Magic the Gathering

Constructed

Magic the Classroom – Toolbox

By Dan Eckstein ⋅ January 27, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

If a Mechanic is only as good as the tools he pos­sesses then a Magic Player is only as good as the cards in his deck.

I think a lot of us can agree with that state­ment. The largest dif­fer­ence is a Mechanic can go to his tool­box and grab what ever he needs when­ever he needs it. On the other hand we Magic play­ers are forced to depend on our lonely draw to get us the card we need. In most cases we do things to max­i­mize our prob­a­bil­ity or odds of get­ting the card we want. Today I want to talk to about another way to get what we need.

That con­cept is the “tool­box.” A tool­box is a way to use a cer­tain card to go and get what­ever “tool” we may need. The eas­i­est exam­ple that most peo­ple are famil­iar with is Dia­bolic Tutor. With 4 copies of Dia­bolic Tutor serv­ing as a tool­box we can run mul­ti­ple tools in our deck. Most tools are sit­u­a­tional and so we only want to com­mit one slot to the card in our deck. How­ever we don’t want to be in the sit­u­a­tion where we need the card and pray­ing to top deck it. So we can put 4 Tutors in our deck with the one card. Now we have just increased our means to get­ting the card and decreased the chances of it being “dead” in our hand. It’s the best of both worlds. We do have to com­mit 4 mana in resources for this flex­i­bil­ity but for many decks it’s worth it.

Not all tools are sit­u­a­tional. Rarely may you need a 6mm Allen wrench but you’ll often need a Phillips head screw­driver. If you look an actual tool­box you’re likely to see just one set of Allen wrenches but you’ll find mul­ti­ple Phillips heads. This can be true of decks as well. I’ve had many arti­cles where I’ve pro­claimed the value of run­ning 4 of a card in every deck. With a good tool­box card you can run essen­tially 8 copies of a card. The 4 slots for the card itself and the 4 Dia­bolic Tutors the can get the card for you.

Of course there are decks where we land in between these two extremes within your tool­box. Some­times because of other require­ments like using the Burn­ing Wish Tool­box to get Mind’s Desire in TEPS (my favorite deck EVER). You had to have 1 copy of Mind’s Desire in your Side­board to Wish for it there­fore mak­ing you go 4 Burn­ing Wish with 3 Mind’s Desire in your actual deck. Or maybe you feel 6 copies is enough so you run­ning 4 Tool­box with 2 Tar­gets. If your tool­box is only there to get one tar­get you may want to use only 2 Tool­boxes with 4 of your Tar­get card also.

Spe­cial­ized Toolbox

Dia­bolic Tutor prob­a­bly rep­re­sents the all inclu­sive Tool­box because it can retrieve any card you would want but most tool­box cards have spe­cific require­ments. Take Trin­ket Mage for exam­ple. Its tools are spe­cial­ized to be only 1 or less cast­ing cost arti­facts. The trade off for going spe­cial­ized allows a Tricket Mage tool­box to come in play for 1 less mana than Dia­bolic Tutor and gain a 2/2 body at the same time. In the right deck the restricted card selec­tion isn’t a much a lia­bil­ity as the poten­tial gain. Remem­ber the mage can get 0cc or Xcc arti­facts as well. Look at an Extended Thop­tor Sword list.

While we only run 2 Mages you can see the ton of choices we have once a Mage is played. You can get sim­ple lands to fix you col­ors if needed with Seat of the Synod and Ancient Den. You can accel­er­ate with a Chrome Mox if you chose but the real cool plays are the fact you have Chal­ice of the Void, Engi­neered Explo­sives, Pithing Nee­dle and Tormod’s Crypt avail­able in game one. Each of those cards can poten­tially wreck an opponent’s deck before they can bring in any threat/answers from their board.

The Spe­cial­ized Tool­box is very playable as you can see. It’s like hav­ing a set of tools that can only work on Porsche auto­mo­biles. While you can’t work for every­one you can cer­tainly charge a lot more for your work.

