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Hello folks! Welcome to the first spoiler season of 2019. I hope your day is going well.
Do you know what time it is?
Oh yes....
New Set Spoiler Time!
This is the time for reloading your favorite browser at the time ebbs to "new article post" time in your time zone (11:00 am EST). This is the time to pore over every new card to see what awesome cards are getting printed. It's a time of excitement, and more than that!
It's a time for deck-building!
Forget just collectively ogling these things. "Is this going to be good?" "What about that?"
Build decks. Let's find out!
What inspires you? What motivates you?
Here are some decks inspired by the so-far-spoiled cards coming to you from Ravnica Allegiance.
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Note that Theater of Horrors doesn't exile the cards until the end of the turn. You can play cards on your turn after some foe lost life that was exiled long ago. The cheap casting cost of the Theater allows you to drop it early and then build up the goods over time. It's not unlike a modern Knowledge Vault in that regard, which would build up over time until you discarded your hand for the cards under the Vault.
What really makes the Theater work is that you can self-activate the cards for four mana. Shoot someone's face for a damage, that damage turns to loss of life, and now you have unlocked a lot of cards!
I have the perfect shell for Theater of Horrors
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This is Death Pits of Rath. It will work to destroy any dork that takes damage, and only something like indestructible will keep it around. Now when twinned with Aether Flash, no creature can arrive to the battlefield as even if it would have survived the two damage, it will die on arrival.
To this build I am going to add a pair of indestructible dorks -
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Stuffy Doll is perfect. You can tap I to shoot itself which hurts a foe and that will let your Theater activate. It's also solid defense otherwise, and will shoot your foes as it takes damage from effects like Aether Flash. Similarly, Mogis is also very strong here as well. With a strong emphasis on not running dorks, Mogis is likely to just be a 2 life loss clock for your foes each upkeep. That gives you a strong clock, and with many of your permanents having at least 2 mana in their symbols of 
, Mogis is likely to be in play, and smash someone for 7 damage to the face.
Rakdos Party Pit | Casual | Abe Sargent
- Creatures (4)
- 2 Stuffy Doll
- 2 Mogis, God of slaughter
- Instants (6)
- 2 Urza's Rage
- 4 Lightning Bolt
- Sorceries (7)
- 3 Forked Bolt
- 4 Rolling Thunder
- Enchantments (12)
- 4 Aether Flash
- 4 Death Pits of Rath
- 4 Theater of Horrors
- Artifacts (7)
- 3 Caltrops
- 4 Kolaghan Monument
- Lands (28)
- 10 Mountain
- 10 Swamp
- 4 Lavaclaw Reaches
- 4 Mishra's Factory
So here is my Rakdos Party Pit. The goal here is to push towards Death Pits of Rath and then drop it. With folks taking damage when they drop dorks, attack into Caltrops, or you shoot them with stuff like Rolling Thunder and other burn effects. The goal is to hold out and then allow the Theater to build up a strong card-advantage shell from which you can win the game.
Your actual game winners include Rakdos Keyrune and some man-lands that will avoid your Death Pits while you are also having chances to win with Mogis and your Stuffy Doll as well as pinging with Theater. Note that some of the burn here can be split so you can do damage to multiple dorks in case they came down before the Death Pits arrive.
All right, great! What's next?
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This is Biomancer's Familiar. It's a fun card! It's basically a Training Grounds on a stick. There's a lot of value with that. It also works as a Adapt lord, but that's not the inspiration here. Instead, netting another Training Grounds is what is moving me.
Any Training Grounds or similar effect is going to be best used by a activated ability that costs precisely 3 mana:
If it costs:
1 mana - it will still cost 1 mana under the Familiar / Grounds.
2 mana - it will cost 1 mana under the Familiar/ Grounds
3 mana - it will cost 1 mana under the Familiar/ Grounds
4 mana - it will cost 2 mana under the Familiar/ Grounds
5 mana - it will cost 3 mana under the Familiar/ Grounds, etc.
You get the biggest reduction in effect for a three mana one. As you only need to spend one mana to use it.
What we really want is an activated ability that costs three mana, has at least two colorless on its cost, and doesn't require the user to tap so you can use it again and again.
Here's an example of what I am talking about:
This is Orzhov Guildmage. Now it has two activations that you could activate for a mana each as many times as you wanted. But this clearly isn't good enough to matter, we're not tossing this into the shell as no one is really going to push into four colors to run the Familiar with this.
We want to push into real effects that folks have to look at!
