painland:the deck

i'd intended to build something that'd effectively give stasis players a headache [since my exploding weenies deck got killed - kind of ruthlessly - by a turbo-stasis deck at a tournament one day.]

so, back in the comfort and safety of my own home i began to consider the question of land and how important it is to any magic player. [which has been mildly nullified by allances, but i haven't been keeping up ;) in a perfect world i'm still living in revised ;)]

with that thought in mind i began to consider ways of taking away the resource of having land. i wanted the ability to play land to become a luxury that could only be paid for in terms of loss of life. i'd once built an ankh of mishra deck that hadn't worked out, because most of the spells in the deck were too extravagent to support the basis of the deck, especially when coming up against a land-destruction deck.]

this time around, i made an important decision, no hinge spell [spells that make the deck work] should cost more than two land to cast.

the next thing i decided about the make-up of the deck was that i wanted it to be a little deck, the original, draft edition deck was 40 cards, including land taxes and other bizarre things, but i found that having the land-taxes [and other things] were more of a hindrance to play and not helping the deck along at all, so i took those out and began the endless search-ponder-play routine. [search:i'm looking for something that'll destroy land - anyone got a strip mine? ponder:will a strip mine do what i want it to do? play:oooo...you've just been strip-mined.]

the next step was to take the stakes one step higher. suppose you had to cast a spell of some kind, but every time you did that it hurt you, but keeping the card also did you damage? so the manabarbs/ black vice combination was born.

that was when i discovered that i was burning myself to death. and with my own deck too, so, knowing that i could counter the burn by having some other means of getting mana, i put the fellwar stone, birds of paradise and llanowar elves in. [at one point i also had sisters of the flame and other mana producers involved, but this turned out to be overkill.]

the rack was kind of an afterthought. i'd got to the point where players who had fewer than four cards were immune from taking damage [and if you found some way to stop drawing cards, [like lsland sanctuary] all my planning would go out the window, so i put the racks in to keep people within a three-four card range.

deck problems:

the big, major problem is lack of creatures. if a black player comes along, draws two dark rituals, a black land and a sengir vampire in his first turn, i may as well kiss the game goodbye.

this problem is partially countered by having the serra angels hanging around. of course, if i want to speed it up a bit i could get rid of them, but then i'd have nothing to throw away should a howling mine come waltzing from nowhere. [i've played really weird games where i've forgotten to get a red and a green land out at the beginning of the game, have subsequently put down three ankh's, while my opponent puts down aforementioned howling mine...after about the second one i'm throwing land and a serra angel or two away every now and then :)]

i haven't opted for circles or other protective armor, for the simple reason that it'd slow down the deck...also, it's fun to try to involve melt-down while both of you cope with the problem of drawing no land and there's three ankh's on the table.

weenie decks:

i've got little creatures, but i sort of need all of the creatures i have to make the lock work, so, of course, if you should attack with say, mutliple tokens [zillions of the little beggars] i'd die.

permission decks:

if i don't get hold of an ankh or three within the first turn, i'm going to have problems. :)

if anyone could help out here, i'd appreciate it greatly.

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playing the deck:

this has to be fast or not at all, within say, the first four turns, if you don't have control of the table, get up, smile, toss the deck in the air and walk away. [ok, don't do anything quite as drastic as that, but you get the picture.]

an ideal first draw:

	green land
	vice
	elf
	stripmine
	red land
	ankh
	bird of paradise

what you want is to get the vice down, shortly followed by an ankh, so that in the second turn you have a red land, a green land, an ankh and a vice on the table. this way he's taking damage lots of ways and you can get rid of his first land on sight, from there, just slow down, but keep putting down ankhs until you hit a manabarbs or serra angel.

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painland:the deck, all wrapped up. :)

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