Hey everyone interested, and everyone else who got here by accident and is now too curious to leave! I have been thinking almost literally all night and all morning about a new Archon project, and at some point I thought I let people participate in my thought process, as it is not trivial to conceptualize a competetive 100 card singleton deck from scratch. This post will not result in a full decklist, rather in the current state of development, at which I have to decide between two competing strands of deckbuilding. [btw. Archon is a 1v1 Commander format, you can find all the details here]
In the beginning there was an idea. That is the usual problem in deck building, at least for me, I have bazillions of ideas, of which few actually yield something fruitful. This one however got me interested to the point that I started piling up cards on my lab table, which is the second stage of bad ideas – ideas that actually wreak havoc in my living room. Now I want to get it to the third stage – make an actual working deck out of the idea and tidy up my desk afterwards. So, here is the idea:
You know these guys, right? Surely you have been haunted in your dreams after encountering one or the other in your favorite MTG format. If your mind works a bit like mine, you will immediately think of the third card in the „cycle“, if we want to call it that, the little brother of Uro and Phlage, that is a bit socially awkward and hence has not found as many friends so far…
…ofc we are talking about Kroxa. His ability being neither as game-carrying as Uro’s, nor as sustainable as Phlage’s, he is rather material for aggressive strategies. Problem is, with aggressive strategies I want a 2-drop that sticks. Not one that has a mediocre effect and afterwards requires me to invest a lot of resources (mana, grave cards) to get him back. Having mentioned that my mind works in a peculiar way regarding cycles in MTG, I still want to try Kroxa. For the simple reason that I have built decks around Uro and Phlage already and I want to do full circle.
After pondering the implications for a while I ended up with an Idea for a rack-like deck that aggressively attacks lifepoints and hand cards of my opponents. So basically, finding a framework in which Kroxa’s mediocre ETB effect actually boosts the deck’s strategy. Now, an actual rack deck is not feasible in a singleton format, as I can immediately only think of three viable cards that have that kind of effect:
But the general notion of keeping the oppo’s hand size low and applying damage to the face before they can draw themselves out still remains charming. So another building block presented itself as fairly obvious: Blightning Skelementals!
These cards have literally printed direct damage and discard on them, so they might work well. Unearthing a Lightning Skelemental is a blast (for everyone except the opponent) and Unearth on Kroxa for another cheap source of discard and damage does not seem to bad as well, even though Cpt. Krox will go straight back to the grave as unearthing is not escaping. Speaking of – I assume that Krox will usually want to go to the grave instead of the command zone, as the only way of making him stick to the board is to escape him. There might be occasions in which returning him to the CZ makes sense, e.g. when recasting him is likely to deliver lethal damage or discard a crucial hand card. In general, however, I will want to operate with my Captain from the graveyard.
Still, these sweeties do not make a deck. Even adding the obvious evergreens in red and black, such as Bolt, T-Seize, Push… there are slots left. Another package that seems very appealing to me is this:
Ward-Discard a card is quite stressful without cards in hand that you want to discard. Assuming that I will rarely be able to fully empty my opponents‘ hands, I think it is safe to assume that they will always discard the stuff that hurts them the least, so them having spare removal is unlikely in itself, but spare removal + something that can easily be discarded hopefully never exists in the midgame. There are a few more viable creatures that have this line of text, and I will definitely consider playing 3-6 of them in total.
After having settled on this idea I started MTG Arena, which seems like an odd thing to do at this point, and started building this deck as a brawl deck. The reason for me simply is, I know almost every card printed until ca 2020, but when set release frequency escalated alongside word count on cards (and I turned old in the meantime) I lost track. Browsing through the MTGA collection is often quite inspiring and reminds me of draft cards that I have forgotten that might fit my strategy (looking at you, Bandit’s Talent). This inspired browsing led to an unexpected problem. Meet Tinybones and the Raven Man:
At this point I wondered whether a mono-black discard deck could be viable in Archon as well. A few years ago, when still playing european highlander, one person performed surprisingly well at a tournament with a mono B discard deck, that featured the Trinket Thief. Had he been allowed to use the command zone, TinyB certainly would have been in there. Now I began questioning my life choices, especially the one mentioned above in which I started piling up cards for the Kroxa deck on my table. I have to admit though, that this is another special feature of my mind: Mention any deck idea in any format and I will try to make a mono black variant off it. I would probably try to play mono black in Wingspan if the color was available there. So here I am, stuck between two urges: complete the titan cycle or go mono…
…I mean, what has RED ever done for me? Except for dealing like 4 Million damage to my opponents‘ faces over the past 28 years… What can red do for this deck? With exceptions of the Blightning Skelementals everything I talked about is mono black, right? right? Well…
Ok I concede that I have at least 40 other plans for mono black and I don’t have 40 copies of Thoughtseize, and I hate proxies, so I stick to the original plan. I am quite confident that TinyB and the Raven Man will be part of the 99, but they have to share the back row with Lightning and Blightning.
So, that is the state of the development, I will go the Kroxa way and I invite you to try the same, or to go mono B, or to just go anywhere mentally and give me feedback on my thoughts and brews. As I said I am an old man, so you can try to do so using the builtin comment function, send me an email [blutzollfeuerball@gmail.com] or contact me in any other way if you know how 🙂 I will resort back to my table now and hope to have it tidied up by the end of the day, a new Archon deck in my bag when going to my tuesday draft night 🙂
BlutzollFeuerball 