Magic the Gathering

Constructed

Magic the Classroom – Redundancy

By Dan Eckstein ⋅ January 20, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

A few months ago peo­ple were scream­ing at Wiz­ards. “Those cheap money grab­bers just printed this….”

“When they could have just reprinted this…..”

Every­one was all up in arms. I just ask “really?” Is this a money grab by Wiz­ards? I mean even if a 2/2 vanilla for 2 mana was in a deck would you really have to shell out the big bucks for this lit­tle com­mon. Just go to any good size draft tour­ney and ask who got it. They’ll prob­a­bly give you a full play­set for free. How is this a money grab? Let’s not for­get that in WOTC his­tory we also have: Ash­coat Bear (bonus Flash), Bal­du­vian Bears, Bear Cub, and For­est Bear. And that’s just the actual Bears. The list gets even longer if you throw out the crea­ture type and just look at 2/2’s for 1G.

Wiz­ards is always print­ing cards that func­tion the same as other cards. Let’s face it the cre­ative­ness and new ideas going into mechan­ics alone can be daunt­ing. Now we want every new card to func­tion dif­fer­ently than all the other bazil­lion cards that have been printed before. Be hon­est, many of you would com­plain about the learn­ing curve get­ting harder and harder. Also our rules text on a card would start look­ing like Yu-Gi-Oh and who wants that?

Instead we can use these func­tional reprints to our advan­tage. How? By abus­ing the 4 copy rule that’s how. Here is a quote from the Basic Rule Book.

There are two rules: Your deck must have at least 60 cards, and your deck can’t have more than four copies of any sin­gle card (except for basic lands).

Now imag­ine that you really want to play with a 2/2 Bear. With both Griz­zly Bears and Runeclaw Bears you now have 8 cards that serve the same func­tion. (Why would you want this? I don’t know but it serves as an exam­ple. Maybe if Mas­ter of the Wild Hunt made Bears instead of Wolves.) Even you didn’t worry about pesky things like For­mat you could actu­ally build a deck with 24 2/2 Bears. That’ll make your inner Cub Scout happy. The math no longer is a ques­tion of prob­a­bil­ity but instead a state­ment of inevitability.

When Zendikar first came out I brushed on this mat­ter a lit­tle bit when I pre­sented a cou­ple of decks that could abuse the fact that you could now basi­cally have 8 Wrath of Gods in your Extended deck. Between Day of Judg­ment and Wrath of God I fig­ured that some Con­trol Decks would get a leg up on a Zoo heavy envi­ron­ment. So far it appears that I was wrong on that one (SO FAR). In fact the only case that I’ve heard for car­ry­ing both is to avoid Med­dling Mage shut downs. I per­son­ally don’t think I’ll ever hear Med­dling Mage being played declar­ing Wrath of God as its card of choice.

But redun­dancy doesn’t stop at exact reprints. What we want to look for is func­tional Reprints. If you where Mono Red in Extended how many cards can destroy lands on turn 3? How about turn 4?

• Avalanche Rid­ers
• Cry­oclasm
• Demol­ish
• Ful­mi­na­tor Mage
• Gob­lin Runeblaster
• Ice Fall
• Molten Rain
• Poi­son the Well
• Seis­mic Spike
• Stone Rain
• Sun­der from Within

And that’s not includ­ing more expen­sive tricks or cards like Detri­ti­vore. That’s quite a choice. If we could build a deck that also sur­vived until all of this LD could get going we would have a con­tender deck. But alas going 1 for 1 with decks that drop 3/3’s on the first turn just isn’t going to work. (I do think it would be cool to have an active Eme­ria with Avalanche Rid­ers in the Yard.) It still serves as another exam­ple of how we can math­e­mat­i­cally assure our­selves of the card we want.

This week we are going to build a deck that uses Rean­i­ma­tion as a theme. In a world with Dredge hate it isn’t going to work and it won’t be any­where near as good as Dredge but the Redun­dancy theme will be there.

What do you need for a Rean­i­ma­tor deck any way? First you need Tar­gets, crea­tures that you can rean­i­mate that’ll truly put your oppo­nent on a clock. Sec­ond, you need ways to get them into your grave­yard so that you can dig them up later. Third, you need some cards that will serve as shov­els and bring them up out of the Grave for your plea­sure. I also add a fourth com­po­nent to today’s build and that’s accel­er­a­tion. Like Land Destruc­tion it appears that Wiz­ards is more than happy to have Rean­i­ma­tion cost 4 mana. I would rather have my Uber Crit­ters hit the field on turn three. The added ben­e­fit of need­ing less lands in the deck helps us as well. It seems con­ve­nient to split the deck as fol­lows. 20 Land, 10 Tar­gets, 10 Dis­cards, 10 Shov­els, and 10 Accelerants.

So basi­cally I want to see if there are enough func­tional spells for each category.

Are there enough tar­gets? The answer is an emphatic YES! With lit­tle thought you can prob­a­bly make a list of 10 dif­fer­ent indi­vid­ual cards even though you only need 3 (2 four of’s and 1 2 of). I myself like to diver­sify and I don’t like to put more than one leg­endary in a deck. I like my rean­i­ma­tions to have at least 5 power and some extra abil­i­ties. First abil­ity I desire is Vig­i­lance. Extended options would be:

• Akroma, Angel of Wrath
• Arbiter of Knollridge
• Bull Cerodon
• God­sire
• Meglonoth
• Nacatl Hunt Pride
• Oakg­narl Warrior
• Razia, Boros Archangel
• Sphinx of the Steel Wind
• Twi­light Shepherd

This list is long enough but let’s look at some other options as well. Aside from Vig­i­lance I like Haste next. The thing with Rean­i­ma­tor is you need to Hit and win before your oppo­nent finds answers. Drop­ping and Swing­ing goes a long way to mak­ing that happen.

