Locations
Attendance at my local friends' weekly magic nights has been getting increasingly irregular, especially from me. Between work, studies and my wonderful new fiancée my spare time for card slinging has been hard pressed of late, but I did manage to get along this week. My buddy Mike picked me up and gave me some lip about not coming the past few weeks. Mike is the kind of guy who can sustain trash talk around a magic table entirely by himself. No matter what you ask him about, you're bound to get a torrent of mindless drivel and profanity in reply - all in good fun, of course. This week he's picking on my Gears of War polo, a relic of my time working at EB Games. "Why are you wearing a shirt for such a crappy game?" He asks.
I start the obvious reply, "why are you wearing a shirt for such a crappy—" But he cuts me off. He's wearing a Miami Heat hoodie, and the one thing Mike loves more than Chameleon Colossus is the Miami Heat. Weird for an Aussie, but we did have an NBA fad back in the early 90s and Mike is like seven feet tall, so it's in his own interest to promote a sport he's naturally good at. We've both got some new decks ready to go – I've sleeved up a Pride of the Clouds fliers deck with Emeria Angels and Soulcatchers, while Mike has a couple of new ones – G/U Faeries, and Thallids.
Now, Thallids have a bit of a reputation in our group. When we were all starting out around Time Spiral one of our friends Dean had a killer Thallids deck with Doubling Season, and none of us could justify buying Wrath of Gods to deal with it. One time Dean played against Tom's Sprout Swarm deck, neither had any removal, and they had to get out a laptop and make up a spread sheet to determine who would win because it's hard to fit 487,216 saproling tokens on a table made out of an old door resting on milk crates.
The part of Mike's new deck I am really interested in is the Contagion Clasps. Proliferate is a natural fit for a tribe who's shtick is generating mass counters. It's also my favourite mechanic from Scars, and one of R&Ds best efforts for a while. Today I'm going to talk about why I like proliferate, why I don't like parasites, and build a deck with one of Zendikar's jankiest rares.
More of that strange oil…
First, I have a confession to make. I hate reading the cards. When I pull off some spectacular play that nobody else on the table saw, I hate when one of them points out "you can only do that in your upkeep," and not just because I look like an idiot and lose my guy. I want the rules to get out of the way of my cool stuff. I am a crusader for magical liberty. I played my Hoofprints of the Stag on the kitchen table for weeks without realising I couldn't make surprise blockers with it. I love proliferate because I don't have to remember what the cards do, they do exactly what I expect.
"I put more counters on that, that and that. "
You can do that?
"Yes, I can, and just for questioning it I'm putting another counter on you."
This simplicity is reinforced in the reminder text. Take a look at Contagion Engine's italics:
You choose any number of permanents and/or players with counters on them, then give each another counter of a kind already there. Then do it again.
That is so very casual. It's like R&D overheard one play-tester describing what his card did to another and just wrote down exactly what he said. ‘Then do it again' is just a perfect, easily comprehensible statement. Compare that to…
Any legendary creatures can attack in a band as long as at least one has "bands with other legendary creatures." Bands are blocked as a group. If at least two legendary creatures you control, one of which has "bands with other legendary creatures," are blocking or being blocked by the same creature, you divide that creature's combat damage, not its controller, among any of the creatures it's being blocked by or is blocking.
…Yeah.
Proliferate is the most fun mechanic in the set because it is open-ended. It lets your mind wander endlessly through the possibilities, as you bring up each counter you can think of and figure out if you want to add another one. You start with a proliferate card, say, Contagion Clasp. Sure, you add a counter each turn to kill a guy, eventually. Straightforward. But then… what about beefing your guy up with +1/+1 counters? This could go in my Bog Hoodlums deck - but what to cut? That list is so tight already. What about pairing it with Ajani Goldmane, then you can double-pump your team—wait, planeswalkers have counters too! The -1/-1 counter almost feels like a ruse, something to disguise the true purpose of the Clasp. By saying so little about what the card does actually in the text box, the designers have left a huge amount of room for the players to explore. This room lets us get creative with our deck-building, trying to find something different, something personalised, something to show off. If all you have to build with are a pile of soldiers that like being in a deck with more soldiers and attacking, things are going to get boring fast.
So the mental adventure continues. Eventually you are sitting down opposite your nemesis, pumping up your Etched Oracle to draw some cards, when he starts taking counters off his Dark Depths the old fashioned way. Suddenly, you've discovered a new use for your innocuous Contagion Clasp. It would have been easy for R&D to jam "you control" between the 6th and 7th words in the reminder text. It would have been safe. Instead they let us run hog wild over our opponents' stuff, messing up their Chalices of the Void and Aether Vials, and decorating their Akromas with extra feather counters just to rub it in. Most sets have counters of one sort or another, so chances are your friends – and enemies – are going to have a few decks with counters in them. By freeing us to add any kind of counters to any kind of permanent wizards have produced a truly brilliant casual mechanic in proliferate.
…It's probably nothing.
This is why mechanics like splice onto arcane and soulshift are such a missed opportunity, to my mind. It's possible some splice card would have been totally busted if you could splice it onto any instant, instead of just an arcane one, I haven't thought too hard about it. I think what happened was the powers-that-be got wrapped up in creating a flavour rich, independent block environment, with a bunch of internally relevant cards. I was amused to see a question on exactly this topic in the Great Designer Search 2 multi-choice test, and I am absolutely sure I got the right answer for that one. Kamigawa decks can have a lot of fun interactions with other Kamigawa decks. The problem now is with hindsight Kamigawa looks like a mechanical anachronism, a weird blip on the road from Mirrodin to Ravnica.
