2001)

Let me preface this first article by saying I usually stick to building fun decks that don't hold their water against highly tuned go for the throat decks. With that said, hopefully this deck will provide a few interesting ideas that you may have not thought of and still be efficient enough to win some T2 matches for you. My biggest problem with building decks is I love to include all kinds of weird cards that really make the game interesting and keep my opponnent on their toes. The disadvantage to this kind of deck building is that your deck may not be as efficient as possible and often has many ´´cool but overcosted´´ cards in it. My goal with this article is to keep my ADD under control for a few minutes, focus, and provide a tournament worthy deck with some interesting ideas that the average fires or rebel player would not expect.

The concept for the deck starts out with utilizing black better in the Type 2 environment. Black has always been a great creature removal color, but I wanted to focus on its discard advantages to take care of the hard to deal with Blastoderm. Taking the control angle of discard led me to consider blue as a secondary color since there is so much color hosing going on in sideboards and the need to have bounce and counterspell answers to make the deck more robust.

With the choice of colors made, the time to choose cards had arrived. My first instincts were to build an interesting deck around library manipulation. The concept was to use Memory Lapse, Painful Memories, Agonizing Memories and some card that penalizes the user for drawing cards. This was an interesting idea that removed threats from my opponents hand while keeping them to the same 8-10 cards for much of the game. The cards used for this are a bit slow, so the idea didn't pan out that well.

My next plan was to consider Lobotomy. This card is a bit expensive, but can be gold when played at the right time and can even be cast turn two with the help of a dark ritual. The obvious benefit of Lobotomy is to remove the big stuff from their hand AND deck (Wrath, Rout, Blastoderm, Linn Sivvi, Fires of Yavimaya, Nether Spirit etc...). The fact that this card can remove all copies of the card from the game is pretty big since so many decks, although technically not combo decks, do rely heavily on one kill card and most decks run four of any given card.

So far the deck has Lobotomy, and I kept Memory lapse as an interesting counterspell because of the draw slowing abilities and only 1 blue mana requirement. Undermine is an obvious choice to round out the counterspell aspect of the deck and to keep your opponents life total quickly plummeting. Now on to creatures. To continue with the idea of removing key cards from the users library, I added in Rootwater Thief as a blue creature, potential flyer, 1/2 (avoids plague spitter), and built-in deck ruiner. Looking through the pool of often-overlooked sixth edition cards, Hidden Horror emerged as an awesome creature especially when combined with Nether Spirit. Turn 1 dark ritual, Hidden Horror and discard Nether Spirit. Turn 2 you have 5 damage targeting your opponent's unprotected head and still have open mana to Dark Ritual - Lobotomy or Memory Lapse their next spell.

To round out the discard pressure I added in Unmask and Parallax Nexus. Unmask is a great turn one play to see what your opponent has in store for you and get rid of the card threatening a rainy day on your parade. Parallax Nexus gives you discard and time advantage and also works well with Recoil. You can use the Nexus to remove those last 2 cards from your opponents hand and recoil their dragon and make them discard it. This gives you a lot of flexibility and also gives you time to fill your hand with what you need to counter your opponents threats.

2 final cards were added to complete the deck. Vampiric Tutor for searching and a Spreading Plague to keep creature heavy decks stalled.

The deck runs 6 Islands, 7 Swamps, 4 Underground Rivers (and 4 Dark Rituals) for mana support and 1 Dust Bowl to control non-basic lands.

Final deck list looks like this:

4:Hidden Horror
4:Nether Spirit
4:Rootwater Thief

4:Unmask
4:Lobotomy
4:Parallax Nexus

4:Recoil
4:Undermine
4:Memory Lapse

1:Spreading Plague
1:Vampiric Tutor

4:Dark Ritual
4:Underground River
1:Dust Bowl
6:Islands
7:Swamps

Sideboard

2:Cursed Totem
2:Counterspell
2:Massacre
4:Perish
4:Washout

The best approach to playing the deck is to use discard heavily at the begining until you can get out a Hidden Horror and Rootwater theif, then switch to Undermine, Memory Lapse and Recoil to protect your investment while you beat their head. Hopefully this deck offers some fun and non-traditional card selections that will catch your opponent off-guard and wondering what hit them!

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