my con­trol from a con­trol change effect, the other was not.

I’ve selected all the cards for this deck because they’re usu­ally wacky, and they def­i­nitely amuse me. That being said, if there are cards in here that gen­uinely frus­trate or annoy your play­group feel free to remove them. It’s alright to have “house rules” and “house banned lists”, do what makes your group have the most fun.

There was a recent arti­cle by Shel­don Men­ery (the god­fa­ther of EDH), on the cards that annoy him, or that he thinks are unfun. As it hap­pens some of those cards have made an appear­ance in this deck. Sensei’s Divin­ing Top is a big un-fun insti­ga­tor. You’re play­ing a casual game with friends, do things out of order. We top dur­ing our turn or search dur­ing our turn and just reserve the right to change our choices. Tak­ing sim­ple mea­sures like that make tutor effects less annoy­ing and top sig­nif­i­cantly less time con­sum­ing. I think the bot­tom line is that if peo­ple aren’t hav­ing fun, then some­thing should change and some­one doesn’t know to change unless some­one tells them.

With that bit of seri­ous­ness out of the way I’d also like to take some time to remind every­one about the con­test cur­rently going on! I’ve received a good num­ber of entries but the slo­gan com­pe­ti­tion is still wide open! Just remem­ber, send me an e-mail with your name and the slo­gan you’ve come up with to ben.mcdole@gmail.com and I’ll take care of the rest. In a week some­one will be a free judge Demonic Tutor richer and I’ll have an awe­some new catch phrase, every­one wins! Until next time, this is Ben remind­ing you [your catch phrase here]!

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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