The Crescent Moon by Montague Dawson (1895-1973). Scourge of Fleets by Steven Belledin.
Last week I walked you through the mashing together of my three midrange simic decks. "Simic Dreams" has already won a game but it has yet to be played in league play. Hopefully out of the six remaining games I've got this month I'll be able to pick up a win or two. I like my chances, but then I tend to be optimistic until the harsh reality of how good other players can be hits me square in the face. We'll see, and I'll let you know. I'm beginning this post mid-week and will wrap it up after next Saturday's league games, so I'll let you know how it goes in my final thoughts.
This week I'm going to walk you through the silly mid-range sea monsters build I decided to make out of some of the leftover cards from those three simic decks - Vorel, Ezuri & Momir Vig.
The Spark
Sometimes when you embark on a new project, the spark that starts the whole process is a single card.
In this case I suspect it was one of two cards, or perhaps both.
Whelming Wave is a sorcery, and it will affect your own creatures, so it's like a strictly worse Cyclonic Rift that is ONLY worth playing if you have low standards and a battlefield full of big dumb sea monsters. Fortunately, I'm hoping to have both. Well, I probably already have the former and this deck will be aiming to create the latter.
Synthetic Destiny is a neat way to cheat lots of creatures onto the battlefield. I've looked at this card in my favorite LGS' blue rare box so many times, I was utterly convinced that I owned a copy. I couldn't find it, bought another, and then discovered that for some inexplicable reason I had put it into my Gisa & Geralf deck (now converted into a Scarab God deck). Go figure.
The mission is to develop a goofy fun mid-range EDH deck that is set up to use and abuse these two cards.
Picking a Commander
Pulling apart my Simic deck and looking through the random sea monsters I had in my rare binder gave me some options to lead this new deck. We've got to be in blue, so that gave me three right off the bat.
The first two are spot-on for a sea monsters build but we aren't trying to cast our sea monsters - we want to cheat them into play. Also, I've sworn off having generals that cost 7 or 8 mana. They're just too expensive. The slighted bit of mana issues or removal and you're screwed. We're looking for something in the 3-5 CMC (converted mana cost) range.
Talrand would be an ideal general. He's much cheaper and he makes drake tokens. Tokens are what we want to exile with Synthetic Destiny to go grab some Krakens, Leviathans, Octopuses and Serpents. "Dr. No" is a fantastic control commander, but we're going to occasionally have to hardcast Sigmund the Sea Monster and his big dumb friends, and that will require lots of mana. Talrand is mono-blue so his colors don't lend themselves to ramping very well.
The need to ramp means we're looking for a commander that has green in their color identity. Luckily for us, taking apart our three simic decks left us with two copies of Rashmi, Eternities Crafter - one of which went into Simic Dreams.
The other is going to lead this deck.
Rashmi gives us card draw, lets us play green ramp spells, and every once in a while we might be able to line up a big creature as our first spell in a turn and be able to cheat something nice out onto the battlefield. More often than not it'll just be card draw but that's fine. Card draw is pretty important.
Ramp and Draw
Last week when I rebuilt my Ezuri deck I did something for the first time ever - I intentionally started a deckbuilding project with 10 draw cards and 10 ramp cards. While the jury isn't in yet on whether that's the best way to build, I liked how it felt and I've decided to give it another go.
Since we're in blue and green we've got the best colors for ramp and draw. We're looking at our typical low-budget package: Rampant Growth, Explosive Vegetation, Urban Evolution, Zendikar Resurgent, Biomantic Mastery, Shamanic Revelation, and more.
We've also got a set of Simic artifacts - Signet, Keyrune & Cluestone. Sol Ring is in too, as it's the stapliest of staples in EDH, and I don't see any reason not to throw one in. This is a deck built with cards I've got lying around, so my ramp & draw package isn't going to be that impressive. No Rhystic Study, Top or Tempt with Discovery here - I didn't even have a spare Harmonize. I was able to do it, so we're on to the next piece of the puzzle.
Token Production
If we're going to be exiling creatures to cheat sea monsters into play, we want to maximize the chances that every token we exile will net us something awesome to replace it. That means that for creatures in our deck we really only want sea monsters and cheap spells that create tokens. These probably aren't as cheap as we'd like but I had them lying around and I think they'll do in a pinch. To optimize this deck we'd probably want to get out more tokens cheaper, but there's going to be a point of no return. Once we have more tokens than we have creatures in our deck, Synthetic Destiny won't be able to get us creatures we don't have. Our sweet spot will be 7-9 creature tokens. That'll give us a nice little army to play with.
