MM6: Thieves' Auction

Thieves' Auction is one funny card. It's a ton of mana, and 4RRR, but in exchange you at least nullify any board advantage your opponent has. More likely, your ability to choose first gives you the advantage. You do have to watch out for the fact that your opponent will untap first. That prevents this deck from using counters well, except of course for Thwart and Misdirection. It also means that you can't let too much power in creatures get on the table if it isn't all in one place. But these don't seem to be major problems in the new Type II.

The next step is to make the Auction more than just a way to equalize the board. The obvious card is Brand, which gives you three quarters of all the cards. If your opponent doesn't catch on and choose his own permanents whenever he can, you can get even more. Bounce can work in a similar way, but generally won't net you that much extra card advantage. The key thing people haven't thought about is that you don't have the option not to take a permanent. That means that if the number of permanents is even, your opponent will end up with one of your choice. Since you can simply play or not play a land the turn you cast the Auction, this is normally under your control. There are cards you would rather not have, and this gives you an extra way to get rid of them. Together with Donate, you can now give stuff away much more reliably.

This is the point where you get to have a little fun. What do you want to give away? No reason not to give up Delusions of Mediocrity. That's a classic. There are two new blue cards that are also very good at playing for the other team. One is Statecraft. While this could see play as a way of protecting your creatures, I really don't think that is the card's main use. The main use is to give it away and shut down the attack phase forever. Finally, Embargo is an amazing Trojan Horse. It still stops everyone from untapping non-lands, and they lose two life a turn. That's two colors and a lot of synergenic cards. Time to build a deck. The funny thing is, you don't really want your cards back, so Brand isn't really that good. There is one in the deck anyway in case there is a big land tradeoff, but normally it will just get cycled.

There are some cards that a deck with 4 Gamble can't not play. There's probably some I've forgotten about as well. I chose to use the two mana lands because this deck is designed to need its mana twice - once to cast an enchantment, the second time for an Auction. If you need to Donate, Tutor, or Gamble, you should be able to do that with a City or basic land. The sideboard can be a classic CMU-style Vampiric Tutor sideboard, since with both Gamble and Mystical Tutor you can reliably get a card you really want. If there's something that you find especially important, you can tune the mana base to provide a third color of mana using pain lands.

How does this deck work around counterspells? Realistically, it just doesn't. You have to play at least ten cards that don't work without other cards, and seven tutors that each lose you a card. There's no way you can recover from that in the long term, and you aren't fast enough to cast Donate under their counterspells. Even if you were, it probably wouldn't be enough. Sideboarding gives you the traditional ways to defeat counterspells, like Defense Grid, and more copies of Rishadan Port if you want them. Sadly, your best shot would be to "break" the deck, abandon its main idea, and transform into a deck that did something the counters couldn't deal with, like Hammer of Bogarden. Going for the Hammer probably won't win you game ones, though, and won't win many matches. Your mana base is downright horrible for this plan. With the deck also clearly not going to beat the combination decks, a competitive player needs to look for a better way.

The base of the deck is blue and the Auction is triple red. Would this deck be better without the Auction in it? Very possibly. You would have the old problem of only having 8 Donates, but the gain of real countermagic and a solid mana base would probably be worth it. On the down side, it wouldn't be anywhere near as much fun. A monoblue Donate deck would look something like this:

Don't bet on this winning any state championships either, though. These days, top-level Magic decks have to live by strict rules, and the Donate deck breaks too many of those rules. Still, if the field divides nicely into decks where you can sideboard out the main idea and turn into a counter deck, and decks where giving them a Statecraft locks up the game, this could actually work.

Finally, a word on the two-use two-mana lands, since I just used them quite a lot. They may or may not belong in these decks. They make the main plan of the deck a little more effective, since it only casts two spells that cost significant mana. That's one of the two reasons the lands can be good. The other is using them to cast other mana sources. The problem is they drastically cut down on your ability to play an attrition war. Since you couldn't really fight one anyway, that's not an issue here. For the second version, though, it is very much an issue.