I’ve had an idea for a deck that has excited me for a couple of months, but I wasn’t able to make it happen because the two key cards are quite expensive and because I’m really cheap. However, I finally picked them up on eBay and started thinking about how to make it happen. The idea is simple and hardly original, but I don’t care; I just think it would be super-cool to cast Rite of Replication on Avenger of Zendikar, then drop a land and give every one of my Plant tokens +6/+6. I can even justify it a little bit strategically—either your opponents sweep the board, or you win next turn, and you should be able to overwhelm the opponent most likely to have an answer in time . . . but I’d be perfectly happy to call it a win if I got to make that play, whether I ultimately won or lost.

Then, a funny thing happened. I mentioned the idea to a tournament player (Gathering Magic’s very own Daniel Pham, last seen placing an eyelash out of Top 64 in GP: Kobe), and his response was, “Why? Isn’t that just win-more if you already have the Avenger in play?” I had thought it was a no-brainer that a play like that was worth aiming for, but there really is an important difference between why a Timmy like me builds a deck and a Spike like Daniel builds a deck. That’s nothing against Spike, but it’s important to remember that it’s also nothing against us! A deck being designed to do something cool is no more a bad deck than a tourney deck that can only thrive in a certain, limited metagame.

For a Timmy trying to live the dream, the only thing that makes a bad deck is when it doesn’t do what you want it to do. That’s where the Johnnies come in. It’s not enough to add Avengers and Rites to any old G/U deck; you have to plan around it. In a way, a focused deck is a lot like a gun: You have one way to win and one way to deliver that win con, but you deliver it pretty much every time.¹ If you’re designing around one particular combo, that’s how you should build your deck, and every other card in your deck needs to be built around getting that combo off.

Here’s a bit of a blueprint for how I translated the dream into reality.

The Plan

The first thing is to think about how your dream is going to fit into the dynamics of the game. Primarily, that means: What are your opponents going to try to do to beat you, and how are you going to stop them? In the case of Rite/Avenger, it will simply involve killing the first Avenger and all of his little minions in the round between when you cast it and when you cast the (what we hope will be kicked) Rite. There are a lot of ways to deal with this, perhaps the most obvious being combining blue’s deck manipulation and green’s ability to play off the top (I’m thinking primarily of Garruk's Horde and an old favorite of mine, Call of the Wild), but I’m using those in other decks, and I have a couple of copies of Dramatic Entrance that haven’t found a permanent home yet.

So, the plan is going to be flashing the Avenger in at the end of someone else’s turn, and then either casting a kicked Rite of Replication when I untap or accelerating into next turn and trying to put enough counters on my Plant tokens to take out the control player.

Meet the Candidates

Sometimes, the plan comes from the cards that are available, but for a deck like this, I think the plan needs to come first; it’s just too easy to disrupt. Once you know what you’re going to do, you can figure out what you’re going to use to do it. Make a list, and organize it so that you know what functions need doing—then, you can choose the best tools for the job. Here are the cards I considered, ordered more or less in terms of the functions that need doing.

"Candidates"

• Function: Winning (0)

• Function: Acceleration (0)

• Function: Redundancy (0)

• Function: Cheating (0)

• Function: Defense/Control (0)

• Function: Win More (0)

Buy This Deck

With only two cards guaranteed to make the deck, I’m already well on my way to a final sixty. I reckon I don’t need a Plan B beyond what Rite of Replication gives me—if by the grace of God, my opponents can withstand what I’m throwing at them, they ought to have some pretty nasty beasties of their own, and soon, I’ll have five of them! I also know that most of my support cards should be critters so that a Rite is as useful as possible for as long as possible and at all stages of the game.

Control is a problem for a creature-based deck in the two colors that are worst at destroying creatures, and I have no interest in playing this as a permission deck, but green’s strength in dealing with noncreature permanents and a strong, swift creature plan of my own should be enough to win, and a wave of support creatures should stall most creature-heavy decks long enough for the leafy green cavalry to arrive.

