Magic the Gathering

Casual

pIRATE! The deck

By Ben Mcdole ⋅ November 24, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

Every year Wiz­ards of the Coast comes up with some fan­tas­tic faux prod­uct for April Fool’s Day. Last year Wiz­ards made some big waves with Duel Decks: Pirates vs. Nin­jas. I remem­ber walk­ing in to Armada games that Fri­day and being greeted by the news that “WotC is mak­ing a new duel deck that has Watery Grave, Trop­i­cal Island and Island of Wak-Wak in it!” Need­less to say, sev­eral of the gamers had missed the boat, so to speak, regard­ing the whole April Fools aspect. I really like the poten­tial fun for such a Duel Deck and I think it’s about time for an EDH ver­sion of pirates!

As is the case with all of my EDH decks, we start off by pick­ing a gen­eral. We want to be as close to the orig­i­nal as pos­si­ble, which means we want a four color deck and a four color gen­eral. The orig­i­nal deck described Ramirez DePietro lead­ing the pirates into bat­tle, but unfor­tu­nately the rules of EDH won’t quite per­mit that. Instead, we need to try and find a gen­eral which fits our col­ors and still has some­thing of a pirate theme.

There are pre­cisely zero four color leg­ends. That forces us to either aban­don a color (not nearly as fun), or jump to five col­ors. I choose to jump to five col­ors and pick up all sorts of other fun cards in the process. For my gen­eral (which I might remind you is mostly for show in this deck), I selected Prog­en­i­tus. Really none of the five color gen­er­als fit the pirate theme and the art­work on Prog­en­i­tus is a giant hydra! Giant sea mon­ster look­ing crea­tures are hard to come by, and what bet­ter to rep­re­sent the scourge of the seas than an essen­tially un-killable beast! Take that ninjas!

With the gen­eral now out of the way, let’s take a look at the orig­i­nal deck and see what we can sal­vage.

I want to try and stay as close to the spirit of the orig­i­nal deck as pos­si­ble. Unfor­tu­nately, there are a few things we will need to get rid of, namely the unglued/unhinged cards. Toy Boat, Loose Lips, and Car­niv­o­rous Death Par­rot have all got to go, as does Dou­ble Cross. For­tu­nately, in their place we can add Talas Air Ship, Talas Mer­chant, Talas Researcher, and Ghost Ship, three cards which have been errata’ed recently to become pirates, and a fourth that’s just bad ass.

This brings our total of cards up to sixty-one cards, includ­ing Prog­en­i­tus of course. One big issue though, is the dis­tinct lack of lands. The orig­i­nal list WotC put forth only had six­teen lands, and only one island. Notice that a lot of the ship themed cards require us to have Islands in play at the time. A major over­haul of the land base is in order if we want this deck to be remotely playable.

I feel like some­where in the neigh­bor­hood of thirty-nine lands is appro­pri­ate for this deck. This means adding in twenty-three lands, which brings out total to eighty-four, giv­ing us six­teen slots to play around with. It’s impor­tant to me that we find the most fun and amus­ing eigh­teen cards to toss in our pirate themed shenani­gan pile!

There are a few crea­tures we can add in imme­di­ately. Dwar­ven Sea Clan and Red Cliffs Armada are both sea-faring crea­tures who would hap­pily join our pirate raid­ing crew! Addi­tion­ally, Ink­fathom Divers would be of great assis­tance look­ing for trea­sure, or per­haps plan­ning sneak attacks. Mer­folk Looter and Cephalid Looter are both fans of loot­ing, some­thing key to the pirate mentality.

Any good ship also needs some direc­tion, which is why Hanna, Ship’s Nav­i­ga­tor also makes the cut. Hanna of course needs an Explorer’s Scope to help find her way. When head­ing Into the Roil it’s impor­tant to be able to pro­tect your­self. While Doom Can­non cer­tainly sounds threat­en­ing I can’t help but feel a Fod­der Can­non is also called for, though it’s ulti­mately the dis­cre­tion of the cap­tain, who might have a spe­cial Captain’s Maneu­ver in mind.

There are of course many dan­gers at sea, no mat­ter how skilled the crew. You could always Cap­size, fight a Deep-Sea Kraken, or just wind up as part of the Sea Floor Debris. In order to keep from hav­ing the Mark of Mutiny stamped on their head a good cap­tain will take time to relax at a refuge (Jwar Isle Refuge). Every refuge of ill repute has busty wenches of course, which make you want to repli­cate (Rip­tide Repli­ca­tor, because you can’t Pil­lage all the time)! Once the relax­ation is over it’s time to her­ald your way back to sea (Brass Her­ald), and offer a paean to the god of the tides him­self Lorthos, the Tide­maker!

Hav­ing now worked our way up to the appro­pri­ate num­ber of cards, and in story fash­ion no less, we need to focus on the mana base a lit­tle bit. We’ve already got six­teen lands down, we need twenty-one more.

There are a few oblig­a­tory inclu­sions. Under­ground Sea, Vol­canic Island, Flooded Strand, and Pol­luted Delta all feel like they should go in the deck. In addi­tion to being water/island themed they help us get some much needed color sta­bi­liz­ing. Bad River has a pic­ture of a buz­zard eat­ing car­rion, that’s about as hard­core and pirate as a land can get!

There need to be more pure islands in the deck, non-basic land hate is pretty strong in my area. Six more islands are suf­fi­cient. This gives us lands to fetch using the fetch lands and also allows us to lit­er­ally sail the seven seas. I’m ok with allow­ing Reflect­ing Pool in the deck, but only if we include Undis­cov­ered Par­adise as well. We need another eight lands, and ide­ally ones that tap for mul­ti­ple col­ors, or allow us access to the other lands in the deck. Wan­der­wine Hub gives us access to some much needed white mana, as will Vivid Creek. Yav­i­maya Coast and Shivan Reef both help greatly in keep­ing with a nau­ti­cal theme and fil­ter­ing in those extra col­ors. Both Rhys­tic Cave and Dromar’s Cav­ern also tap for mul­ti­ple col­ors while also keep­ing in theme as well. Don’t for­get that the Cave lets you turn on Reflect­ing Pool for any color!

Even the most scurvy of pirates needs a break every once in a while. As a vaca­tion spot I am includ­ing a Swamp and a plains for our pirates to raze and pil­lage while they take a break from their usual jobs of raz­ing and pil­lag­ing. That brings us to a hun­dred cards exactly, just what we need for our final list chock full of kick-assery.

To quote the author Mad­dox, “This deck is so full of ass-kickery they’ll have to import colons just to meet quota.” Every­thing pirate just hap­pens to be amaz­ing and this deck does not devi­ate. Look for­ward to next week when I bring you their shad­owy coun­ter­parts the ninja. There are those who might say that nin­jas are the bet­ter of the two, and EDH can be our test­ing grounds!

Until next time this is Ben McDole remind­ing you “Arrrrh, give me your booty!” …err giv­ing you a hun­dred rea­sons to play magic!

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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