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Greetings, my fellow dorks. It has been quite some time since my last article. In that time, I’ve built several new decks for my Magic Online account, weathered the rise and fall of Ravnica, and now hide like a scared puppy from the incoming Time Spiral release online. As I have said before, I tend to be a “Johnny”-style player because I tend to focus on a card and build a deck or two around it until I think I’ve adequately abused it. Some of my fun recent cards/combos have included Celestial Ancient/Doubling Season, Lovisa Coldeyes, Warp World, and Tamanoa. After much consideration and consultation with some of my dorkiest buds (Mr. Editor-dude and Brian Baker), I feel that my Tamanoa deck is the strongest of these ideas.
To introduce the evolution of this deck, I’d like to start with the first time I read the spoilers for Coldsnap and feasted my eyes upon the golden beauty known as Tamanoa. My first thought hearkened back to my early days as a Magic player when I realized a key point to the game: if everyone is trying to reduce your life to 0, you should gain life to counter that. Much to the dismay of my playgroup, I took that too far and made decks that were very hard to kill, but the decks had hardly any kill condition. Eventually, I used cards like Ageless Entity and Test of Endurance to give my lifegain some point. That gave me the courage to branch out into more aggressive decks, which certainly have their advantages, but I have always had an affinity for spells that gain me life and keep me alive. Once I saw Tamanoa, I started thinking of all the fun spells to really get me the most out of this creature.
I first looked at a lot of mono-red burn spells with green mana acceleration and white protection spells to keep Tamanoa and myself alive. While pursuing that route, I thought about the red Honden as a constant source of damage, which led me to wanting to use the white and green Honden as well for backup. Pretty soon I had a solid deck base of Tamanoa and 3 each of those Honden to build around. I quickly turned from red burn that targeted only one creature to more massive forms of damage like Brightflame and Magmatic Core. For white, I added Darien to make my opponents think twice before trying to damage me. On the green side I fiddled with the idea of adding Juniper Order Rangers to beef up my Tamanoa, Darien’s Soldier tokens, and Honden-produced Spirit tokens.
Searing Meditation fit perfectly (very likely something WOTC development planned) with the deck, and so I had to add Lightning Helix and Firemane Angel because they were the original big combos with Meditation. Add to that my obligatory Sensei’s Divining Tops (I have 2 in every deck because they’re just that good, and I try to be as fast as possible with them to minimize complaining about how they make the game drag out), as well as Manriki-Gusari for more creature pump and equipment control, Sundering Vitae, and Faith’s Fetters. Needless to say, I had a very large deck at this point once you factor in land and some green land grab spells.
At this point, I always play with the deck several times to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t. I know that it’s a skewed view because I won’t get to see all of the pieces work, but if I keep getting the same card that sits in my hand forever without doing anything, I begin to see places to cut cards in later versions of the deck. After the first few games, I was having a rough time finding something to cut though. It went 7-3 in the first 10 games and was only losing to strict blue control, LD, or super-aggressive decks that could win by turn 5. The thing I noticed though was that each game was a little different in terms of how I won. Sometimes I’d get the Tamanoa/Searing Meditation combo and just crush them with that, other times I’d get the green Honden with Juniper Order Ranger and just swarm my opponent. After a few more games of this, I realized that my deck was struggling with two completely different ideas of life-gain/damage versus creature beatdown swarm. I decided it was time to overhaul the deck and set its priorities straight. I took out Darien, Juniper Order Ranger, and Manriki-Gusari (since I had just dropped half of my creature spells, the equipment tended to sit out there for a while without anything to attach it to.
In their place, I added Dowsing Shaman to counteract enchantment removal, and Boros Fury-Shield (both defensive and aggressive). After a lot of playtesting, I got the mana base to be pretty predictable while also dropping Magmatic Core (good source of constant damage, but a massive drain on my mana at crucial times) and lowering some of my spell counts from 4 to 3 (like the Honden and my land-grab spells). Here’s the final decklist:
Tamanoa Fun Deck (68 cards)
Land (24):
10 Forest
7 Mountain
7 Plains
Green (15):
2 Dowsing Shaman
3 Honden of Life's Web
4 Sundering Vitae
3 Rampant Growth
3 Kodama's Reach
Red (3):
3 Honden of Infinite Rage
White (9):
3 Faith's Fetters
3 Boros Fury-Shield
3 Honden of Cleansing Fire
Multicolored (15):
4 Tamanoa
3 Firemane Angel
3 Searing Meditation
3 Lightning Helix
2 Brightflame
Artifact (2):
2 Sensei's Divining Top
Now for a quick rundown of some interesting interactions/tips I have with this deck:
-Using Boros-Fury Shield with Tamanoa on the board can be quite nice. It stops the creature from hitting you this turn, gains you that much life instead, AND deals that much damage to your opponent. All for three mana. Hail of Arrows was also amazing, but it glitched on me (it didn’t allow me to choose multiple targets before it resolved) so I'd be cautious in recommending its inclusion in online decks at least.
