Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the bushiest of them all? The wolf guy, of course.
This is my own Magic: the Gathering theme deck. It is bit of a weenie deck, with lots of small bushy-tailed animals, and some other lupine bits. The wolf theme shows.
A little bit of history: This deck started out in 4th Ed. and Ice Age days. I saw someone selling a wolf theme deck online, and then decided to make my own deck around the wolves. It turned into a spectral deck (which shined in solitaire but not in duels), which later turned into a white/green deck (although I miss Hymn to Tourach and a few other wolf cards).
This deck doesn't have all of the wolves I wanted to put here, particularly some wolf cards from earlier editions - and due to my M:tG "blackout" in recent years, not much from editions newer than Mirage. For example, I have only found one Howling Wolf so far (and a howling wolf isn't much unless there are others to respond to the call!)
The deck used to be very much green mana-driven, but now I have a lot of white cards, so there's more plains. The snow-covered lands are more or less just for looks. I like them. All lands are from Ice Age or Mirages (God I love Ice Age's land artwork!), except for Odyssey's Tarnished Citadel. I've never found any good non-basic lands, but this sounded pretty good.
My usual strategies with this deck:
- Usual weenie strategies: produce too much bushy-tailed creatures for the opponent to handle.
- If the opponent gets somehing big and nasty to play, Reprisal helps.
- Giant Growth + Reprisal is good for rat-flinging smaller opponents.
- Enchantments and nasty weevil artifacts shall be Disenchanted.
- Once the opponent is quivering after the weenie attack, bring out the big creatures.
The usual problems with this deck:
- It just doesn't win against other weenie decks, especially decks that are weenier than it... Weenie decks are all about raw, headless, mindless, reckless attack power with lots of enemy casualties and quite a few of their own - this deck has a lot of supporting cards, which means it's not purely based on that strategy. I suppose this deck needs some mid-range creature additions.
- As implied, there's no mid-range creatures and big critters need time to come to play. If the low end gets flattened before the big 'uns arrive - or worse, the low end doesn't come to the play at all - the blood shall flow on the wrong end of the table, probably fatally.
I think the worst side of the deck is that it can be fickle: Either it gives Enough Mana and Stuff Really Happens Too, or... not. Victory is very much dependent on the drawing. I think there are still more wins than losses with this deck, but it doesn't work quite as well as the most annoying weenie deck I've ever built. If only I had 3 more Howling Wolves, 4 Timber Wolves and... um, whatever bushiness is left in the old editions. Oh, and Wolf Pack.
Cards
The Little Critters have obviously extremely bushy tails. Or at least tail feathers...
- 4 x Tundra Wolves [1/1 first strike] (These things bite.)
- 3 x Dire Wolves [2/2, banding if plains in play] (These things bite a bit harder, and also have banding.)
- 2 x Wild Aesthir [1/1 flying, first strike, pumpable WW = +2/+0] (Had to have some flying critters too...)
The bigger critters are probably something that needs to be more frequently updated, but I have some favorites here - anything cheap and effective rules.
- Arctic Wolves [4/5, cumulative upkeep, draw a card] (These wuffs are... aww... well, the cumulative upkeep is sort of a drag, but tolerable.)
- Scalebane's Elite [4/4 Prot/black] (4/4 with protection from black was enough to seriously annoy my overly goth sister who seemed to love Dark Banishings...)
- Shambling Strider [5/5, pumpable RG = +1/-1] (Too bad I don't have red mana to pump this up. I once removed this from the deck - what was I thinking???)
- Ivy Elemental [0/0, cost XG, comes with X +1/+1 counters] (Relatively new, but I'm starting to love this.)
- Krosan Archer [2/3, block flying, pumpable G+discard = +0/+2] (Phew, hope I find something that does things better.)
Then the enchantments.
- 3 x Aspect of Wolf [Give +y/+y, where y=forests you control / 2] (Increases the target's Bushiness.)
- 2 x Gift of the Woods [During combat +0/+3] (With the wolf picture, of course)
- Spirit Link [Gain 1 life for each damage the creature deals] (Dipping this to any double-Aspected critter sure brightens the opponent's day. I'll always remember the day I found this from a starter deck...)
- Nature's Blessing [WG,discard to give creature permanent ability or +1/+1 bonus...] (I only recently found this from my card box- and had to read it twice to realize I actually had two of card this good in a huge bunch of cards I paid 100mk for...)
And the instants.
- 3 x Reprisal [Bury creature with power >=4] (MtG was fun until my sister got a load of big critters... then I found a huge bunch of these from my treasure chest.)
- 2 x Giant Growth [+3/+3 until end of the turn] (Great for making Bushy things Really Bushy, or rat-flinging opponents to be targeted with Reprisal.)
- 3 x Disenchant [nuke artifact or enchantment] (One of the cards that no sane player can live without...)
- Storm Seeker [1 damage per card in hand] (I got this because it was in one poster and it has a cool picture. And, it's cool in early game.)
- Ancestral Tribute [2 life / creature in graveyard, flashback] (No wonder my sister didn't sell this card so easily...)
- 2 x Scars of the Veteran [Prevent 7 damage, for each damage prevented creature gets +0/+1] (Another card that was found from the box and then Turned Out To Be Cool)
- Reinforcements [Put 3 creatures from graveyard on top of library] (I guess this will go at some point... but it's pretty neat.)
Sideboard (if it can be called that, I hope to refine this later):
- Millstone [Discard 2 cards from top of library] (I bought this with some money, and had a gigantic lot of fun, but then my sister started collecting Odyssey that has all that Flashback/Threshold shit...)
- Crusade [enchantment, +1/+1 for whites]
- Jester's Cap [Remove cards from library]
- Runesword [creature gets +2/+0, its damagee can't be regenerated, if dies, removed from game.] (Never really found this staggeringly useful, but what the heck...)