The Morally Confused Skeleton
Between Good and Evil.... Skeleton!
The year is 2009, and Zendikar just released. While the people are my LGS are trying to make Ob Nixilis or Lorthos work with plenty of ramp, hitting up the aggro plan with Boros Bushwhacker, or even play control with the new Wrath of God variant… I’m cooking up something special with 5$ and a dream.
Now my Local Game Store wasn’t huge or monolithic by any regards, and my face was well known around the place - a big fish in a small pond, perhaps - but more well known were my Friday Night Magic shenanigans. My body was a machine that converted five dollars and an hour with the bulk common/uncommon box into a playable deck - a wild card that tested people who were relying on playing against meta decks. But on this night, something caught my interest with that “Wrath of God” reprint:
Did you catch it? The difference is subtle… and somewhat masked by all that flavor text they added. But for players who earnestly believe that “reading the card explains the card,” they might have noticed that this new version of a control sweeper is missing a line of text compared to its older counterpart. So, considering that missing line of text at the forefront of your imagination, let me introduce you to my homies…
The Homies Roll In
Alright, so we’ve got some creatures that are invincible to board wipes. There’s only a few answers I have to worry about to get rid of those creatures… Some people are running Celestial Purge, though that only hits the Skeletons and some people are running Oblivion Ring… and both of those answers usually hide away in the sideboard, where I won’t worry about them in game 1. So we have some (mostly) invincible boys and girls to clutter up our field, and aggressively “trade” off opponents creatures… but how do we produce a victory off of a field like this?
Moral Confusion
Well, we’re already running black, so what if our Islandwalking snake friend, or our amazing Skeleton made some sort of… dark pact… to get more power? That would be sweet, wouldn’t it? And M10 thankfully has our back.
The great thing about Unholy Strength is that it only costs one mana, so let’s throw four of them in. The usual weakness of enchantments is that we open ourselves up to getting two for one’d when the creature dies… but with our creatures being more or less “safe,” we don’t have to worry about that. For the same reason, we don’t really have to worry about the fact that Unholy Strength gives less toughness than power. We can aggressively kill creatures and save mana to regenerate without fear. But… thinking about it… we can’t call this gameplan consistent with just a few Unholy Strengths. Thankfully, M10 has us covered again:
Ok, well… The toughness buff isn’t AS relevant as the power buff, because of the regenerate… but I want to buff my creatures, I have the technology, and I don’t want to spend a lot of mana. It does mean most of our creatures can kill a Goblin Guide without spending that regenerate mana, too, so we can save more of our mana for regenerating. The downside of this plan, of course, is confusion. In this deck, it wouldn’t be uncommon for a creature to look something like this:
This River Boa, blessed be thy name, clearly is unsure where to fit on a D&D alignment chart. Two years before Kaalia was printed, this islandwalking danger noodle is calling on every force from ABOVE and BELOW before it’s cool. Perhaps they killed three people but also rescued a litter of kittens from a fire? Perhaps… they need a little bit more of a boost. Thankfully, M10 is like The Giving Tree, because it has our backs yet again.
We take and we take and we take, but M10 doesn’t quit. It provides the buff of Unholy Strength and Holy Strength combined… but for one extra mana and while spending only one card instead of two. It’s a little higher on the curve, so let’s not run four of them… just a couple. But now that our snake can call upon TREE POWER™ we can truly harness the powers of above, below, and everything between.
Finishing Touches
Well there’s still one glaring hole in the deck. In my mind, we’re still sort of a… slow… deck. We’re losing the aggro game to bushwhacker, we’re losing the long game to Ob Nixilis ramp-drain (as we just chumpblock eachother but they drain in), we’re still losing to my one friend who thinks Timbermaw Larva + Primal Bellow is a real deck… and we’re losing to midrange-ey decks that simply are more efficient than ours. What if there was some way that we could stabilize…
What’s this? Something that lets us stabilize against beatdown stratagies while beating out Ob Nixilis’s drain? What could we possibly get that allows us to do that? What possible tools could our great WotC™ be giving us that I still haven’t added into the deck?
Oh right… It’s…
Now our confusingly strong Cudgel Troll who is too dumb to understand whether their power comes from heaven or hell can have Lifelink and gain us life back. Whether we’re getting in for extra damage, eating off opponents creatures with our regenerate, or being stuck in combat with a huge Ob Nixilis… we can gain back a lot of life. We practically have a build-your-own-Baneslayer.
Finally, let’s talk about removal..
We’re all in on enchantments, so why not lock our opponents out of using their creatures with M10’s copy of Pacifism? Our creatures may be razing heaven and hell alike to get their buffs, but at least our opponents creatures can feel a little warm and fuzzy inside.
Doom Blade is a classic and, while being bad in certain matchups, it certainly gets the job done. I ran four of this as my only instant-speed interaction in the deck.
Not interaction, per-se, but since almost our whole deck is permanents I ran a one-of Nature’s Spiral in the deck… and it won me exactly one game.
I don’t know why I did it at the time… maybe it was because I couldn’t afford Journey to Nowhere on my strict 5$ budget… but I ran a few visionaries just to chumpblock and draw me into more stuff.
My mana base totally sucked, but this innocuous ETB tapped land helped with the fixing quite a bit. A workhorse, honestly, since the rest of my lands were basics since my LGS let me take basics for free.
The Games
So I have my five dollar monstrosity of a deck and… the actual games with this deck went exceedingly well. Game 1 the opponent rarely ever had answers… Game 2 I always tried to put more of my enchantments on green creatures in case of a sideboarded Celestial Purge… and only a couple of my games even went to Game 3. In a couple of games, my opponents sidedboarded in Oblivion Rings but I never saw them.
The final game was perhaps the most climactic… going to turns on a stalled out board state with a very, very morally confused skeleton.
The lifelink, being a clutch topdeck when I was at a mere 2 life, capatapulted me back into the game and allowed me to take the W - buying enough time to dig through their chumpblockers and hit with a massive skeletal body.
I took first place that night. I won a lot of packs, some store credit, and of course… a FNM profile from the F09 promo runs:
Ironic that the event organizer was the only one who could force an O-Ring on me that night. Ironic more that when I received the 6$ card and immediately added it as a 61st card to the deck, it more than doubled the price of my deck. Surely my night had perfect symmetry.
The End
I’ve written more autobiographical content before (see Cards I’ve Seen Banned or Every Deck I’ve Ever Built), but I haven’t really honed in on a specific event like this before. If you’d like to see more stories of my old escapades, let me know in the comments… and of course, for irregular MTG/EDH content, consider picking up a free subscription.
