« On being boring, and on early season reports | Main | Good job, Luis »

Gargadon Rock?

This has been a week for pleasingly quirky Extended decks.

First, I direct you to this week's Top Decks article from Michael J, where he highlights Scott Honigmann's PTQ-winning mono-white control deck as well as Bradley Carpenter's quite surprising Lightning Zoo. Really, go look, especially for Lightning Zoo.

Second, it's usually worth taking a look through each week's Decks of the Week for interesting standouts. Amidst a bunch of the expected decks, I spied this build from an online PE on the ninth (click through to the extended for the deck list):

DampingEngine's Gargadon Rock

20 Creatures:
Eternal Witness
Greater Gargadon
Kitchen Finks
Sakura-Tribe Elder
Shriekmaw
Siege-Gang Commander
Wickerbough Elder
16 Spells:
Chrome Mox
Jund Charm
Primal Command
Sarkhan Vol
Umezawa's Jitte
Utopia Sprawl
24 Land:
Forest
Gemstone Caverns
Mountain
Overgrown Tomb
Stomping Ground
Swamp
Treetop Village
Windswept Heath
Wooded Foothills
15 Sideboard:
Ancient Grudge
Choke
Damnation
Fleshbag Marauder
Magus of the Moon

This has some features of the now-standard black-green midrange frame, with some mix of Eternal Witness, Sakura-Tribe Elder, and Kitchen Finks. This is seasoned, however, with a host of intriguing card choices, including double Wickerbough Elder, triple Gargadon, a single Siege-Gang Commander, quadruple Utopia Sprawl, and quadruple Primal Command.

The multiple Primal Commands are a call back to midrange decks from the Onslaught-Mirrodin and Mirrodin-Kamigawa periods of Standard, taking the place of Plow Under while also being a house against Zoo and Burn decks and letting the user tutor up utility or power creatures as needed. I'd have to test the deck to really get a feel for what it can do, but there are many synergies in the build, such as the ability of a suspended Gargadon sac a Finks to get some extra life in the burn matchup, or the ability to Command for Witness, then Witness back Command, and so on and so forth.

Neat. I like these outliers that highlight the fact that some imagination has a place in the current Extended environment.

Post a comment

About the author

Alexander Shearer is a biologist, gamer, and writer. He has written for games and educational comics, and writes the ongoing In Development column at ChannelFireball.com when he's not collecting his gaming thoughts here at Gifts Ungiven.

About

This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on January 15, 2009 10:48 AM.

The previous post in this blog was On being boring, and on early season reports.

The next post in this blog is Good job, Luis.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.