-I’ve found that it’s pretty easy to get to 10 mana by turn 8 or 9 which means that not even death can stop your Firemane Angel from coming back turn after turn. What’s best though is to let the life-gain resolve first and then bring the Angel into play because doing it in reverse will disrupt the life-gain.
-Make sure to always strive to have at least 2 Mountains and 2 Plains before you use land-grab to get any Forests because of the mana-intensive cost of some cards. I have more Forests in the mana base to counter this effect so I'll be more likely to draw them to use the land-grab spells. I did this because I got tired of drawing many of the cards that required a green (especially the land-grab spells) and having no way to cast them. Just be wary of the occasional mana-flood experience, which happens when you get a lot of land-grab spells and mess with the shuffler so much that it starts to hate on you.
-Brightflame is SICK with Tamanoa on the board for many reasons. First, it doubles your life-gain (I went from 4 life to well over 60 with a topdecked Brightflame on my Tamanoa recently). Secondly, Tamanoa’s got 3 colors so your radiance could hit a lot more creatures if you target Tamanoa. Thirdly, Tamanoa and Dowsing Shaman (2 of the 3 creatures in the deck) have a toughness of 4 so they can survive a lot and keep going. Last but not least, the Spirit tokens from the green Honden are colorless so they can survive a Brightflame to swarm an opponent immediately afterwards.
Another important point to mention here is that I'm a poor grad student so I work with what little I have. Let me run through some of the ways this deck could be improved if I had more money.
-First, dual lands would be wonderful here. Running 4 of the R/G, G/W, and W/R Ravnica dual lands would help clear up a lot of problems and the loss of life could be countered thanks to the massive life-gain the deck provides. Pain-lands from 9th Edition would be even better with Tamanoa out there because you'll gain the life back anyway.
-An alternate solution could be to use several of the Ravnica Signets, but I personally find them to be a little slow and too easy to disrupt if you're running low on one color.
-Privileged Positions could be added to really help out against disruption, as could Sterling Groves. Eternal Witness or Loaming Shaman could also greatly improve the longevity of the deck as the game winds on.
-Another fun idea I would love to see in the deck one day is to add Collapsing Borders since you'll gain the life from all the damage and then you'll do better than break even when it comes to you.
In terms of matchups, I've found that this deck is very susceptible to Stasis/Counterspell decks (which appears to be 1 in every 3 decks that one will see in the MTGO Extended Casual room unless you specifically ask for no counters like some people have been doing). Fast elf/rat/goblin/phantom decks also had a 50/50 chance of beating me, but if I had enough acceleration early game, I was able to halt them. Now, I'd like to leave you with some of the experiences I've had with this deck against various deck types in Extended:
-Back in the original build, I played against a milling deck that dropped 3 Scalpelexis by turn 6 and got me thanks to the high volume of multiple copies in the deck. Shortly thereafter, I added the Faith's Fetters.
-One fast and effective Rat deck hit me while I was mana-flooded. My opening hand was 4 lands, a Rampant Growth, a Kodama's Reach, and a Sundering Vitae. Normally I'd decide to keep it because it'll mean I can play just about anything I draw. However this is what I faced that game. Turn 2 Nezumi Graverobber, turn 3 Chittering Rats, turn 4 Okiba-Gang Shinobi ninja'd, turn 5 Marrow-Gnawer, turn 6 Ratcatcher, turn 7 Ink-Eyes and Nezumi Short-fang, turn 8 he dropped Crypt Rats just to show off. Meanwhile I drew 4 more land in those turns and cried in the corner.
-In happier news, I took on a White Weenie deck, dropped a turn 3 Searing Meditation and turn 4 Honden of Cleansing Fire and proceeded to clear every creature until he was spent and then I aimed for the face while tossing out the other two Honden for good measure.
-The other evening, I played this deck in a 2-Headed Giant. An army of Elves was facing me down and my teammate was doing all he could to keep his opponent under control when I topdecked a Brightflame with a Tamanoa on the board. That was the game where we went from 4 life to over 60 in one turn, which turned the game around for us.
Since I dislike gloating too much, I'll forego other stories of the deck's successes because they all pretty much sound the same. Got Searing Meditation out and use various lifegain, sometimes with Tamanoa out too, to just shoot the opponent straight to the dome over several turns. That's the primary win condition anyway, but it's also possible to have beatdown with the Angels and Spirit tokens or a combination of Spirit tokens and red Honden burn to overwhelm an opponent. Now, I hope everyone reading this can take something from it, whether it be the process of deck evolution, or cool combos, or even taking notice that this deck exists and planning to be able to beat it when you see it. And now I'm spent. But never fear, my dorks, I hope to have another article soon explaining my fun experiments with Warp World! Mwahahahaha! *cough, cough*
AJ Anderson
spelleraja@hotmail.com
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