B1 – Orion Concord
This deck started of very mechanically (I’ll see myself out). Puns aside, I was first inspired to build this deck after seeing Tempered Steel. It’s like two Glorious Anthems for the price of one! How hard could it be to fill a deck with good artifact weenies. Turns out, not very, especially with things like Court Homunculus and Arcbound Javelineer.
In the interest of differentiating this from my vast collection of white weenie decks (one for every block), I decided to branch out to blue for another great aggro card: Ensoul Artifact. I started looking for blue artifact creatures and came across Etherium Sculptor and Master of Etherium. This deck quickly added Chief of the Foundry and Ethersworn Shieldmage, and it occurred to me that there were simply too many great artifact creatures.
So I took a step back, and decided to favor the flavor of the deck over power. Besides, there are enough good Constructs that I’m liable to build a colorless Construct tribal deck in the future.
As I was laying out this deck, I was looking at a lot of sci-fi artwork, rather than fantasy. The flavor was evolving into an far-future alliance between the earthling Humans and alien Vedalken, banding together to fight some as-yet-unnamed foe. So most of the constructs came out so that I could fill the deck with white and blue Humans and Vedalken kitted out with super-science tech.
The deck plays as a pretty standard ramping aggro deck and takes advantage of Scourglass by running all artifacts, all the time. If I stall in the late game, I can rely on Lita to provide fighter craft for my ground troops to pilot to victory or a Cityscape Leveler to wear down my enemy’s defenses.
Homebrew Cards – White Blue
Mixing things up for my two-colored ally decks, I’ll be posting homebrew cards from multiple cycles that happen to be in those same colors. Without further ado, here’s white-blue:
The original guildmages from Mirage were the first time I recognized a cycle of cards. I was frustrated by the first several cycles, be they Civic, Sunscape, or Dega, since you couldn’t activate their ability with the color you used to play them and their abilities weren’t that good anyway.
This guy is part of a cycle that seeks to rectify that issues, presenting a decent body that useful to either color, but especially so for the right pair.
Way back in Apocalypse, they printed a cycle of 2/2 creatures for two colored mana that had an ability shared by both. Those creatures have fallen behind in power over the last few years, and the thing I like most about allied colors is what types of cards they destroy.
Every ruler should have a magician on staff to come flying in at a moment’s notice to protect them from incoming spells.
The theme of this cycle was finding enchantments that had been printed in two allied colors, then reducing their total mana value by requiring both colors to cast.
Here we see a merger of Propaganda and Ghostly Prison. This card fits nicely into a white-blue moat strategy, without the crushing despair that comes from playing an opponent who has an actual Moat on the field.
My first custom split card! This combines my love of allied removal with the fuse mechanic. Inspired by Hull Breach and Wax//Wane, this card fills the role of spell counter in either color, with the possibility of getting a twofer by stopping some absurd, multi-spell combo.
This cycle started as a mental exercise of thinking of spells that would make multiple Clue, Food, and Treasure tokens. For this one, I had to come up with another token type, trying to think of other materiel that one would stockpile in a conflict.
Medicine could obviously benefit creatures with -1/-1 counters and players with poison counters, but I like that it can also sedate planeswalkers and creatures amped up with +1/+1 counters.
Back to my love for allied-color removal! Color-hosers have always been a part of the game, though they are an exceptionally meta choice. I wanted a cycle of cards that were useful against any color combination, but got a little extra boost against their enemy color.
Here we have a simple spell counter that also allows scrying against red. I like the idea of gaining valuable insight by an enemy’s failure.