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Building Blocks: A Virtueless World
Posted on April 3, 2012 by Lee McLeod
Lee McLeod Lee McLeod (Gard online) is a student who plays both paper and online Magic. He earned a 6th-place finish at the 2011 U.S. Nationals tournament and is an avid Block Constructed player online.
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My brother and I went 3-1 with a 5 color reanimator deck in a daily. huntmasters/drogskol reavers/flayer of the hatebound/unburial rites. Fun times.
I have played a million different decks and the junk walker deck has still been the best performer for me. It is honestly very clunky and the mana is pretty gross but the power level is so high it keeps winning anyway.
Nobody is talking about GW humans in block. I’ve been cleaning up in the 2-mans with it lately. I splash black for a little removal – but I’m not sure how necessary that is. The deck has a more explosive early game than Boros and can out grind most control decks. Maindeck curses can be problematic but WG offers lots of answers to curses if the meta moves more heavily in that direction.
@Robin
Can you list the deck? Wouldn’t have the same exact start as boros except, boros gets better at turn 4? The mana base in GW is not as good as Boros. Either, way Im always up for playing something different. Post the list.
The major benefit of GW is that you get to play with anthems in a block world suddenly largely devoid of them (mayor and township). Your starts are slightly better than boros, since you can more reliably attack with a 3/3 Champ on T2 thanks to mayor. Unless they expend their reach on your creatures you quickly outclass them in size thanks to anthems. If you ever activate a township at board parity (or better) you win since they have to start blocking.
I played Boros a ton pre-banning and don’t find the mana to be much worse at all in this deck. The double/triple red costs in boros cause that deck to play more red than it really wants. Pilgrims and the fact that you are usually casting 2 drops on turn 3 means that you usually have at least on grace turn to play a tapped land where it doesn’t hurt you.
4x Champion
4x Pilgrim
4x Doomed Traveler
4x Mayor
4x Gather the Townsfolk (maybe only 3?)
3x Fiend Hunter
4x Garruk
2x Sever the Bloodline
2x Slayer (a current meta call – werewolves were hot last week)
2x Increasing Devotion
1x Geist Honored Monk
1x Mikaes the Lunarch
Doing this from memory basic land counts are fuzzy
Weighted in favor of plains because your pilgrims don’t accel you to 3, they accel you to 4-5. 3 Township. 3 Chapel. 4 Cemetery. 25 lands.
SB
1x Fiend Hunter
4x Tribute to Hunger (I hate stalker so much that I play this, but its probably wrong)
3x Grafdigger’s Cage – keep going back and forth between purify
2x Kessig Cagebreakers, (an all star vs. control, or dredge decks whose gnaw send the game long)
1x Mentor of the Meek
2x Ray of Revelation
1x Nauralize
1x Sever
Thalia has been in and out, Slayer replaced a couple of copies of her recently and as I said above Tribute is awful but a lot of people seem to be trying to get free wins off of stalker in the 2-mans so I play them. The list needs to shift toward anti-control in the SB for daily event play, but I haven’t had time for dailies lately.
@Robin: I did mention GW humans in passing, but I didn’t give it its own section because people just aren’t playing it in dailies (or, at least, aren’t doing well with it). I don’t think it’s a bad deck, but I think it’s good draws are comparable to Boros. Which isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but your late games are drastically different. GW’s reach comes primarily in Garruk and Township (which is to say, your late game relies on board position). Boros’s late game is pretty much just burn spells. GW is in general better against creature decks because of its ability to just “go bigger” than them, but Boros is muuuuch better against control. I don’t want to be playing GW against the Jund deck after a Blasphemous Act resolves, for instance, but I don’t mind being Boros in that situation, because I’m always drawing live into a possible Devil’s Play.
I also think GW is a little more consistent than Boros, mainly because you have a lot of redundancy in threats, whereas Boros has a lot of games where you need to attack with Hellrider or else Boros falls behind too quickly.
tl;dr: GW is board position vs Boros’s burn. Take your pick, they’re both fine decks.