In this experiment, we transform our civilized human into a homicidal mutant, and we indulge his madness.

About six months ago, I shared a deck similar to one I played casually on Magic Online. My Ana Aggro deck featured Ana Sanctuary, and this week—partially inspired by the old-is-new-again talk about G/U Madness and its presence in Vintage Masters—I want to cover a deck like the one I referenced in that Ana-associated article.

Now, I don’t have the old deck assembled anymore, so I’m unable to share the exact list as I played it, though that does give me the opportunity to update the list with some newer cards and some I might have opted out of or otherwise overlooked before.

Introduction to Madness

Madness is a keyword ability originally from Torment, and cards of every color appeared with the ability. Though the exact rules have been a bit wonky at times, the essential gist is that if you discard a card with madness, you can immediately cast it for its madness cost—which is almost always cheaper than its original cost (with Obsessive Search and Ichor Slick as the exceptions).

The most powerful madness spells emerged as Arrogant Wurm, Basking Rootwalla, and Circular Logic—though perhaps they excelled because of the existence of Wild Mongrel and Aquamoeba as powerful 2-drops in those colors. The cards formed the base of a powerful Standard archetype, and they’re all back in Vintage Masters—and they’re all commons in that set, too, so the archetype is perfectly draftable.

In Time Spiral block, we saw madness again, this time shifted over to black and red instead of all five colors. Planar Chaos brought the color-shifted Reckless Wurm as an analogue to Arrogant Wurm. Most of the cards were unimpressive black commons, though, such as Brain Gorgers, Call to the Netherworld, and Gorgon Recluse, and the keyword didn’t really make a Standard comeback.

Arrogant and Reckless

Planar Chaos had a lot of color-shifted cards as alternate-reality imaginings of what the color pie could have looked like. Prodigal Pyromancer went on to become typical, and Damnation is super-popular and perfectly reasonable for black—though it’s a bit too powerful for a recurring role in Standard—but most of the color-shifted cards weren’t worth mentioning. Who really built new decks around Healing Leaves and Bog Serpent?

But I was excited by the existence of both Arrogant Wurm and Reckless Wurm. Arrogant Wurm was essentially half of a two-card combo, and we all know combo decks need redundancy. However, nothing really clicked for me until Innistrad and Civilized Scholar.

Some madness decks ran Merfolk Looter as a card-advantage-generating madness outlet. (Looters don’t normally provide card advantage, but when you are able to cast the spell you discarded, especially on the cheap, the card advantage starts rolling.) But Civilized Scholar is a madness outlet who also has the superpower to attack for 5. The commonly used Wonder works great with Civilized Scholar as well—we don’t advance our board with a 4/4 trample Wurm, but we do immediately get in for 5, and we put our opponent on quite a clock.

Seeing Red and Green

Of course, Civilized Scholar can’t do all the discard work on its own. That reminded me of one of my favorite looting effects—as you may have guessed from the article’s intro, that card is Ceta Sanctuary. Since we already know we’re playing red and green, we just need some permanents of those colors to get the cards—and discards—flowing.

As we saw when playing with Ana Sanctuary, Shards of Alara block’s Borderposts are the Sanctuaries’ best friends. Firewild Borderpost acts as a Shivan Reef or as a Gruul Cluestone, but it has the decided advantage of having both red and green pips of mana in its cost to fuel Ceta Sanctuary. I’m sure Theros’s Gods and their devotion would approve as well.

A new addition I’ll try out in today’s list is Frantic Search. Contrary to the G/U Madness deck’s usual Deep Analysis, Frantic Search doesn’t provide card advantage, but it does provide a manaless madness outlet while digging us deeper into our deck. With Anger in the deck, we can use Frantic Search to hit with a Homicidal Brute on turn three: Frantic Search, discard Anger, Civilized Scholar, activate the Scholar, discard Wonder, transform, and attack with flying and haste.

Special Additions

Elvish Mystic – While Wild Mongrel is an extremely strong card and would be great in a deck like this, I went with a lot of 3-drops instead. Elvish Mystic will help us accelerate into them, and it is a green permanent to at least bring our Ceta Sanctuary partially online.

Radha, Heir to Keld – She’s a 2/2 for 2 and a mana accelerant similar to the Mystics. She’s both red and green, so that helps, and her attack trigger can let us cast some of our madness spells during combat as long as we have madness outlets. We have to hold back a Civilized Scholar if we want to use that, but Frantic Search is an instant, so that could make for some potent attack steps.

Bloodbraid Elf – It’s red, it’s green, and it’s awesome. We don’t want to cascade into Circular Logic, but having another way to find Ceta Sanctuary seems good.

Basking Rootwalla, Fiery Temper, and Violent Eruption – These are some of Torment’s original madness spells, and they should all be good here.

Cephalid Coliseum, Centaur Garden, and Barbarian Ring – These Odyssey lands deal damage in exchange for mana, but they offer serious, spell-like upsides once we hit threshold, which we should be able to do.

Soaring Seacliff and Smoldering Spires – These couple of lands make our deck more aggressive. I’m imagining that, with the amount of looting the deck has, we’ll have plenty of land cards available. With these around, we can choose whether we want to discard them and play untapped lands or play these for their spell effects when we don’t need any more mana.

Dack Fayden – Okay, so I didn’t actually put a copy of Dack in the list. He’s pretty expensive, and that probably won’t change anytime soon; also, he’s not even red and green! But he does offer a Careful Study every turn for increasing loyalty, and his ultimate can be pretty potent. If I were running Dack, I’d play more copies of Violent Eruption to really abuse that emblem.

Ceta Madness ? Casual | Andrew Wilson

• Creatures (24)
• 2 Anger
• 2 Basking Rootwalla
• 2 Wonder
• 3 Arrogant Wurm
• 3 Bloodbraid Elf
• 3 Reckless Wurm
• 4 Civilized Scholar
• 4 Elvish Mystic
• 1 Radha, Heir to Keld

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Xenagos, the Reveler

• Spells (15)
• 1 Violent Eruption
• 2 Circular Logic
• 2 Frantic Search
• 3 Fiery Temper
• 3 Ceta Sanctuary
• 4 Firewild Borderpost

• Lands (20)
• 2 Island
• 2 Mountain
• 3 Forest
• 1 Barbarian Ring
• 1 Centaur Garden
• 1 Cephalid Coliseum
• 1 Smoldering Spires
• 1 Soaring Seacliff
• 4 Breeding Pool
• 4 Steam Vents

Buy This Deck

If you’ve ever wanted to loot your way into a flying Homicidal Brute, if you’ve been waiting to run another wedge’s Sanctuary, or if you just want to play some more madness after drafting it on Magic Online, give this deck a try.

Andrew Wilson

@Silent7Seven

fissionessence at hotmail dot com