It doesn't really matter what kind of tokens, though smaller ones are to some extent going to give us better value in the exchange. This isn't the full extent of what I threw into the deck but it's fairly representative of what we're trying to do.
Sea Monsters!
This is where we pile up the biggest, baddest creatures we can find, with a strong bias towards sea monsters. Fortunately, I had lots of these guys lying around. Imagine if you exiled 10 random snakes, elephants, elves and treefolk and got a boardstate like this...
Of course, you would only be looking at a total of 65 power on board. That would be enough to kill one player and if you're lucky you might be able to kill a table but you're going to have to wait a turn. Also note that Stormtide Leviathan will prevent a bunch of your dudes from being able to swing with them. This is the classic problem of the midrange deck - the potential is there but there are issues. The deck gets in its own way sometimes and while it can do some damage, it isn't going to kill everyone out of nowhere. Your opponents will probably have a chance to try to find answers.
In a better deck we would ditch Whelming Wave, ditch the sea monsters and run Eldrazi titans. A player in our EDH league (our friendly neighborhood Sheoldred player) runs a deck called "Surprise Spaghetti" that is all about cheating Eldrazi into play. Built right, it could be a very strong midrange deck that could deal out a ton of pain in the form of both damage and annihilator triggers. It would probably have haste enablers so you can swing on the same turn they hit the table. This isn't that deck.
A Little Something Extra
If we've got 10 cards in the ramp, draw, tokens and fatties categories, that leaves us with a few more cards we can throw in to make the deck work.
We've got our game plan. We're going to make tokens. We're going to try to cheat them into play. If we can have a turn where a half dozen tokens turn into 6 sea monsters, we've accomplished our goal. That said - we don't want to depend upon a single card to have this deck work, so we've got to throw in a few extras. These will come in the form of other ways to do what Synthetic Destiny is doing, plus cards that help with token production or just do fun stuff.
Trading post will give us goats, but it's also a swiss-army-knife artifact that gives us much more than just cheap tokens. If swapping some elephants for leviathans sounds like a good deal, wait until we turn a herd of goats into Krakenpocalypse 2017! Tempt with Reflections may seem nice early game but if we do get some sea monsters on board and are in a goofy mood, we can always tempt our opponents with the big fellas. The deck's goal isn't to lose games, but it is to have fun and there may be times when giving everyone a Stormtide Leviathan seems like too silly an option to pass up.
The other three cards shown above are variations on the Synthetic Destiny theme. Proteus Staff and Polymorph have the added advantage of not forcing us to lose Rashmi. Sometimes one sea monster is all we'll need and I've always wanted to put Polymorph in a deck because I just love the artwork on it. Five "extras" aren't enough though, so we'll add in a few more!
Energy tap will make it easier to hardcast those sea monsters if we ever need to do so. Merchant Scroll is a way to get Synthetic Destiny but we can also get Swan Song, Energy Tap or a counterspell if we need one. We aren't running Cyclonic Rift - I only have so many copies of that bad boy - but if we were it would be a top pick as well for tutoring up a blue instant. Reef Worm will sometimes be an inconvenient creature to get cheated into play but it's too perfect for the theme to not include it in this deck. We've got Mulldrifter in the lineup as well. Card draw is too important and there will be times a flying blocker is needed.
Archetype of Imagination is just so that we can occasionally have an army of flying sea monsters. Kiora makes Octopuses and is again too perfect for the theme of this deck to pass up. She didn't go in my Simic Dreams deck because there isn't enough of a focus on tapping and untapping creatures, but I may well change my mind and put her back in. Her ultimate will be easy to get to with both Doubling Season and Deepglow Skate in that deck.
The Low Ceiling
I keep coming back to the phrase "low ceiling" when thinking about this deck. Let's explore that idea a little.
A deck's "ceiling" is basically how dangerous it is when everything goes right. It has to do with how much damage it can deal and how quickly, but also whether or not it even needs to go to combat to win the game. Can the deck go infinite? If it does go infinite, does it win the game that turn?
A "Surprise Spaghetti" deck that cheats out a half dozen Eldrazi, including the titans, and can give them haste has a pretty high ceiling. Whether it can do that in every game, in half of its games, or in a tiny fraction of its games will determine what tier the deck would belong in. A midrange deck with a high ceiling might be able to flood a board with Eldrazi but might only be able to do that once in a great while.
