Building the New Extended: Part 2
Extended's engine decks all lost at least one of their components. What happens will be everything from total extinction to emergence as even stronger than before. This article will examine the fates of four of them: Stasis, Aluren, Donate and TurboLand.
Aluren Alex Borteh: Nice Masters 2002
Aluren Federico Bastos: Nice Masters Gateway 2002
These are two significantly different approaches to the Aluren engine, but they both come down to the same complex combination. Under Aluren, the deck uses Raven Familiar and Cavern Harpy to search through its library, eventually adding in Man-o'-War and Spike Feeder for infinite life. The missing link in this chain doesn't seem to be important, but Man-o'-War turns out to be vital. Without it, the deck has no clear way to reuse its creatures unless they are blue. Eventually the engine will no longer be able to continue to pay for Cavern Harpy and it will die out.
Is there anything that can replace it? There are two possible plans. One is to find a replacement for Man-o'-War, but my preliminary searches indicate that no single such creature exists. The best you can do is to exchange the Spike Feeder for a Fleetfoot Panther and then exchange the Panther for a Silver Drake. Finally, you can exchange the Drake for a Cavern Harpy, pay one life and repeat the process. The other option is to use Soul Warden. Since the Warden grants one life every time a creature enters play, using it with Cavern Harpy and any other blue creature with a casting cost of three or less will get the job done. Each cycle, the Warden will grant two life points, and Rishadan Cutpurse is still available to finish the opponent off for only one slot. This definitely seems a lot better than trying to use multiple gating creatures.
The question is: How strong is the deck that remains?
The engine itself has retained its size and its consistency if the opponent cannot interfere. If Aluren hits the table, things should go as smoothly as before. The problem is that just about everything else about the deck is a disaster. Man-o'-War would not have been of Extended quality in the absence of the Aluren engine, but it's a solid card that made it into a number of decks in both Mirage block and in old versions of Standard. As a stand alone creature, Soul Warden only makes sense in White Weenie, allows for virtually no neat tricks and is most definitely the wrong color for a one casting cost creature. This deck needs to play blue for Raven Familiar and green for Aluren. If it wants to cast Cavern Harpy, it then needs black mana, and now it wants white for Soul Warden - all at the same time the dual lands disappear. The deck was good in large part because it was so good at scrambling its defenses while looking for Aluren, and it just got a lot worse at that.
In the past, that would have been annoying but not actually that big a deal. Between fetch lands, dual lands, Birds of Paradise and Land Grant it's perfectly reasonable to expect to consistently find four colors of mana as long as only two of them are make or break in the first few turns. That's not true anymore. Two colors are easy, but three involves making sacrifices and four is going to hurt big time. Then again, Alex Borteh's decklist shows that many of those mana tricks are unnecessary. He uses City of Brass, but it seems to have freed him from any need to take advantage of the special aspects of dual lands. In addition, Living Wish seems to fit right into the deck.
Now I have no idea if Alex's decklist works or not, but if it was solid then a player willing to accept the consequences in pain could do something like this. This may be a horrible butchering of the deck, but then again it might not be:
Aluren: November 2002
Donate Kai Budde: Nice Masters 2002
Donate Jens Thoren: Nice Masters 2002
Illusions of Grandeur is dead. Without it, this is a deck without a kill. That doesn't change the effectiveness of the engine, which remains quite scary, but the deck needs to find a new way to win the game after it draws all its cards. Deep Analysis provides the deck with even more ways to turn cheap blue spells and Intuition into massive card advantage, but it still leaves the deck without a purpose. It's safe to say that red will be abandoned without either Volcanic Island or Pyroblast. Whatever emerges will probably have to fall back on some lower level kill cards. That means the deck has to keep itself alive for more turns. Either it has to fight its opponent, or it has to take some extra turns. I'm a fan of both approaches. Helm of Awakening would be interesting, but it too was lost in the rotation. Of course, Merchant Scroll is also gone, and that means that Intuition has to stand on its own. The engine will probably be better off as part of a different deck such as Oath of Druids. I don't think this deck has what it takes, but this is what's left if the Medallions are left intact.
