Notepads down, readers. This is not a week of testing and metagaming. It's time to put your feet up by the fire with hot cocoa and your loyal hound by your side, because today we're taking it easy.

I've laid down my block cards for the last two weeks. There are only so many Venser-backed Tumble Magnets that one man can try to attack into before he gets sick of it. The advantage of having such a small format is there are only a limited number of decks to learn, which is also its Achilles heel—Block can quickly become stale, facing the same cards over and over again.

At the other end of the spectrum is Legacy, a format so huge and so wide-open that you never know what you're going to face. Last weekend I discovered that I unknowingly owned a Legacy deck, thanks to Blake Cunningham's win at the SCG Open. To build his winning Tezzeret Affinity list, the only old nonbasics I had to buy were the common artifact lands and Blinkmoth Nexuses, and the only really expensive cards were the ones I already had from my Block collection—Tezzeret and Mox Opal. I jumped in the Tournament Practice room and played a dozen or so matches, and I don't think I faced the same deck twice. In one game, my opponent played Ancient Tomb, Lotus Petal, and Show and Tell putting Emrakul into play. On turn one. In another game, I vomited my hand onto the table, including Cranial Plating, and won on turn three. At the other extreme, I had a game stall-out against Goblins—he couldn't draw lands, and I couldn't draw anything but, and he didn't want to attack his Piledrivers into my Frogmites. Eventually, he won on turn twelve by Tutoring for Skirk Prospector and Goblin Sharpshooter to virtually Plague Wind me while he was on 2 life. On the other side of the coin, this huge and varied format means to switch decks will cost me an arm and a leg, while in Block I own nearly every card and can switch at the click of a button.

I am not a Legacy player as such, and so there is little value in writing further on it. Instead, I'll be writing about my favorite constructed format of all—kitchen-table casual. The advantages of this format are many. With every card in Magic potentially available and the threshold for playability much lower than in tournament formats, you never know quite what you'll be facing—sure, there are the old favorite decks that come out with some regularity, but usually everyone has a new brew or two to try out. You can also play cards that tournament players have little to no interest in, which makes it a lot cheaper—and like Legacy, nothing ever rotates, so you're not left holding the cards as your investment circles the drain. The downside is that decks can be massively overpowered or underpowered, and mismatches do occur—for example, Tempest-block Shadow against budget Legacy Enchantress. Each kitchen-table group is a "format," so to speak, and you have to learn what sort of power level is suitable. Our group has developed an informal tier system, described by a series of increasingly vulgar epithets. Consistency has nothing to do with the tier system; it is entirely based on how obnoxious the deck is when it's firing on all cylinders.

My brews for casual Magic, much like brews for constructed, start with one card. Since I am a total casual Johnny, that card is almost always an engine card of some description. Today's deck actually started as two separate decks, one based on Stampeding Wildebeests and one based on Wild Pair. While Wildebeests is pretty straightforward, Wild Pair is a card I love, and one that deserves further examination.

Wild Pair

Wild Pair is a 6-mana Green enchantment, much like another of my favorite cards—Lurking Predators. Also like that card, it lets you play creatures for free from your library! The way Wild Pair works is that when you play a creature, you add its power and toughness together and search your library for another creature whose power and toughness add to the same—so, for example, if you play an Overgrown Battlement (0/4) whose total P/T is 4, you could search your library for a Grizzly Bears (2/2). Or, more usefully, you could play a Trained Armodon (3/3) and get a free Myojin of Seeing Winds (3/3). There are a lot of ways you could go with this enchantment. One obvious way to go is to have an overpoweringly expensive creature with some cheap creatures with a matching total power/toughness, as in the Myojin example above. The other way to go is to build a toolbox of creatures with matching total P/Ts, so that once you have Wild Pair out you can go get whatever you need based on the game state at that point.