So let's take a look see:
Duskwatch Recruiter arrives to the battlefield ready to party on the 2nd turn, and then you can activate it for a Green mana each time to basically grab a ton of dorks from your deck. If you played Training Grounds on the first turn, then you could net up to three cards on the third turn, and flip it into a 3/3 beater that'll drop their cost on a future turn.
Level up is extremely good with these if you have the right level-up ability. Beastmaster of Bala Ged is great! Once you've cast it for 
, just another will turn it into a 4/4 dork and you can get a 6/6 trampler for in addition to what you paid, which is very flexible when spread across multiple turns.
You can also just win the game with an infinite combo...
How?
With Galvanic Alchemist! You want to soulbound it with a dork that taps for two mana, one of which needs to be 
. Might I suggest the new card from Ravnica Allegiance called Gyre Engineer?
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Once you have soulbonded it, you can tap it for , and then untap it for and leave that in your mana pool. Just rinse and repeat! I also tossed in a pair of Ley Weavers to tap and untap two lands one of which makes , and then repeat. I even gave you a Lore Weaver in case you wanted to use your mana to draw a ton of cards.
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However, my main winning conditions are Jade Mage and Rhonas the Indomitable. With the Mage, you can make 15,577 Saprolings when you've gone infinite, but even without it, just a Familiar or Grounds will let you churn out tokens for a single mana each time! You can easily go wide and win with just a few turns and those out. You can also go over someone with a 10,222/2 trampling threat that Rhonas made giant in the same way. And again, he's a fast drop that can have a strong impact on the board immediately!
Here's our deck!
Training Familiars | Casual | Abe Sargent
- Creatures (29)
- 1 Lore Weaver
- 2 Ley Weaver
- 2 Rhonas the Indomitable
- 4 Beastbreaker of Bala Ged
- 4 Biomancer's Familiar
- 4 Duskwatch Recruiter
- 4 Galvanic Alchemist
- 4 Gyre Engineer
- 4 Jade Mage
- Enchantments (8)
- 4 Breeding Pit
- 4 Training Grounds
- Lands (22)
- 6 Island
- 8 Forest
- 4 Simic Growth Chamber
- 4 Yavimaya Coast
What else inspires me?
This is Verity Circle. It wants to do a few things:
- Get dropped down on the third turn
- Get played in a deck that really wants to tap your dorks!
- Ideally, get played in multiples!
I think we can make that work, right?
And here's how we are going to do that!
Verity Circle already taps non-flyers. We need something that'll tap flyers instead, and this works well in that role as both a threat in the red zone as well as a tapper of flyers. Tap a flyer, draw a card, swing for four damage to someone's face. Seems like a game winning card to me!
The good thing about Merfolk Seastalkers is that their tap-of-non-flyers is cheaper than the Verity Circle, so you can tap two dorks for just one more mana total than the Verity Circle will. It also adds another body for you to use.
Do you see what I'm doing here?
Perfect!
You can build my deck for me!
Yes, I am building this around the same Training Grounds + Biomancer's Familiar combo from above! Good catch!
With the drop in activation to just a single mana, we can tap a ton of stuff, and swing across with a loaded grip of cards.
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I will be using Chameleon Colossus and Soramaro, First to Dream as potential winning conditions into the great punch. Either can win a game against a tapped board state, especially with halved activation costs that will turn them against others.
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I know that you won't get a big reduction in cost for the Kazandu Tuskcaller, but you can get a ton of 3/3 Elephants very easily, and it feels like it slides well into this deck as a useful adjunct. Meanwhile, Sphinx of Magosi can draw you oodles of cards with an increasingly beefy body too, right? That's just nasty in a deck that requires just a single mana to activate.
Right!
So here is my deck.
Thou Shalt Not Untap! | Casual | Abe Sargent
- Creatures (20)
- 2 Chameleon Colossus
- 2 Kazandu Tuskcaller
- 2 Soramaro, First to Dream
- 2 Sphinx of Magosi
- 4 Air Servant
- 4 Biomancer's Familiar
- 4 Merfolk Seastalkers
- Planeswalkers (2)
- 2 Tamiyo, the Moon Sage
- Sorceries (4)
- 4 Cultivate
- Enchantments (12)
- 4 Breeding Pit
- 4 Training Grounds
- 4 Verity Circle
- Lands (22)
- 6 Forest
- 8 Island
- 4 Simic Growth Chamber
- 4 Yavimaya Coast
And there we are! I hope that you enjoyed our two decks that use the Biomancer's Familiar as well as cards like Theater of Horrors, Verity Circle, and Gyre Engineer. Did you see anything in here that inspired your own deck-building? Anything I missed? Just let me know!
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