So, given that I'm running a Ravnica-set D&D campaign with the Phyrexians as the big bads, the focus on them in MTG's canon story has been useful to me for inspiration (I picked them just because I'm an old school MTG fan who started playing first during Fallen Empires and not long after our campaign started, Vorinclex showed up on Kaldheim).
The newest set is Phyrexia: All Will Be One, which puts these fantasy-genre cybernetic body horror monsters front and center (there's a card, I can't remember the name, that shows a bunch of humanoid Phyrexians who could very easily just be the Borg from Star Trek).
Now, I'll confess that I'm not the most adventurous deck builder. Arena's system where anyone can get any card pretty easily is a bit of a double-edged sword. On one hand, you can get all the coolest cards. On the other hand, there's less incentive to try to scrape together a functional deck with just the stuff you have. Most players it seems are working with the carefully-crafted deck archetypes that the pros use.
That makes these early days of a new set kind of exciting. You don't really know what the good deck types and good cards are, so you scrape together what works. The downside is that you still encounter a lot of the really strong decks from the past set's era, which usually blows you out of the water with your weird new one. But occasionally, you wind up playing something that's just out of left field enough to work pretty well against people expecting you to play a certain way.
There are two decks I've found pretty satisfying to play - even if they're still not tuned up fully yet.
The first is a mono-black deck that uses a cool new threat called Archfiend of the Dross. This is a 6/6 flyer for 2BB - yes, it's cheap and huge. It also causes your opponent to lose 2 life any time a creature they control dies. The big and scary-sounding downside is that it starts with 4 oil counters, and each upkeep, you remove one of those counters. Once it's out of oil, you lose the game.
That sounds scary, and is clearly the downside that justifies its absurdly low cost for its size. The thing is: this gives you four turns to attack your opponent with a 6/6 flying creature. That means there's a good chance that you're going to swing in for the kill before you run out of oil - 24 total damage is more than enough to win. But then, also consider that you'll likely be removing more life from the opponent. One creature down and now the archfiend can finish the game in three attacks.
A creature surviving four turns is pretty rare in Magic anyway - you might swing in once and it dies to some removal, and now the downside has disappeared.
The other terrifying threat in this deck is Phyrexian Obliterator (a creature I've homebrewed stats for in the aforementioned D&D game - though it's not quite as nasty, if I'm honest). This is a reprint of a card that basically took its inspiration (the Negator - which I've also homebrewed) and turned the punishing drawback into a horrifying bonus. Again for just 4 mana (though it's BBBB, so good luck using that in a multicolor deck) you get a 5/5 trampler, and when it takes damage the opponent needs to sacrifice permanents equal to the damage dealt. Note that nowhere does it say "nonland permanents."
My experience with the Obliterator is that most opponents know that it's way more punishing to kill one of these things with damage than to just let it swing through and hit them - though any sort of kill, bounce, exile, or otherwise nondamaging removal spell works just fine. Still, I did play against an Izzet Prowess deck and the opponent must have either been desperate or not understood the text, because they buffed up a creature to kill my Obliterator and they wound up having to sacrifice literally everything they had on the board to start from scratch (or, they would have if they hadn't just conceded there - I can't blame them).
The deck uses a few black staples like Graveyard Tresspasser, Liliana of the Veil (a card I always feel a little skeptical about) and lots of removal. Gix's Command combos very well with the Archfiend especially against go-wide Soldier decks.
The other thing I've been trying to do is build a solid Toxic deck. Toxic is the new Infect/Poisonous ability that decouples the number of poison counters from the power of the creature (I actually wonder if this could become a retroactive keyword on old cards like Surveil did - does my Marsh Viper from The Dark now just say "Toxic 2?")
Initially I wanted to try using the new Phyrexian Mite tokens as a go-wide strategy with Toxic, but I'm not convinced it really works that well. I've had more luck with a Golgari deck of my own clumsy design that gets a bunch of cheap creatures (that are probably too simple to be considered by really competitive constructed players) with flight or deathtouch to make blocking them either more difficult or more costly. Venerated Rotpriest is a 1/2 for G that has Toxic 1 and also causes your opponent to get a poison counter whenever they target any of your creatures. Given how cheap my creatures are, this creates a bit of tension when it comes to removal spells where it might be worse to remove them than to just let them hit you (especially if I can get multiple Rotpriests out). Another insane green card here is Bloated Contaminator, a 4/4 with trample for just 2G (man, power creep is real) that has Toxic 1 but also lets you Proliferate when you hit the opponent with it. 4 power and trample along with Toxic is pretty nasty.
I can't say that this Golgari Deck is quite off the ground yet, but I've definitely racked up a few wins with it.
I will say, I now it's been a few years since they stopped doing "blocks," but I kind of miss it. I know that they've been able to introduce a lot of new ideas this way, but I also think that it often means that the really distinctive mechanics of any given setting or set wind up usually falling behind more general and kind of perpetual deck archetypes.
Also, while I don't really follow the Magic story very closely, I am struck by how this set really feels like it represents the darkest hour. While originally introduced in Antiquities, I think the original Phyrexian saga could be said to have run from Tempest Block through Invasion Block, so about four years. This one, has, I guess, gotten three years (certainly coming about after the War of the Spark). I do wonder if the relatively low bodycount from the War of the Spark and the complaints about it encouraged the folks at WotC to kill off a lot more established characters (to be fair, Jaya Ballard's the only one who has really died-died, but of course a lot of these folks have gotten a fate worse than death).
The Phyrexian plot here does suggest to me that they might pull back on the restrictions on planar travel that happened after Time Spiral. This allowed them to make Planeswalker cards in the first place, but I almost feel like, as cool as that is, Planeswalkers have kind of taken the place of Legendary Creatures, and now it's like anyone who isn't a planeswalker is an NPC in the planeswalkers' stories.
Anyway, the new set is gross and so far I'm having fun with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment