Necrotic Ooze

Lurking in the shadows before its imminent rise to power? 

I lost a Standard game online to a Necrotic Ooze and it got me thinking. In this particular case, the game-breaking combo was with a Spikeshot Elder, but I think this card's true power hasn't even been seen yet.

The rumor is, Innistrad is going to be have a graveyard theme.This does seem likely because you can see a little graveyard theme running through M12 as well. To name a few, the new Jace, Jace's Archivist, and Zombie Infestation make it much easier to get cards into your graveyard. From there Necrotic Ooze's power potentially skyrockets.

Remember Knight of the Reliquary? This Alara block card was unremarkable until Zendikar's land theme turned this guy (gal?) into a major player.Could Necrotic Ooze be the next Knight of the Reliquary? I believe there is a strong possibility for this, but to be fair, it could turn out more like the Lodestone Golem whose value increase after Scars of Mirrodin was much less pronounced.

Let's take a look at some creatures with abilities our death ooze would love to absorb:

• Geth- mill your opponent and steal creatures out of his graveyard
• Hex Parasite - take out pesky plansewalkers
• Molten Tail Masticore - 4 damage to creature or player and regen
• Pestilent Souleater - gain infect
• Trespassing Souleater - unblockable
• Immolating Souleater - phyrexian firebreathing
• Steel Hellkite - destroy permanents
• Vector Asp- gain infect

I especially like the souleaters teaming up. Pay some life to give your 4/3 unblockable, infect, and firebreathing? Yes please.

With the new cards in M12 and Innistrad (presumably) to get creatures into graveyards, I think this guy is going to get serious. The potential to absorb any and all activated creature abilities on top of an efficient body may prove very competitive in the new format.

One more thing. If we build a deck around one creature how do we ensure we get it into play regularly? Birthing Pod will do the trick! I think that'll work nicely - tossing souleaters into the graveyard along the way.

I'm willing to bet Necrotic Ooze's value is going to increase over the next year. In fact, I did. I've always thought about buying up cards I think are going to increase in value but with this guy I finally did. With digital copies available for eight cents I figure even if I'm wrong a few extra playsets won't break the bank.

Elf Wave

4 Arbor Elf
4 Dread Statuary
4 Elvish Archdruid
4 Ezuri, Renegade Leader
20 Forest
1 Garruk Wildspeaker
4 Genesis Wave
4 Joraga Treespeaker
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Nissa's Chosen
1 Sylvan Ranger
2 Tumble Magnet
4 Wildheart Invoker






Here's a standard deck inspired by a Scars of Mirrodin block Pro Tour deck list. Sixteen mana producing elves launch you into monster Genesis Waves. Besides the waves, the entire deck is composed of permanents with converted mana cost 4 or less.

The elf chief, Elvish Archdruid, is key. He not only makes all your elves bigger but ends up tapping for large amounts of green mana.Elruzi can protect the archdruid while also providing Overrun in permanent form.

If you can't find a wave, the Wildheart Invoker provides way to use all that extra mana while also incrementing your elf count.

Here are some highlights from a few sample games:

Game 1: I have a good hand: elves, lands, and a genesis wave. T1 llanowar elves, T2 treespeaker. My turn 3 would ramp me to 6 mana allowing me to drop the rest of my elves... except his turn 2 involves a Pyroclasm. Two elves bite the dust. A few turns pass. I play some elves and he gets a Contagion Clasp which he uses to proliferate my wounded elf and charge up his Everflowing Chalice. Ok.. not too big of a deal if I can just get this Genesis Wave to go off... He plays a Khalni Gem. Ok dude, sure. And then Destructive Force. Ouch. He basically wipes my entire board (lands included), and he of course doesn't care about the losing the lands because of the gem and charged chalice. Some other stuff happened but it didn't matter. That was game. 0-1.

Game 2: This game was picture perfect for the elves. My opponent did nothing that mattered. These were my plays: T1 mana elf, T2 archdruid, T3 Elruzi, treespeaker, and nissa's choosen. T4 swing, activate overrun, hit for 22. 1-1.

Game 3: He mulliganed to 5 the drops a Glistener Elf. My first thought was his deck was even faster than mine. These infect decks seem to burn out extremely quickly but are totally capable of killing you on turn 3. I'm certain that being able to quickly detect "who's the beatdown" allowed me to win a game that would have otherwise been impossible. He was the beatdown. I need to trade cards 1 for 1 an avoid taking any poison counters for as long as possible. So... he ran his 1/1 into my 1/1s. I blocked each time and each time he pumped his elf to save it. I guess he had to save his one creature. Not blocking would have poisoned me to death quickly. After that I let him through a few times to build up a enough mana elves to launch a wave for 4. I flip over 3 lands and an elf. Not the best. However, next turn I cast a wave for 9. At this point my entire deck is on the table, but I realize I'm still very close to dying. I have 7 poison counters and he has an Inkmoth Nexus. I can't block flying. If he draws one of his many boosts I'm dead. I don't think he did because he conceded. 2-1.

A little about me and this blog

Hello, my name is Tom. I've been playing magic off and on for about 3 years. Magic is certainly my favorite game. As much as I love playing magic I might enjoy thinking about magic even more. And writing is just organized thought right?

The thing is, my interest is a bit fickle (that whole off and on thing). I just don't know if a week from know or even tomorrow I'll still want to do this. But, magic has been a fairly consistent part of my life since I started playing so maybe this will work out. I think blogs don't work very well unless you update consistently. Good news for me is I don't actually have any followers. So... tomorrow if I quit no will notice. And of course if I do stick it out a while I might decide to make some kind of commitment. At that point I'd look into sharing my blog (with who I'm not sure yet).

Maybe one day this'll be a big thing. Or maybe medium. I think my secret goal for this blog is to have it noticed one day by Mark Rosewater. He's the lead designer (or some title like that) for magic and his weekly blog is fantastic. In fact, now that I think about it, his writing is certainly an inspiration for me and one of the reasons I'm giving this a go. But apparently he likes to read fan mail and writing about magic so that may actually be a possibility (fingers crossed). Hmm that might sound weird... Tone is difficult to get across in writing and I refuse to use emoticons. I'm joking.. kind of.. not really.

Everything over at daily mtg is high quality. Well.. a lot of it. I especially like Mike Flores' tournament reports in addition to Mark's stuff. If you play magic, check it out.

There are so many ways to play magic. Different formats, online vs offline, competitive vs casual. For a while I wanted to be super competitive but I pretty much gave up on that because I believe to be really good at anything you have to force yourself to do it, and I wasn't quite willing to do that with magic at this point in my life. The thing is, trying to win has always been a big part of what I enjoy about the game so my current compromise is playing in the casual room online, with my own (cheap) decks, but trying to win. Here are my current guiding principles for how I want to play magic (does anybody else do weird stuff like this?):

casual standard, classic, and pauper:

• enjoy playing
• learn and grok
• play to win
• build my own decks
• use a variety of decks
• stay within budget

I think this is a pretty good mix between playing casual and competitive. This is less competitive than I used to play because I don't keep score anymore. I used to track all of my wins and losses per deck in a spreadsheet (maybe one day I'll share), but now, see, I figure this blog could sort of memorialize my experience instead of my spreadsheet. It's not about win ratio but the experience. And, in case you're wondering, my budget is fairly small - especially when you consider that budget is spread across all my decks and I like to build a lot.

I'm gonna say one more thing about Maro. One of his articles was about writing. In this article he said something like what makes writers special is putting themselves into their writing. I think this means sharing slightly embarrassing details like my "guiding principles for how I want to play magic" and my ridiculous spreadsheet tracking every magic online game I ever played. You do kind of feel like you're leaving yourself exposed a bit for the whole world to see, but I think he's right.

So. Here's to maybe, just maybe, a long happy journey of writing about magic.

First multiplayer game

My first multiplayer game. This post is also really a test. I imagine screenshots will come in handy sometimes. Anyway.. this game took FOREVER. It was fun though. Played with some friends. One of them was new to MTGO which greatly contributed to the length of the game. Multiplayer was kind of interesting, but I've always felt magic was a two player game.

Blue Locus

14 Island
4 Cloudpost
4 Glimmerpost
4 Expedition Map
2 Bonesplitter
2 Unsummon
3 Brilliant Plan
3 Drift of Phantasms
3 Halimar Wavewatch
2 Kraken Hatchling
4 Mulldrifter
3 Phantom Monster
4 Sea Gate Oracle
4 Trinket Mage
4 Ulamog's Crusher



This is a pauper deck. I didn't include the speed in the deck title this time but it's definitely a 5 - very slow.

The 8 locus lands works to generate a ton of colorless mana. Trinket mage hooks up with an expedition map which can fetch the very important Cloudposts. Get a few couldposts in play then Brilliant Plans and Mulldrifters eventually dig up a crusher. Bonesplitter on a flier is the backup plan.Trinket Mage fetches the bonesplitter when you don't need more mana.

b4-monoblack

4 Doom Blade
1 Drana, Kalastria Bloodchief
4 Gatekeeper of Malakir
4 Grasp of Darkness
1 Mind Sludge
4 Nantuko Shade
4 Phyrexian Rager
4 Skinrender
4 Steel Hellkite
24 Swamp
2 Trusty Machete
4 Vampire Nighthawk

My first post! This was mainly a test for a script I wrote to convert my Magic Online deck exports to html decklists with links to Gatherer. Works well enough.

This deck is "b4" because it's black (the b) and 4 is the speed. I use a labeling system (sometimes) where the speed of a deck goes from 1 (very fast) to 5 (very slow). This one, however, isn't really all that slow. It could probably be 3 too. But the idea behind this one is cram a bunch of card advantage and removal into the deck and win with either the shade, the hellkite, Drana, or maybe a nighthawk with a machete.

I should mention the format. This is a standard deck, but I play in the casual room. I try to win, but I like to build my own decks and I have a limited budget. So casual standard works out. I also like to build a variety of decks as you may see.