Magic: The Gathering Spikes

Hello, I am Sam, I will be writing daily posts about different cards and decks in standard, modern, or legacy even. I will be doing it on a week by week basis. The First and Third week of each month will be standard, The second week will be Modern, and The fourth week will be Legacy.

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May 2nd: Todays Topic: Mono-Black Devotion

Hello I am very sorry about how long this took me to post, i have just been really busy and my father had a heart attack, so I haven't been able to sit down and do this I will try to post as much as possible.

Anyway here is my deck review of Mono-Black Devotion, This is one of my favorite decks to play in standard. It is a very competitive and strong deck, it is chock full of removal and really strong creatures to take your opponent down one big chunk at a time. Here is the list of Nicholas Schoolcraft 2014 StarCity Open Standard - Dallas - 4/12

4 Desecration Demon 4 Gray Merchant of Asphodel 4 Lifebane Zombie 4 Pack Rat

2 Bile Blight 3 Devour Flesh 4 Hero's Downfall 4 Thoughtseize 2 Ultimate Price 4 Underworld Connections

4 Mutavault 13 Swamp 4 Temple of Deceit 4 Temple of Silence

SIDEBOARD

3 Dark Betrayal 1 Devour Flesh 3 Doom Blade 2 Drown in Sorrow 4 Duress 2 Erebos, God of the Dead

Okay, so how this deck functions, it has a large control aspect to it and a strong leading aggro role late game. This is why this deck is classified as a mid-range deck. This deck utilizes the card Pack Rat, this allows you to use cards in your hand that wouldn't be the best and turns it into a threat the more you use its ability which is....

Pack Rat's power and toughness are each equal to the number of Rats you control.

, Discard a card: Put a token onto the battlefield that's a copy of Pack Rat.

 This pretty much allows you to turn each card in your hand into a three mana Pack Rat.

This deck also has access to a lot of the best removal available (ie. Hero's Downfall, Ultimate Price, Bile Blight, and Devour Flesh ect.) It also uses Underworld Connections, which can fill your hand with cards to make into rats or slaughter your opponents teams.

This deck has a quite strong late game due to the connections and the rats, but also Desecration Demon is really fun to watch people struggle with.

Side-boarding for this deck is quite straight forward you put in Dark Betrayal for the mirror and I personally think Duress is not a bad choice for the mirror either. Erebos, God of the Dead goes in agaisnt things with  lots of life gain, and control for those pesky sphinx's and their revelations. Duress would go in for control as well. The other removal is for aggro and heavy aggro mid-range decks.

That is all for today, Have a great day, I hoped you learned a lot of why the deck is the way it is and maybe a little bit of how to pilot it, Have a great day, and stay safe out there, See you next time. 

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April 19th: Today's Topic: Mono-Blue Devotion

Hello and welcome to the first deck review I have done here. C: I am just going to jump straight into this one because there is a lot of ground to cover here, or should I say there is a lot of seas to cover today. Here is the Mono-Blue Devotion list that took first place at a TCGPlayer Platinum on 3/29/14.

4 Cloudfin Raptor 4 Frostburn Weird 4 Judge's Familiar 4 Master of Waves 4 Nightveil Specter 4 Thassa, God of the Sea 4 Tidebinder Mage

2 Bident of Thassa 3 Cyclonic Rift 4 Rapid Hybridization 20 Island 4 Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx

SIDEBOARD

2 AEtherling 4 Dispel 4 Gainsay 1 Jace, Architect of Thought 1 Jace, Memory Adept 1 Pithing Needle 2 Ratchet Bomb

The deck pilot and designer is Barry Piotrowski. This deck is a very hard aggro deck that can side into a more mid-range style. This archetype has been prevalent in today's standard competitive play.  This deck has a very strong early game due to the very low mana curve and does well against aggressive decks such as Gruul rush and Gruul monsters. It has a pretty good match against Mono-black devotion, but lacks late game power once the remove your board and drop a demon. Which can be turned into a frog-lizard mutant thing which can be quite fun.

The ideal hand will have 3 Islands, a one drop, a two drop, a three drop, and a Master of Waves. This is you nuts hand, you get this to go smoothly and it can be GG turn five. It is also has Bident of Thassa which can be good for getting your hand full of tasty spells. Thassa, God of the Sea is really cool in stalemate situations where you both have big board states and then you just drop Thassa, make an metric ton of mana and make all of your creatures unblockable. You can just swim right under everyone. :3

This deck, like all decks have its weakness's it is very weak to and Anger of the gods and Mizzium Mortars.  Some Jund lists can do some serious damage to you, but that is when you side in AEtherling, and Jace 4.0.

Well that is all for today, I hope you enjoyed, I hope to see you tomorrow. c: Have a fantastic day.

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Today's topic: Ajani, Mentor of Heroes

Hello, and welcome to the first Topic of the Day on MTGSpikes, I would like to start off with an introduction of what I will actually doing here. So, once per day I'm going to go over a deck/card and rate it talk about how it works, and it viability in standard, I will do the obvious top tier decks, but i will stick mainly to rouge builds.

Any-who, on with today's topic,

Ajani, Mentor of Heroes 3GW

Planeswalker- Ajani

[+1]: Distribute three +1/+1 counters among one, two, or three target creatures you control. [+1]: Look at the top four cards of your library. You may reveal an Aura, creature, or planeswalker card from among them and put it into your hand. Put the rest on the bottom of your library in any order. [-8]: You gain 100 life

He is the new Green/White Planeswalker in the next set, Journey to Nyx, My opinion at first of this card was he is quite bad, because you do not see a single black deck without Heroes Downfall. However, the more I look at him the more interesting I find him, I personally like the idea of turn 5 popping three heroic triggers and swinging in big. He also is equipped with a dig engine which card advantage is always nice. The ultimate is one of the most straight forward I have seen on a walker, gain 100 life, in limited, this gives you all the time in the world to do what you please, in standard, it is still quite devastating, but I don't see him getting there often knowing that Heroes Downfall is a thing

Viability in standard:5/10

Strength in Limited:9/10 This is a must draft if you get it. You are not required to play it of course, it just is no fun when your opponent has a walker you have no removal for and gains 100 life.

Estimated card value: $13-17