On Nov 15, 2004, at 5:49 PM, Jim Sharkey wrote:
I'm and have been a Magic player, myself. (Though you do tend to accrue stacks of cards. My trading stock is thousands of cards deep, and I don't have a very large collection.)
Mine is quite large, *despite* having taken a Magic sabbatical for a few year while I was playing D&D regularly. What are your collection's gems? Do you play often?
Often -- hmm -- a couple times a week might or might not qualify. It's not my life.
Let's see -- gems -- well, I've analyzed as a Johnny/Timmy, which means I like weird combinations but there's also a tendency toward large creatures or lots of creatures.
So I don't have specific cards that get me really jazzed (locally we call those "Timmy chubs", since they're big and they tend to ... um, well, they excite Timmys). I've got combination decks.
One example is a work in progress that's a modified Sunburst deck. It's got several sunburst creatures, several arcbounds, several clockworks. Also a couple energy chambers, Coretappers and an Ion Storm. All five mana colors (four each) and some darksteel pendants for deck accel. Basically the energy chambers serve to "wind up" the clockwork creatures, the arcbounds have various counter advance/steal/transfer features, the sunburst are plain old muscle and the ion storm works in conjunction with the charge accumulators.
Another combo is a good old-fashioned Timmy chub green deck with some revisions. Saber ants for creature tokens, for instance, night soil to reduce opponents' graveyard recursion (and add more tokens), and some Thelonite Monks to convert lands to creatures. Handy when I summon that ole Stag Beetle. ;) (There's the Timmy in me, but it's a big ole fat beefy because of all the Johnny that goes into the combo creature development beforehand.)
One of my nastier decks features Faceless Butcher, Memnarch, Soul Foundry and Copper-Leaf Angel. The soul foundries keep me in butchers (remove target creature from game when it comes into play, return it when/if butcher is dead); the Memnarchs let me take over opponents' lands, and the angels then get pumped up when I sacrifice said lands to them. (I don't play this one very often; when some punk is getting out of line I'm likely to slap it down, though.)
I've got a fairly uncomplicated red burn deck as well, but with a twist. Dwarven Nomad to render 1/1 creatures unblockable -- but then I attack with Goblin Bowling Team. (1/1, but when it deals damage roll a 6-sider and add that to the total damage dealt.) Also there's a hornet cannon, nuisance engine and a couple fodder cannon -- the creature factories feed the cannon. (Again with the Johnny combo tendency; I can do 3 damage for 7 mana, which is expensive enough that I don't own the game when that combination gets out.) That deck also contains a goblin charbelcher, but only one. (It's a very very nasty card otherwise, or *can* be -- another Johnny characteristic is the chance element.)
White/blue deck with life gain and a Serra Avatar. No Loxodon War Hammer though. I had that in there for a while but when my life hit 180+ one game, I decided it was too broken a combination to play again. That deck does have some graveyard recursion and some basic trample, but I try not too make it too vicious. That deck's got some disenchant and other cards of that nature, along with isochron scepters to keep the instants around on an as-needed basis.
Recently constructed a black/white deck, black for life gain and white for control. Just experimenting with cross-color effects there. It plays all right; it's not very fast, it lets opponents play, and it does win sometimes, but not every time.
I'll probably be working on a black/red die-roll combo deck soon, one that uses a lot of chance for effects to come into play, but also some Goblin Bookie cards to let me reroll if I don't like how things work out the first time.
Howbout you?
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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