• Akroma, Angel of Wrath
• Bull Cerodon
• Garza Zol, Plague Queen
• Hel­lkite Charger
• Hel­lkite Overlord
• Kar­rthus, Tyrant of Jund
• Razia, Boros Archangel
• Stalk­ing Vengence
• Thrax­imundar

Another impres­sive list. Notice the repeat offend­ers. They should def­i­nitely make our final list. The final thing I look for is some kind of eva­sion. Noth­ing is more annoy­ing than hav­ing all the mus­cle on the field and being stopped by some Insect Token. The two above list yield plenty of options so I stick with these.

• Akroma, Angel of Wrath
• Garza Zol, Plague Queen
• God­sire
• Kar­rthus, Tyrant of Jund
• Meglonoth (2)
• Razia, Boros Archangel
• Sphinx of the Steel Wind (2)
• Thrax­imundar

Dis­card effects are our next con­sid­er­a­tion. We’ll try to limit our­selves to cards with 2 or less mana costs. That way we will be able to use our actual rean­i­ma­tion on turn 3 or 4. The list of one drops is plenty long to reach our 10.

• Black­mail
• Cry of Contrition
• Funeral Charm
• Greenseeker
• Light­ning Axe
• Llanowar Men­tor
• Piracy Charm
• Raven’s Crime
• Thought­seize

I per­son­ally notice the Llanowar Men­tor first. It gives me a dis­card out­let as well as a mana accel­er­ant. How I count it is two copies for Dis­card and two for the mana. Raven’s Crime is also a very easy fix and will take advan­tage of our extra mana we’re sure to have. Finally I chose Funeral Charm because of the addi­tional options. Thought­sieze is also a great card but the Charm is eas­ier on the pocket book.

The list of true rean­i­ma­tion spells is a bit shorter but still very func­tional. Almost to a card each does the same thing. Return tar­get crea­ture from the Grave­yard to the Battlefield.

• Doomed Necro­mancer
• Dread Return
• Makeshift Man­nequin
• Res­ur­rec­tion
• Vigor Mor­tis
• Zomb­ify

The dou­ble white for Res­ur­rec­tion throws it out. Also the tap­ping require­ment for Doomed Necro­mancer makes it to vul­ner­a­ble. Makeshift Man­nequin is also too risky I don’t want my Glo­rius Rean­i­mated Angel of Dis­pair to be removed by a sim­ple Dis­fig­ure (or maybe I do). That leaves me with Dread Return, Vigor Mor­tis, and Zomb­ify. If I chose a best of these it would be Vigor Mor­tis since I’m look­ing to use Green any­way. Also don’t for­get to look for token Gen­er­a­tors in your Tar­get list if you run a full Dread Return set. There will be times where you may hard cast a Dread Return to rean­i­mate a token maker and then sac the tokens for a sec­ond re-up in the same turn.

Finally, we look at accel­er­ants. Since we’re involv­ing Green there are plenty to choose from. I per­son­ally avoid the “mana dorks” since they are so frag­ile. Instead I focused on cards that are less likely to see main deck removal. Remem­ber that I’ve already com­mit­ted 2 of my 10 slots to Llanowar Men­tor ear­lier. Here are my choices.

• Chrome Mox
• Cold­steel Heart
• Fell­ware Stone
• Fer­tile Ground
• Gol­gari Signet
• Tal­is­man of Dominance
• Tal­is­man of Impulse
• Tal­is­man of Indulgence
• Tal­is­man of Unity
• Utopia Sprawl

From this I will stay with 2 Llanowar Men­tor and add in a play­set of Fer­tile Ground and Utopia Sprawl. Which will leave us with the fol­low­ing list.

Redun­dant Reanimator

1 Akroma, Angel of Wrath 1 Garza Zol, Plague Queen 1 Godsire 1 Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund 2 Meglonoth 1 Razia, Boros Archangel 2 Sphinx of the Steel Wind 1 Thraximundar 4 Llanowar Mentor 4 Raven's Crime 4 Funeral Charm 2 Dread Return 4 Vigor Mortis 4 Zombify 4 Fertile Ground 4 Utopia Sprawl 4 Verdant Catacombs 4 Overgrown Tomb 4 Llanowar Waste 4 Forest 4 Swamp

That’ll be the end of Offi­cial Class today. Now I would like to make an appeal to you all. If you live ANYWHERE near Pitts­burg (no H), Kansas please plan on attend­ing the World­wake Pre­re­lease there. My local Store Asy­lum Anime needs to have 32 play­ers in a tour­na­ment to achieve Advanced sta­tus. That would be very cool. I’ve men­tioned before how far I have to travel for big tour­na­ments. This at least would get Magic Game Day and Grand Prix Tri­als nearby. The Stores Orga­nizer has promised an extra pack of prod­uct to every par­tic­i­pant if he gets 32 so it’s a win/win.

Class dis­missed. See you on the 30th for the pre-release!

Dan is a High School Teacher who does everything he can to squeeze Magic into his schedule. Between being a Father, Husband, and Coach it’s pretty hard. Articles by Dan focus on tips and lessons for beginners that he has learned while teaching his students how to play their best. As a player Dan has a propensity to go Crazy For Combos so occasionally these articles happen as well.

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