Of the land-searchers, I’m going to rely on those that bring multiple lands into play and creatures that can stall the ground. I’m still not entirely sure if some kind of Wood Elves, which accelerates my mana but may be useless in the long game, is better than an Elvish Visionary, which comes out sooner and is never useless. The same dilemma is true for Krosan Tusker, which is solid card advantage and mana fixing plus a mediocre, but serviceable late-game beater, especially in multiples, but it doesn’t accelerate me into a turn-three or turn-four Avenger, which is the name of the game. In the end, accelerants won out.

With only four heavy hitters in the deck, I soon realized that multiple Fierce Empaths wasn’t going to serve me well. It’s bad enough that land-searching spells often become redundant in a long game—I may often pop may a Khalni Heart Expedition only to find a single basic land and a Simic Growth Chamber remaining—but playing a Fierce Empath without an Avenger to find is too much of a risk, I think. Pack Hunt is an overlooked gem that will work just fine with any of my critters, even as early as the third turn.

To be honest, there are any number of different ways to build the support package, and I couldn’t swear the configuration I chose was optimal,² but I am very happy with play sets of Acidic Slime and Coiling Oracle. Either of them is a fine late-game target for Rite and a strong play in the early game. Deathtouch can also be a great equalizer for a deck that needs to stave off attacks but has very little removal to speak of. Also, Temporal Spring and Aether Mutation are overlooked cards that deal with problems in useful and original ways. Once you put an Avenger in play with a bit of board position, bouncing or on-top-putting a key permanent could give you the game. Another option I considered was Snakeform, which is great pseudo-removal and offers some interesting possibilities with Peer Pressure. If I was running Sakura-Tribe Elder along with the Oracle, I really think I could make it work, but for now, I’ll stick with something more conventional.

Final List: Rite of Re-Plantation

"Rite of Re-Plantation"

• Creatures (16)
• 4 Acidic Slime
• 4 Avenger of Zendikar
• 4 Coiling Oracle
• 4 Farhaven Elf

• Spells (24)
• 1 Lure of Prey
• 3 Dramatic Entrance
• 2 Primal Command
• 3 Pack Hunt
• 3 Temporal Spring
• 4 Explosive Vegetation
• 4 Rite of Replication
• 4 Khalni Heart Expedition

• Lands (20)
• 10 Forest
• 6 Island
• 4 Simic Growth Chamber

Buy This Deck

This is a deck with a strong game plan that is challenging to put together or to win with. Unless your meta is free of board sweepers, you’ll often find yourself having to recover and reload, which is the best kind of challenge: one that you should be able to overcome easily enough in most games. Ideally, you could drop a Khalni Heart Expedition on turn two, some form of ramp into a Dramatic Entrance on turn four or five (or a Lure of Prey—both are great cards, but they're only in a three-to-one ratio because those are the cards I could find), and then drop three or four lands at once and swing with half a dozen beaters. If you don’t find all the pieces you need, you can usually Coiling Oracle into third- or fourth-turn Pack Hunt, which gives you two turns worth of plays and a damn good chance of drawing into something significant on the next turn.

The land count is low, which is a bit risky and requires a bit of careful mulliganing, but it’s generally okay when you have eight 2-drops, four 3-drops and four 4-drops that can accelerate your mana. Of course, you don’t want to pop the Expedition if you don’t have to—it’s so damn good to use after you’ve flashed in an Avenger.

What makes it all hang together in games in which everything else goes wrong is Primal Command. I only just got the pair from our good friends at CoolStuffInc, and I was planning to put them into a couple of Commander decks, but they’re just so perfect here that I might have to pick up some more. In the early game and midgame, you get tutoring and board control, in the late game, you get recursion and a much needed life top-up, and in between, there are a lot of other variations you can find. I’m looking forward to playing the Command in other situations!

¹ Most of my decks are built a little differently—I prefer the Terminator model where my decks are designed to keep coming at you no matter what and will eventually beat you to death with whatever is at hand. But it’s definitely worth designing at least a few focused decks in order to flex the old deck-building muscles.

² Then again, I don’t think the word “optimal” can ever or should ever be applied to casual decks.