The Oldest Trick of All, November 2002
Stasis Tony Dobson, 2000 New York Masters
Stasis Thomas Preter: 2002 Nice Masters Gateway
I have had endless arguments about what the right Stasis build is, and at some point those arguments will likely be resurrected anew. I would consider neither of these builds ideal, but they are the most successful and the last-known builds of the deck. One thing is certain regardless, and that is that Stasis is dead. Stasis depended on one card at least as much as any other deck ever has, and without that card the deck cannot function. Perhaps Draw-Go will live on, and that's another issue, but you can't lock someone under Stasis without a Stasis. Mist of Stagnation isn't going to get the job done, especially without Phyrexian Furnace.
What can be taken away from the Stasis deck to help in the future? For those who have paid close attention to the details of the deck, there were valuable lessons of how to construct a tight deck, how to cut down on the size of a deck and play exactly what you need both early and eventually without anything extra. This deck walked an amazingly thin tightrope, and the better it walked it the better the deck was. At its finest, it was a rival for best deck in the format, but the very best version never caught on. I should have played it at the first Masters event, but I misjudged the field and that's my fault. Now it's too late.
TurboLand Zvi Mowshowitz: 2002 Nice Masters Gateway
I've heard it proclaimed dead before, so these last few days have been nothing new. Gaea's Blessing has been taken from us, and while nothing else turns out to be a major issue this would seem to be a devastating blow. Does the Oath engine work without it? How will the deck take infinite turns if it can't use Blessing to put cards back? I've even had the deck be accused of not being able to survive the loss of Tropical Island and the resulting weakening of Gush. Only testing will reveal if I'm correct or not, but I think the deck emerges without much trouble. In some ways, the deck could even be seen as having improved.
This is one approach to the deck:
TurboLand 3.0 (November 2002)
All right, it's time for the explanations. The first question is: How will the deck go infinite? That one is easy to answer. Battlefield Scrounger comes to the rescue. Its ability returns three cards from your graveyard to the bottom of your library, allowing the Time Warps and whatever else you desire to flow freely. In fact, Oath of Druids will now within two turns generate an empty library, which the Scrounger can then fill up with whatever you want. Normally this will result in infinite turns and end the game. When deciding to make the Scrounger the only creature, I gave the deck a lot more explosiveness, with the opportunity to win games off infinite recursion as early as turn three becoming realistic. Turn one Exploration, turn two Oath of Druids. Turn three Oath into the Scrounger, cast a Time Warp, and you can start drawing whatever you want while a 6/6 finishes off the opponent. Turn five is going to be par for the course against opponents with multiple creatures.
That takes care of the engine. The new Oath engine has one large weakness, which is that if it faces off against one creature it will often lose in a fight - for example, Morphling. If that proves to be too problematic, the creature set may have to return to a more normal configuration. There's nothing wrong with the good old 'big guy' plan. Regardless of what happens, Krosan Reclamation can stand in for Gaea's Blessing without too much trouble. If you mill your entire library, then the Reclamations are sitting there in the graveyard to flashback, and they become double tutors. There are numerous creature configurations to try, and I have no idea which one will be best.
The proposed sideboard is a little strange and very speculative. The second Reclamation is both insurance and hate for reanimator decks. Spike Weaver, Morphling and Phantom Nishoba are alternate creature sets (and the Nishobas is the reason for the Brushland). The Nishobas should be a very strong answer to Sligh if the Oath goes active, since the life gain will put the game away quickly. Morphling is for control decks. Spike Weaver is for those decks that bring out massive numbers of creatures that need to be fogged as soon as possible.
All of those bring attention to the strangest card in the sideboard: Living Wish. The Living Wish is there to allow me to hide the Battlefield Scrounger in the sideboard. Oath of Druids won't hit Living Wish, so I can get the creatures I want to stop my opponent, use Krosan Reclamation to get back Living Wish, then use Living Wish to get the Scrounger for the win. Then again, that might be totally crazy. But this should be a solid place to start looking for the new version of this deck. Normal Oath decks can take this path, or they can take another. There are so many to choose from.
Welcome to the new Extended. I hope you like it.
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