Vari­able Toolbox

Some Tool­boxes are not as con­trol­lable. The card itself can force you to either limit your choices or allow your oppo­nent to have voice in the mat­ter. Using the same list above we see a very used exam­ple. Gifts Ungiven is like Dia­bolic Tutor in that it can get any card you want. In fact it goes beyond that get­ting any 4 cards you may want (as long as they’re dif­fer­ently named). It has the same mana cost so it has to give some­thing back for the extra cards. That some­thing is giv­ing your oppo­nent a choice of what you get and what goes to the yard. At first thought many play­ers would think that this would mean the two best cards would be goners and you would be stuck with the 3rd and 4th best choice. But once again in the right deck you can get the right 4 cards so you oppo­nent has no real choice but to let you get the play you want.

Another way a tool­box can be vari­able is to have it based on unknown quan­tity. In the Gifts Ungiven exam­ple the unknown was what your oppo­nents would choose but some­times it’s what your choices may be. Peer through Depths is cur­rently a pop­u­lar choice. While it will fetch you an instant or sor­cery you just don’t know what that Spell will be since you don’t know the top cards of your library. Of course there are tricks that help you con­trol the top of your library mak­ing Peer much stronger but then you start mak­ing the mana cost more equiv­a­lent to Dia­bolic Tutor.

My Favorite Toolbox

I cur­rently run a deck that that uses more tools than you can shake a stick at. (What­ever that means).

Prob­a­bly the best way to explain how I built this deck is to start at the fin­ish line.

Or some­times I’ll use this Machine Gun to finish.

Or still some play­ers pre­fer this.

Get­ting to any of these requires either a ton of mana or a good tool­box. Notice that these are all crea­ture based combo’s. That leads us to our sig­na­ture Tool­box. Tooth and Nail serves at 7 mana as two Dia­bol­ics in one card as long as you are only fetch­ing crea­tures. But for a measly two more mana it also plays them which is equiv­a­lent to two Dra­matic Entrances but for any color crea­tures. Let’s com­pare, using nine mana I can get 18 mana worth of spells from just one card. That’s quite a tool­box. And by the way those two crea­tures prob­a­bly win you the game.

Then we enter into how to gen­er­ate that mana. Most play­ers use cards like Expe­di­tion Map, Syl­van Scry­ing, and Reap and Sow to get either Cloud­post or the Urza lands. While these are all good Spe­cial­ized Tool­boxes I went a dif­fer­ent route. My box is accessed by Drift of Phan­toms. The trans­mute mechanic is a very use­ful tool­box abil­ity. While extremely focused and spe­cial­ized in the right deck it can also be very ver­sa­tile for one less mana than Dia­bolic Tutor. In this deck the Drifts serve as copies 5,6,7, and 8 of mul­ti­ple cards. All of them I want max pos­si­bil­i­ties of hav­ing on turn 3. Early Har­vest, Heart­beat of Spring, Invoke the Fire­mind, and Maga, Trai­tor to Mor­tals all slip into the deck. This pro­vides me with both Mana Accel­er­a­tion and Alter­nate win conditions.

In order to max­i­mize my chances of get­ting the Drifts which lead to mana to play Tooth and Nail I’ll sup­port with another tool­box. Weird Har­vest is a good fetcher card like Tooth and Nail. While not nearly as pow­er­ful since it lacks the abil­ity to put the crea­ture in play it is insanely less expen­sive. For the same mana a Dia­bolic Tutor we can get two cards instead of just one. Sure our oppo­nent gets some as well but I per­son­ally can deal with that.

To help gen­er­ate basic mana faster I’ll also use Ram­pant Growth and Sakura Tribe Elder. Notice that these cards both have a con­verted mana cost of 2 just like Weird Har­vest. So I fig­ure I can add another Trans­muter with Mud­dle the Mix­ture.

That leaves us with this final Deck.

That’s my tool­box list. Notice how almost every can search your library for some­thing else. I’m prob­a­bly going to add a sin­gle Omnath, Locus of Mana in the future. After all he’s driftable.

For today’s home­work I would like you all to post your favorite tool­box card and the tool you most often get from it.

Also don’t for­get to attend a Pre­re­lease near you and if you live near Pitts­burg, Kansas attend the one at Asy­lum Anime!

Class Dis­missed.

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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