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Last week I ran through part of my own custom Jumpstart pack ideas based around things that defined me. This came about from a prompt by Wizards R&D member Chris Mooney that was shared by Gavin Verhey in his YouTube series Good Morning Magic. This set up the following guidelines for your custom pack:
- Choose one color. This will be the focus of your pack.
- There must be seven creatures and four non-creatures. Among these should be one rare or mythic rare card.
- Choose a mana fixing land or artifact.
- The rest are lands, but choose your favorite since it's based on you.
- Creatures (8)
- 1 Arcbound Worker
- 1 Broodstar
- 1 Frogmite
- 1 Myr Enforcer
- 1 Qumulox
- 1 Somber Hoverguard
- 1 Spire Golem
- 1 Vault Skirge
- Sorceries (1)
- 1 Thoughtcast
- Artifacts (3)
- 1 Cranial Plating
- 1 Skullclamp
- 1 Springleaf Drum
- Lands (6)
- 4 Island
- 1 Seat of the Synod
- 1 Vault of Whispers
- Creatures (9)
- 1 Brood Sliver
- 1 Gemhide Sliver
- 1 Harmonic Sliver
- 1 Plated Sliver
- 1 Predatory Sliver
- 1 Root Sliver
- 1 Silver Knight
- 1 Victual Sliver
- 1 Ward Sliver
- Sorceries (2)
- 1 Lead the Stampede
- 1 Winding Way
- Enchantments (1)
- 1 Worship
- Lands (8)
- 3 Forest
- 3 Plains
- 1 Vivid Grove
- 1 Vivid Meadow
- Creatures (8)
- 1 Avacyn's Pilgrim
- 1 Kitchen Finks
- 1 Knight of Glory
- 1 Knight of the Reliquary
- 1 Mother of Runes
- 1 Qasali Pridemage
- 1 Scryb Ranger
- 1 Vryn Wingmare
- Instants (2)
- 1 Swords to Plowshares
- 1 Worldly Tutor
- Artifacts (1)
- 1 Behemoth Sledge
- Lands (9)
- 3 Forest
- 3 Plains
- 1 Dryad Arbor
- 1 Mortuary Mire
- 1 Sejiri Steppe
While my personal packs largely worked within these guidelines (High Tide flipped the numbers for creatures and non-creatures due to the theme) today we're getting a little bit different. When I started looking at the things that defined me as a Magic player, I knew that the mono-color angle was going to really hurt my ability to represent myself. The reason for this was some of the things I'm best known for or have historically played are intrinsically very much multicolored.
For this one, we're going to use the rules set forth above but we're also going to play around with them a bit so they can fit these themes a bit better in the process. I'll explain how and why as we go through them, but we're definitely going to go off the beaten path a bit. Let's get into it!
Affinity
Affinity | Jumpstart | Kendra Smith
Affinity has been a cornerstone of my Magic career and has taken many forms during my time with the deck. Obviously, things started in the days of Mirrodin when I played a Broodstar version featuring Skullclamp that all my friends hated. When I came back to the game in 2010 after a couple year hiatus, Tempered Steel was the deck I chose to go hard and heavy with as I got competitive.
When I purchased my copy of Tempered Steel for Standard, I noticed it had a lot of crossover with the Affinity archetypes in Modern and Legacy (where it's since become defunct). I loved it so much that it drove my interest in both of these formats until I slowly began to branch out into trying other decks. And when Tempered Steel enabled artifact strategies in Historic, you better believe I went hard at it. Heck I've even played Affinity in Pauper!
Affinity style decks will always be a constant favorite and I wanted to stretch this one a bit as a result. Because we're playing with a bunch of artifacts, it only seemed fitting that we didn't need too many actual colored sources, so why not play things a little loosely instead? The focus color here is Blue to focus on cards like Broodstar and Thoughtcast, but we're also throwing in a little mana for a bunch of other colors for activated abilities in the form of single artifact land copies in place of a few basics. This will enable us to get a little wacky with our play but not stray too far from the core strategy in the process. And the Island of choice? It couldn't be anything but a Mirrodin Island of course!
Slivers
Slivers | Jumpstart | Kendra Smith
Slivers is where things get really interesting. Why? Because you can't really do slivers with just one color. It doesn't work well because you lose out on a ton of different synergies. Instead, here we're making a nice Selesnya colored deck. You might notice some odd choices. Like why is Worship the rare here and not something bigger and flashier? And what's with the Silver Knight? That's not a sliver!
This one actually has a story to it. You see, everyone has that first deck they take to a local FNM and by all accounts it is normally terrible. It's like a rite of passage for any Magic player. You just don't start good. For me, my bad deck was a five-color slivers deck that featured a ton of the Onslaught block slivers. It wasn't that great, relying largely on me somehow making it to 5 mana for things like *checks notes* Brood Sliver or Ward Sliver. Not only that, but it ran cards like singleton copies of cards like Decree of Justice and Eternal Dragon - largely because they were chase rares and I didn't understand why. Spoiler alert: it was because they synergized with Astral Slide.
There were two odd cards that found their way into my list, though: Silver Knight and Worship. Silver Knight was something I put in because I remembered how my cousins and friends in my earliest days of Magic would hype up White Knight and Black Knight so much. I saw this new version and absolutely wanted to play with it based on what I'd remembered - even if the game had come a long way already since those early days. Worship was just a cool card that seemed like a great choice for a creature based sliver deck. How right I was!
