2012)

Hello and welcome to the Chaos Theory! This week I will be looking at some of my Innistrad favorites and trying to build from there. Innistrad brought out a whole new range of toys for casual players to try, and I suspect none interested casual players more than werewolves. But today I want to focus on a slightly different wolf-based card: Kessig Cagebreakers.

When I am looking for a card to focus a deck around I generally want to look for something that has an absurdly high power level if we jump through some hoops, but if the plan doesn't work the card is not completely useless. Kessig Cagebreakers fits the bill perfectly as, even without any major shenanigans to get creatures into the graveyard, it isn't difficult to see him bringing along 2-4 wolf buddies, when coupled with his own 3/4 body this is a fair amount of power for 5 mana. If we manage to stock up the graveyard the Cagebreakers will be bringing a whole pack every time they attack. It is also important to remember that unlike most fair variations of these "bring along some friends attackers" the wolves don't disappear once your attacks are done, so if you manage to keep a Kessig Cagebreakers on board for a few turns then winning under a mass of wolf tokens should be easy.

With the Cagebreakers as our focus there are two more Innistrad creatures that interact quite nicely with the fill our graveyard theme: Splinterfright, and Boneyard Wurm. Both of these guys love seeing more creatures in the graveyard, and Splinterfright actually helps by milling for 2 in the upkeep. The main problem with these two creatures is that they actually require some creatures to already be in the graveyard before we can have them stick around. If we include 4 copies of each, it is possible that situations would arise where you have to cast a Boneyard Wurm so it immediately dies, so you can have the next one not die. While this situation isn't optimal I think the absurd size these could get to in the late game is definite cause for including at least 4 of the Splinterfright and some number of the Boneyard Wurm.

The next step for this deck is to actually find a few ways to help stock our graveyard. When it comes to deck-building I think this is the step where most builders go wrong. It is very easy to see that Kessig Cagebreakers, Splinterfright and Boneyard Wurm all go into the same deck, and that the easiest way to make these cards function is to mill themselves. So often people will look at cards like Mesmeric Orb, and think this is great it mills myself, and I might get lucky and mill out an opponent. My issue with this line of thinking is Mesmeric Orb helps out with filling our own graveyard but it doesn't do anything else. This deck never wants to win via milling as we are hoping that our large Splinterfright our army of wolves can get there. As a result milling our opponents will always be bad because it gives them the opportunity to use their graveyard, which is often one of the most powerful resources in multiplayer.

Since we don't want to mill everyone we could look at milling ourselves. Throughout Magic's history there have been a lot of very effective ways to mill (or selectively place) cards from our own library into our graveyard. However, Innistrad also provided some interesting tools for assisting with this. Forbidden Alchemy is among my favorite cards to cast in Magic at the moment. The ability to dig four cards at instant speed is so powerful, and when you are abusing cards in your graveyard it is pretty close to drawing four cards for three mana at instant speed. The unfortunate downside is Forbidden Alchemy moves us from being a mono-green deck to a green/blue/black deck. Even though I don't foresee flashing back Forbidden Alchemy often I would hate for it to be relevant in a game and not have the right colored mana to cast it. Mulch is another card that is very powerful in the deck. It is very good early game as helps ensure we hit land drops, while filtering away creatures to ensure the early Splinterfright/Boneyard Wurm does not come down as a 0/0, while in the late game it helps to dig for a flashback spell and out it in the graveyard.

Up until now I have managed to keep all the cards from Innistrad, however this where we leave that path, and we do so for Stinkweed Imp. Stinky seems very powerful in the deck, as a flier with (admittedly bad) death touch, he will keep away many early attacks as opponents will not want to lose their creature and they won't want the Imp to die either. The Imp is very powerful when in the graveyard, although I would be cautious about dredging it too soon. In general I would want to wait until I am at least intending to swing to kill one player before dredging him unless I really needed to recast him.

Between Stinkweed Imp, Boneyard Wurm and Splinterfright we have a decent amount of cheap creatures, and with Forbidden Alchemy and Mulch to fill our graveyard Vengevine seems like a natural fit in the deck. We are happy to mill him away early, and since Mulch ensures we hit land drops, getting a couple of Vengevines out on turn 5 seems like it wouldn't require much work. They can help put the pressure on opponents or even be suicided in to clear out some blockers. And of course, while they sit in the graveyard they are helping the deck to function as well. At this point I'm going to give a mention to Spider Spawning. This card seems relatively solid in the deck. While it is largely a defensive card, it does provide a decent amount of tokens for the cost, and the ability to flashback it if it gets milled is some sweet gravy.

We now have a pretty awesome engine for our deck that has both early and late game action. Now I want to think about including some removal. In general I anticipate this deck doesn't want much removal, we hope our creatures are generally bigger than everyone else's (at least when it matters), although we do struggle a bit with dealing with flying creatures (Spider Spawning helps though). So to mitigate this I would look to include some combination of Fleshbag Marauder and Shriekmaw. These are both creatures that can go straight to the graveyard while doing their destructo-thing. Shriekmaw is an excellent spot removal card, while the Marauder clears blockers, and does a fairly decent job punishing control decks with few creatures.

Now for the crazy part, the cherry on top of our cake of dead creatures. Mirrorweave. This card is absolutely insane. In a deck where we hope to make a mountain of tokens and have a big trampling man this card is quite simply beautiful. Chances are our opponents are not stocking up on creatures in their graveyard at the rate we are and so not only can this pump our team but make theirs smaller (and in some situations actually clear their side of the table). If we only have a Kessig Cagebreakers or some Spider Spawning tokens then we can copy our opponents big tramply things and then kill them with it. Mirrorweave is one of my all-time favorite cards for multiplayer as it has a very high power level if you use it right, and it seems like every other game you manage to do something completely wacky that always makes for a great story.

So after mushing these all in to a 60 card deck here is what I get:

Green (24):
2 Eternal Witness
3 Spider Spawning
3 Kessig Cagebreakers
4 Mulch
4 Vengevine
4 Boneyard Wurm
4 Splinterfright

Blue (4):
4 Forbidden Alchemy

Black (6):
2 Shriekmaw
1 Fleshbag Marauder
3 Stinkweed Imp

Multi (3):
3 Mirrorweave

Land (24):
9 Forest
4 Island
2 Swamp
3 Drowned Catacomb
3 Woodland Cemetery
3 Hinterland Harbor

This deck has turned out very well and with a few minor changes it might even be possible to take to an FNM. That's all I have this week, join me next week when I have a reader submitted deck to work on.

If you want me to take a look at your multiplayer deck or have some comments/suggestions on my article leave a comment or hit me up on Twitter: @DelverOfSecrets

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