This is also one reason I'm not really interested in poison as a mechanic. I can make a poison deck now and bash you with a bunch of infect guys, but when Ravnica II comes out in a few years' time what cards are there going to be for it? A more effective Giant Growth? Similarly when I look back at my Lorwyn block cards, what am I going to find for my poison deck? Most of the creatures are going to be worthless, because attacking life totals and adding poison counters at the same time is a non-bo when you could just be doing one or the other. Metalcraft has the same problem, in my mind. Kuldotha Phoenix is a spectacular card, but I keep forgetting its ability requires metalcraft. I loved playing Hell's Thunder in the last standard season and I would love to unearth this relative, but I don't want to have to force a bunch of useless/lame/forty dollar artifacts in my deck just to enable it. I am happy to play with a Coalition Relic or Basilisk Collar, but metalcraft's three artifact requirement means a serious amount of deck space devoted to grey/brown card borders. This means if you want to get the full potential out of Kuldotha Phoenix, it can go in either an artifact deck or a dedicated Kuldotha Pheonix deck.
I don't mean for this to degenerate into a screed against linear/parasitic mechanics, they are fine for a while. But proliferate is innovative and versatile, and essentially timeless. What makes me excited about a new card is the possibilities. I don't want to be told what I can't do with a card. I don't want to be told what I should do with a card. Give me a blank slate, and I'll find the fun.
Steady Ascension
One set of cards that needs to be re-evaluated in the context of proliferate is the quest cards from Zendikar. There are a whole bunch to look at and I'll leave the rest up to you, but the one I want to proliferate today is the rightly scorned Archmage Ascension. The effect is amazingly powerful once you set it off, but ordinarily it just isn't worth the effort – drawing six extra cards over six turns, you should have found whatever it is you're tutoring for already. With proliferate though, we won't have to sit around until the end of the game just for our deck to die to Naturalize. There will be three parts to this deck – the combo parts, which will be the Ascension, proliferate cards and some cantrips to put counters on; things to tutor for, including a way to win the game and some toolbox type answer cards; and lastly the boring stuff that keeps us alive while we set all this up. Of course anything that fits in multiple categories will score mega bonus points.
The obvious place to start adding counters is with Steady Progress. It cantrips, which helps us put counters on normally, and significantly it has proliferate as well so we get two counters for the price of one. Instant speed cantrips are going to be very handy both early and late as they help us charge up Ascension and then once it gets going they are basically instant Demonic Tutors. Preordain definitely goes in to help us find Ascension and power it up, and Into the Roil is a nice catch-all answer for nasty things like Luminarch Ascension or Hellkite Overlord.
While looking for win conditions, I stumbled across another forgotten blue rare – or mythic, in this case – Lighthouse Chronologist. This guy can serve a dual purpose, blocking early Goblin Guides and eventually giving us an overwhelming advantage once we've levelled him up. He also gives us another thing to proliferate, which is always fun. I want a single Hada Spy Patrol to help end games in his boring, inevitable fashion. Enclave Cryptologist is another leveller who is a perfect fit for the deck – powering up Ascension, giving us instant tutoring in the end game, and also being another worthwhile proliferate target. I want to play a tutorable Elixir of Immortality to be able to recycle my graveyard, and Cryptologist can also play this role by partnering with our next singleton – Kozilek, Butcher of Truth! When this guy isn't tutoring us four cards and smashing the opponent for 12 (and four permanents), he's cheerily being discarded to shuffle our spent resources back in.
A set of Everflowing Chalices join the team to help pay for Kozilek (plus you can proliferate them. Can you see my cunning plan?). A single Jace Beleren puts his hand up – draws cards, wins the game, likes proliferation, a perfect fit. Contagion Engine jumps out as another handy proliferator and control card, and then I remember I haven't put any Contagion Clasps in so they fill the last four spell slots. 24 Islands round out the deck – some of them can probably go later, but I find it's always better to start with too many lands and trim them down.
I couldn't think of a snappy name for the deck so you get the old standby, "Parts of two key card names". Now I want to figure out a way to fit Steady Progress into a green black deck, so I can call it Prog Rock.
"Steady Ascension"
Having finished the first draft of the deck I realise I am probably going to die to a huge Corrupt, since I have no counters or ways to buffer my life total. I want to get some games in with the deck before making any more changes, though. There were so many older cards that were just begging to join the team in this one – Beacon of Tomorrows is an unfun, but very reliable, win condition with Archmage out. As long as you can cast it each turn you will always have it as it shuffles itself in, and each extra turn starts with a draw step to tutor for it. Taking over a game like that really isn't that fun in multiplayer, though. It's not very interactive and the game essentially ends when you cast your big sorcery.
Proliferate excites me because this is only the beginning. If I were building a poison deck, I would refine it after a few games but that would be it. That would be my poison deck. Proliferate is a key component in this deck but could just as easily fit into any number of other decks, either as a random fun card to fiddle with your opponent's Wall of Rootses or a vital element to your deck's engine.