During one of my matches, I ended up facing down Goblins. Yeah, you all might be getting well acquainted with the archetype now thanks to Muxus, but I'll never forget how terrifying it was facing down Goblin Warchief, Goblin Piledriver, Goblin Goon, Siege-Gang Commander, and so much more. It was a monstrously powerful deck. But you know what it turns out Mono-Red decks can't deal with? Enchantments or creatures with protection from Red. My opponent couldn't deal with either my Silver Knight nor my Worship when I landed both down on the field and in a moment of sheer luck - I won my match on the back of these two cards. Main decked in a slivers list. As such, it only feels right to immortalize them here alongside the actual slivers themselves, which are arguably at their best in the common and uncommon slots anyways.
The slivers themselves make up my interest and love for these critters over the game's history (exception being Harmonic Sliver which is here for utility and replaces a non-creature spell as such). Victual Sliver was one of the first cards I ever owned and I thought it was great, all the Legions ones were in the aforementioned Silver Knight list, and Predatory Sliver I played a bit in Standard as well as in Pauper. I am cheating a little bit and added a second rare in Brood Sliver but I both loved it as a kid and some Jumpstart packs came with two rares, so why not this? Since it's two colors, I'm also including a Vivid land in each one as a callback to the Premium Deck Series: Slivers precon that was the first paper product I bought on my return to the game in 2010.
As for basics? Let's go with some Urza's Saga basics. Partially for nostalgia, which this list is packed with, and also it's what I continue to use in my Pauper Slivers list. We'll use this Plains and this Forest because I love their arts and have since I was a kid.
Maverick
Maverick | Jumpstart | Kendra Smith
Is it cheating to do another Selesnya deck? Nah! It wouldn't be right to do a series on what my personal Jumpstart packs might look like without repping Maverick and it definitely wouldn't be right to have it as anything other than Selesnya. I could add more colors if I wanted, but I don't want to go too off the deck-building restrictions! The face card is obvious and couldn't be anything but Knight of the Reliquary. It's my favorite card in the game and is the longstanding big payoff for Maverick. Alongside it, we're going to have a host of creatures and removal spells to help us get there.
Luckily, many of the non-land cards that have appeared in Legacy Maverick over the years are commons and uncommons. This gives us plenty of tools - even for cards that have been printed at rare down the line like Mother of Runes. There's a lot of big cards that would be rare since this is Legacy we're talking about, but we can fill the holes in our own way that's fitting of a more simple Jumpstart pack.
Vryn Wingmare is an excellent alternative for Thalia, Guardian of Thraben here and is perfect for carrying our one equipment in Behemoth Sledge. Finding something to replace the toolbox card that is Green Sun's Zenith is tough, but Worldly Tutor does a great impression - even if it's also getting reprinted soon and costs as much as a modern-day mythic. It's still an uncommon in my heart. Knight of Glory helps with the exalted theme that has come and gone from the deck and Kitchen Finks just feels at home here even if it's not a staple in the Legacy deck itself. Because there's so much more utility than normal, I also shaved a non-creature spell but it makes sense when looking at the lands.
We go off guidelines more than normal in this part. Nine lands? And only six of them are basic? That might seem odd, but it clears up a few issues. For one, it lets us actually slip in an extra creature this way since Dryad Arbor is both a land and a creature. It also gives us a bit of possible ramp when paired alongside Scryb Ranger. Having nine lands in a field where there's normally eight in a pack gives our list a nice full 17 lands. It also gives us more to sacrifice and search for with Knight of the Reliquary. The biggest aspect of this change is it allows us a few utility lands for the Knight to fetch up, and here I went with Sejiri Steppe and Mortuary Mire to help our creature-based gameplan.
It's not quite the Maverick I know and love, but it does a good enough of an impression and is something I'd be thrilled to see as my Jumpstart pack. For basic lands, I'm going to go with the Euro Promo Forest depicting Schwarzwald, Germany and the APAC Plains that shows a field of sunflowers in Japan. These have long been some of my favorite basics of all time and are extremely difficult to come by, but are awesome for a Legacy deck - especially when you only need one or two in the actual deck. I'd love to see more of them get printed too, like how the Forest was in Duel Deck: Knights vs. Dragons. They're truly gorgeous lands.
And that's it for my Jumpstart packs that define me. Yes, it's only a two-parter this time around, but fear not because I'll definitely have more Jumpstart articles in the near future. There're so many great themes from Magic's extensive history that I'd love to really dive more into it. I might go way more off the beaten path than here (multiple rares, dual lands, etc.) but I think it's too rich a well not to tackle and put forth ideas for something like a Jumpstart Cube. If you enjoyed these, make sure you check out fellow author A.E. Marling who is also writing great custom Jumpstart content right here on CoolStuffInc.com.
What will your personal Jumpstart pack look like? Don't just let me know in the comments below - make sure you ping Chris Mooney and Gavin Verhey on Twitter as well!
Kendra Smith
Twitter: @TheMaverickGal
Twitch: twitch.tv/themaverickgirl
YouTube: Kendra Smith
