No restrictions!

It seems to be impossible to find an evening where at least three of my team mates are able to meet up with me to play some decent, old school face-to-face Magic in these summer times. And it is not because the summer weather here in Denmark should make you feel bad for being inside. It is cold and rainy all the time. Perfect weather for some friendly spell-slinging, but alas!

Too many real life obligations has once again foiled the otherwise great plans! Maybe next week? We will see.

But now that I have no one to play against, and I am still on summer vacation (in my home), I thought I might as well write something to these halls of infinite Old School Magic related nonsense.

Today I will present for you, a couple more decks, I have assembled with not a single restricted (Swedish!) card in sight.

I wrote a bit more at length about my habit of playing unrestricted here. I will not go much into the finer details of why I make and play these decks; only show some more of them today. Click the link if you want the full backstory.

It is getting Personal

The first deck is one where I try to use Personal Incarnation.

I think it is an okay card, but of course you have to know what you are doing, when you play the guy. Otherwise you may well succumb surprisingly fast to your opponent.

My thought was that the more life I have, the less dangerous it would be to lose my Incarnation. I also wanted to play Angelic Voices because it is a cool card.

I came up with this mono white train wreck:

Okay. Train wreck is way too harsh a word. It was a decent deck, even though it of course lacks card draw and a way to avoid getting into top deck mode, which is not where this deck normally wants to be.

But if you draw some removal and get to play your threats, it is a fun deck. I should mention, though, that the real hero is of the deck is not Personal Incarnation but rather the Clay Statue. Regeneration with Spirit Link and an Angelic Voices! Wow. That was very nice!

Now with the gloves on…

The next one, I have actually already shown you. Ish. It is the NoRestricted edition of the deck I played at The Mountains of Madness back in June. You can read all about it here.

This deck is really cool. Also without the restricted cards. I don’t have a lot to add besides what I wrote about the deck in my tournament report. The deck is strong. In the NoRestricted edition I have opted to play the Copy Artifact to put some more Oomph into the pile. And between Mana Vaults, Su-Chis, Ashnod’s Altars and all the other stuff going on in this deck, Copy Artifact is rather crazy.

Sindbad Machine

On to another really cool deck. It is a machine deck who wants to do a lot of things, and is rather good at doing some of them.

Yep, this is a pile of almost unlimited synergies and different stuff going on. I really like these machine decks, that wants to get some crazy machine going in order to get so much ahead it becomes impossible for the opponent to catch up. I think I will try to build this deck in powered mode at some point. It is just fun, and an unanswered Sindbad is really, really all I want to do!

Towering Lich

And then, finally, a Lich deck. I have already declared 2023 as year of the Lich somewhere, but I haven’t been able to build many decks with the evil, old Lich.

But now, here we are again.

I was thinking that we don’t necessarily have to think about Lich as a combo card. What would happen if we simply played it as a card advantage engine?

So the point here is that we want to keep all creatures at bay, while we build up our board with mana, Ivory Tower and possibly a The Hive.

At some point we play a Lich to draw cards off of the Ivory Tower. It wasn’t before I tested it, I figured out the stupid amount of cards one is to draw, if there is more than one Ivory Tower in play. The first Tower trigger will resolve – for example giving you one life – which will trigger the Lich, drawing you one card. Then the next Tower trigger will resolve, but now you have more cards in hand. This gets really stupid really fast.

The point, of course, is that you have to be able to protect your Lich once it hits the board. So that is the other half of the deck. Counters. I should probably play more Flash Counters, but this is a first draft, and I really like Spell Blast so I wanted to try it out.

And that was it for now. Just throwing a small handful of decks at you to ponder. I am definitely going to work more on the last two – probably also with some power in the mix.

Have a great summer.