This Rashmi deck looks to be fairly consistent in its ability to cast or just cheat out Sea Monsters. Obviously we'll want to do that on the end step before our turn but the bottom line is that they won't have haste and we have little in the way of pump or anthems. What you see is what you get. That means it should be a fairly midrange deck with a relatively low ceiling. No infinites. Not enough damage to kill a whole table. It may win a few games but it's no powerhouse.
It should go without saying that these things are relative. My "low ceiling" might seem amazing to someone used to piloting even worse decks. I'm comparing this to decks that are able to go infinite and/or win the game right then and there - either by combat or combo.
In terms of speed, this deck should be relatively slow - able to establish a board by turns 5-7 and if things go right, seriously threaten an opponent by turns 8-10. Really good decks have won the game by then, and truly top decks will win before we can even establish much of a boardstate.
That's OK - we aren't trying to compete with tier one decks..
Rashmi Sea Monsters also won't be very resilient.
If we cheat all of our big boys onto the table and have to recover from a board wipe or Cyclonic Rift, we'll be in a pretty bad position.
Why Bother?
You may ask why someone would bother making a deck that they know will be mid-range with a low ceiling.
What's the point?
Why not just build a strong deck?
There are lots of answers to this, but they are my answers and might not make sense to someone else.
First off - I like to have a range of decks. If I play my best deck and get a quick win, I like to swap to weaker decks unless my opponents specifically ask me not to. Everyone likes to win. I'm not going to win every game even with my best decks, but I firmly believe that a healthy playgroup is one where everybody feels like they're going to occasionally win a game. Playing a range of decks helps to enable that.
The second reason is that I enjoy playing a range of types of decks. This is a deck I haven't built before, with a strategy that is somewhat new to me. I enjoy the surprise of seeing what you're going to cheat into play, much in the same way that I enjoy the "flop" mechanics of Mayael and Narset.
The last reason is that if I were ever to decide that I wanted to turn this into a much stronger deck, swapping out all of the sea monsters for Eldrazi wouldn't be that hard. It probably wouldn't be that expensive either, though I have it in my head that getting a full set of Eldrazi Titans is more money than I usually throw into building a deck.
Having lots of decks makes it easier to let yourself have some that are janky, midrange or even just bad. That doesn't mean they can't be fun in the right situation, and if I only had a few decks I'd probably make sure they were all pretty darn good.
Final Thoughts
If you've gotten this far I should really share the decklist. I think it came out pretty well for something thrown together out of stuff I had lying around, but clearly there's work to be done if I ever want it to be a really good deck.
Rasmhi Sea Monsters
I did promise to update you on how last week's "Simic Dreams" (Ezuri, Claw of Progress) deck did in our EDH league.
Unfortunately, the news is not good. Yesterday was just a terrible no-good day for me in EDH. In both rounds I wasn't able to keep up with the best deck at the table and wasn't able to make much of an impact on the game.
In round one I was at a table with the same Sheoldred player who crushed our table in the previous league game, two weeks ago. Once we had gotten out of the early game, he wiped the board, played Sheoldred, and was the only player able to maintain a boardstate. He had ramped like crazy and I simply wasn't able to keep up. I had Momir Vig on the field for the briefest of moments but wasn't able to turn that into anything before it made its way to the graveyard. Not much fun.
Round two wasn't much better. I was at a table with three very strong players. I was able to keep a second Ezuri Claw player from blowing up, but at the cost of letting another player blow up beyond the point where we could deal with him. I had Deadeye Navigator in hand but wasn't able to ramp enough to be able to play and use him.
Some days things go right. Some days, it's a shit-show of epic proportions. It can be hard to grin and bear it, but you've got to try. Hopefully I took my beatings with a smile on my face. With any luck I'll still manage to win a game before the month is out. I do like my chances - it's a decent build with a "high ceiling", and I even added in my first Rhystic Study just a few days ago!
I'm definitely thinking about what kind of Tier 1 deck I would build if I set my mind to it, but for now I think I'm going to stay the course. I've got two more weeks to play Ezuri "Simic Dreams". After that I'm probably going to play my Sidar & Tana Naya Tokens deck, as it's one of my stronger decks and I really enjoy it. September will be the debut of Ramos, Dragon Engine. I'm counting the days...
As always - thanks for reading and I'll see you next week!