| The Noble Art of Being Extra-Late |
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| Written by Chris | |||||||||
| Tuesday, 07 October 2008 20:53 | |||||||||
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Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am now going to finish the article that I recently left hanging about Sky Swallower and how awful it is. Do I win a cookie for seeing this through? Thought not. Sky Swallower then. What possible deck could one build around it? Well, I had a thought, couldn't find anything in Standard that would be worthwhile, and looked into the realms beyond. Hey, Sky Swallower isn't in standard either - it's a Guildpact card! Clearly a card as terrible as Sky Swallower needs a decent or crazy support card, and I thought I'd found it in Nefarious Lich. See, both cards are pretty awful on their own, but together? I spy a sweet combo. What am I waiting for? Here's the deck listing.
Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. If you haven't yet worked it out, here is how this deck works. Or tries to work. Hit some walls on the table, with Telepathy keeping an eye on your opponent's hand. Use Clutch of the Undercity to search for the Nefarious Lich and Boomerang or Eye of Nowhere to bounce back some of your opponent's more threatening cards, keeping one in reserve. Life is quite key here. Stay as high as possible, and if the worst comes to the worst, drop a Nefarious Lich to the table and hope that your graveyard can hold out. Dark Ritual is vital in getting the Lich out, since we only have 5 Swamps. Use the non-basic lands to smooth out the mana curve; Chromatic Star should help in this regard. So far, a strategy that keeps us alive. But where does Sky Swallower enter into the mix, and how does the deck win? Simple. Once Nefarious Lich is on the table, float ![[3]](/media/mana/3_mana.gif) ![[U]](/media/mana/U_mana.gif) and drop Sky Swallower. Bye bye Lich. Now, don't bother attacking, but instead use the left over to cast either a Boomerang or an Eye of Nowhere on the Nefarious Lich now under your opponent's control. Then gloat as they slowly realise that they've just lost the game. Sneaky!What a great idea! I played 3 games with this deck. Let's see how they pan out. Game 1 Opponent is playing a combo deck that relies on having one massive creature in the deck and loads of cards that revolve around searching for Oath of Druids and playing it. With just a wall on the table and a 1/1 black spirit token spawned by my opponent, I have no chance when he reveals a bunch of cards including Black Lotus and the Moxes, before finally playing a Tidespout Tyrant, bouncing all my lands and sailing over for an easy win. Score so far: 0 wins, 1 loss. But really, should they be allowed to play anything that cheeky? Game 2 I'd love to say that this game went better, I really would. But it didn't. I just couldn't seem to draw Sky Swallower and despite having two Dark Rituals and two Nefarious Liches, the game failed since I couldn't find my Sky Swallowers. I managed to stash a lot of mana into Dreadship Reef, and if I had drawn it, I would have won. Nevertheless, 0 wins, 2 losses. Depressing. Game 3 A heated match against a deck built around the Lifelink mechanic. All sorts of cards costing ![[WB]](/media/mana/WB_mana.gif) were cast by my opponent to beef each other up, but they couldn't get round my regenerating Wall of Bones... until Divinity of Pride hit the table. Having over 40 life, my opponent suddenly acquired an 8/8 flier. Since I had not drawn Nefarious Lich or Sky Swallower, I could not win this one either.0 wins, 3 losses. Conclusion This deck fails, utterly. But there is potential in the Nefarious Lich combo, I can see it. Whether I am simply not drawing the right cards to pull it off or the deck is fundamentally flawed, I haven't had time to test out. I think it is the latter, because I need to find some way of getting both ![[B]](/media/mana/B_mana.gif) and , preferably though not necessarily on the same turn. Dreadship Reef would help to pull this off, so more of those would be ideal. I didn't find the lack of Swamps particularly problematic, since Sunken Ruins and Dark Ritual should have helped in that respect.Nevertheless, there is not enough of a chance of drawing Sky Swallower in time. Some ways to offset this would be more and bigger blockers (something with both Flying and Regenerate would be ideal) and more searching. Nefarious Lich was quite easy to get hold of, as were the bouncing spells, and although the double mana costs all over the place were shocking, my choice of lands and accelerators did allow me to chuck spells around fairly consistently. Would anything have been different had I drawn Sky Swallower? It would have been nice to see the combo come off, and I might play this deck again just to see if it works. For now though, I'll happily write off this card as "horrible at best".
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| Last Updated ( Saturday, 11 October 2008 13:47 ) | |||||||||