I love cards like this because they let me give magiccards.info's advanced search a good workout. Combing through custom search results looking for potential combos is great fun for me, and usually gives me ideas for half a dozen other decks to build later on. Picking a particular P/T combination—say, 3/3—and searching for all creatures that match, then sorting by converted mana cost. There are several 1-mana 3/3's that could potentially work—Cinder Wall, Rogue Elephant, Sleeper Agent. At the top end of the casting costs, we've got such beasts as Konda, Lord of Eiganjo, or Petrified Wood-Kin. Between these two extremes, there are over five hundred creatures to sift through, and when you get done with those there are a whole pile of 2/4's, 4/2's, 1/5's, 5/1's, and 0/6's to look at as well—Shield Sphere is a particularly cheap way to trigger Wild Pair, and maybe you want to go and get a Realm Razer to close out the game. For an amateur deck-builder, there's hours of interest there, all springing from a single dollar rare.

I went with a somewhat unusual P/T total of 2, but with good reason. Six mana is a lot to pay just to get set up, but there are a lot of creature-based accelerants in Green. Most of them are 1/1's, such as Llanowar Elves, Arbor Elf, Sylvan Ranger, etc., etc. By playing a whole bunch of cheap ramp guys and Wild Pair, I can get to Wild Pair sooner and still have some utility from these dorks after I've hit my mana. Before I start discussing the choices in detail, here's the list:

[cardlist]

[Creatures]

4 Essence Warden

1 Joraga Treespeaker

1 Loyal Sentry

4 Squadron Hawk

3 Devoted Druid

3 Elvish Visionary

1 Sylvan Ranger

1 Whirling Dervish

1 Kazandu Tuskcaller

1 Bramblesnap

4 Farhaven Elf

1 Quillspike

2 Stampeding Wildebeests

4 Deranged Hermit

1 Regal Force

[/Creatures]

[Spells]

1 Summoner's Pact

1 Might of the Masses

4 Wild Pair

[/Spells]

[Lands]

4 Sunpetal Grove

2 Pendelhaven

2 Plains

14 Forest

[/Lands]

[/cardlist]

The Setup

Devoted Druid, Sylvan Ranger, Farhaven Elf, Joraga Treespeaker

My mana guys. Devoted Druid gives an extra kick, which is great for getting to 6 on turn four, and the other two get me extra lands while also pulling them out of my deck so I don't keep drawing them. The one-of Sylvan Ranger is based on the scientific method of only having one to hand.

The Dorks

Squadron Hawk, Elvish Visionary

The idea of all these guys is to give me a 1/1 to trigger Wild Pair, while also drawing me (I hope) into more 1/1s. The deck was mono-Green until recently, when I added White for the Hawks—basically, all I want to draw off Visionaries is more cheap 1/1s to trigger Wild Pair, so they were an obvious upgrade.

The Main Game

Essence Warden, Deranged Hermit, Stampeding Wildebeests

When the deck gets up to full speed, the first thing to do is get out all the Essence Wardens and then start getting out Hermits. With four Wardens, each Hermit will net you 20 life in addition to five bodies which generally equals a winning position. The Wildebeests are not tutorable, and often they are a win-more card, but they have a lot of synergy with the deck and especially with Hermit—if you stack the upkeep triggers right, you can bounce your Hermit before having to pay Echo, letting you replay it instead and get four new squirrels!

The Bullets

Loyal Sentry, Whirling Dervish, Kazandu Tuskcaller, Bramblesnap, Quillspike

The toolbox side of the deck—the Sentry is a great rattlesnake in multiplayer and a great removal spell in all formats. Dervish is especially for Black decks, of course. Tuskcaller, Bramblesnap, and Quillspike are alternate win conditions—if for any reason I need a supply of 3/3's instead of 1/1's, a huge trample guy, or an even huger nontrample guy, I can just go and get them.

The Misers

Regal Force, Might of the Masses, Summoner's Pact

I never want to see multiples of these, but as one-ofs, I'm almost always happy to draw them off the top in the later game. One thing the deck really does need is some sort of Overrun effect to end the game, but I haven't found a Wild Pair-able one yet—I may just have to go with good old Overrun itself as a two-of.

So there you have it—my Wild Pair deck. I hope you enjoyed this casual change—if you want to see more casual articles or if you really want a switch back to competitive ones, sound off in the comments. I will be doing a mixture, as my article choices are heavily influenced by what I've been playing recently, but if the audience prefers a lean one way or the other, I'll take that into account. I'd also love to hear about your own Wild Pair deck if you've got one, or what your other favorite engine cards are—let's hear it for the Johnnies!