Tag Archives: Zero to sixty

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Steal and dump deck

I’ve wanted to participate to yesterday’s “Zero to Sixty” article on Daily magic. So here is my letter.

Dear Gavin Verhey,

Sorry to contact you by email even though you asked to submit our deck list on the discussion board but I’ve had a few account problems recently and can’t do otherwise. Regarding your article “Zero to Sixty”, I found that it was really good advices about deck building that I never actually saw written anywhere. It made me realise that I was building my decks around cards and not goals and your “Crunching numbers” really helped too. So with that said lets go to the deck.

The deck is a Rg control type that aims to close the game by attacking with my opponent’s creatures. At the end of the game, the graveyard is stuffed of mass removals and temporary steal spells with some cards used to sack the creatures I stole. My opponent’s grave should have lots of creatures in it.

Card like Act of aggression, Act of treason and Traitorous blood steal my opponent’s creatures until the end of turn. But we don’t want to give them back so we use sacrifice outlets like Culling dais, Feed the pack, Helvault or Garruk to gain significant card advantage. The early protections consist of circle of flame and a few mass removals along with the Walls of tanglecord. The Charmbreaker Devils is our finisher if we ever need one and can be fetched by Garruk.

On a quick note, Feed the pack allows us to use freely our steal spells because it triggers before we have to give the creature back.

Deck list: Steal and Dump

  • Lands (25)
  • 4 Copperline Gorge
  • 4 Rootbound crag
  • 2 Forests
  • 15 Mountains
  • Creatures (5)
  • 1 Charmbreaker Devils
  • 4 Wall of tanglecord
  • Spells (28)
  • 3 Act of aggression
  • 4 Act of treason
  • 4 Circle of flame
  • 4 Culling dais
  • 2 Feed the pack
  • 3 Helvault
  • 1 Jar of eyeballs
  • 2 Slagstorm
  • 2 Traitorous blood
  • 3 Whipflare
  • Planewalker (2)
  • 2 Garruk relentless
  • Sideboard (15)
  • 3 grafdigger’s cage
  • 4 Kuldotha rebirth
  • 2 Corrosive gale
  • 4 Dismember
  • 2 ancient grudge

This deck has a lot of problems with tokens and humans, even with Slagstorms. I’m really not sure about the sideboard and other control or aggro-control decks tend to beat this one in the long run. Zombie recursion and Geralf’s messenger are also problematic.

With all due respect and anticipation of your articles.

Pascal T-L