Old School MTG / Finland

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Of angels and demons

Long time since last post - I was going to write about this deck, but got busy with life. Tournaments have been run in the Finnish old school scene, but blogging has happened little less as autumn has progressed…

First version of the deck took part in one of the Finnish webcam tournaments of this autumn, but lost very badly. 2nd version took shared first place in a small local tournament. The one here is third incarnation - untried in tournament, but I feel the best.

Fair warning first: The soul of the deck is Bottle of Suleiman - and this means sometimes you just lose to dice, so take that into account if considering this.

Now then, what you can do with the bottles besides roll fair dice? Prevent the damage of course! And actually, from that the deck kind of builds itself, see:

I first tried Martyrs fro preventing damage, but they felt too clunky for me as 5-cost critters - whereas CoP artifacts turned out to be really nice, handling also opposing Mishra’s and Su-Chis!

And if you are playing CoP artifacts, Transmogrants feel quite natural. And then ‘grants mean Relic barriers are cool, and that means Howling mines are a nice draw engine.

With Transmogrants and bottles, Archaologists have steady jobs, and that means also Orb, and by extension Beast belong. Finally with all these artifacts floating around, Yawgmoth’s demons are happy, and I just could not avoid putting Serras and demons in to the same deck….

Moats might be objectively better than Abysses, but when playing both angels and demons, Abyss is the only thematically correct option. And Transmogranted Serra flying in Abyss has won multiple games….

Sideboard?

Sideboard not shown in pic, but some ideas:

  • 1 Maze to make Abyss more costly

  • 1 StoP & 1 Spirit link to help aginst hordes.

  • 1 Serra and a set of Su-chis for aggressiveness againts creature-light piles

  • 1 Dust to dust

  • 2 Greater realm of Preservation - burn is a real enemy with bottles

  • 2 Armageddon clocks + 1 Cop artifact for the ultra stylish wins