Old School Budget – Part 2

NOTA DEL AUTOR: Si buscas este artículo en castellano, lo puedes encontrar aquí:

https://showandtellmtg.com/articulos/old-school/966-old-school-aun-mas-barato

Hello again! If I recall it correctly, in the last article I told you that a lot of people approached me on Twitter about how they could start playing Old School without expending much money, and I proposed one deck of each colour. You can see it here:

https://ligaoldschoolmadrid.wordpress.com/2020/09/21/old-school-budget-part-1/

But the best colours were missing so here we have the best and most effective budget decks on Old School:

WHITE WEENIE

This deck started with Alpha, with Magic itself: small creatures, great removal and Crusades to grow them all. Is a very cheap deck that works very well. Is synergic, it has a great curve and a lot of answers for opponents permanents.

As you can see, this deck is practically full in fourth black bordered, that makes it beautiful and at the same time very affordable to our pockets. If you want it cheaper, you only have to buy it white bordered. The deck is very simple, a whopping 20 creatures to go for the throat, all of them with great cost/strength ratio, and with some abilities too. They are distributed well in the curve, with Crusade to make them bigger.

To support this army, we have the best removal spells of the format: Swords to plowshares and Disenchant. Blue is the best color overall, but in Old School the best removal is white. We have some land destruction too, for when the match is controlled: Armageddon. If you are winning drop the bomb and the match is yours for sure. If things go wrong, we have Balance to balance things.

Mana base is easy, we have Mishras to attack and Strip mines to win time, all the rest being plains to cast all our spells. As you can see, deck is great and the strategy is simple, so to make todays article more spicy we are proposing some cards to change the deck or make it better.

The first card I propose is Land Tax. They are not cheap (about 15€ the white border ones) but is a direct card advantage: less lands on your deck = more gas. I would not advise playing more than 2-3 because you only want one on the table. Combined with Armaggedon can be explosive and funny (for you) because your deck can work with 2-3 plains that you already have in your hand thanks to Land Tax.

Next card I propose is a creature that will make delight of the control players. It’s called Preacher, and it does exactly what its text says: controls an opponent’s creature as it remains tapped. This creature is seeing a lot of play on UW control decks and we can play it on the main or on the side (King Suleiman is played too but is too expensive). Although his price has rose, is a very fun card to play.

So if you love aggro, this deck is your sure choice, but for the control lovers here is he only and authentic…

MONOBLACK

This is for me the best monocolour deck of the format, for a long way. I have played it to great results, and I always have it in the backpack for our leagues to lend it to anyone who wants to play and is new to the format or forgot his deck at home. The deck I have now is this:

You have seen that I love Fourth black bordered, being as it is a cheap and beautiful collection. This deck is nuts, it has everything you can ask to a control lover:

• Discard? Check
• Kills? Check
• Creatures? Check
• Land destruction? Check
• Life gain? Check
• Tutors? Check

In summary, hand and board control. Creatures are cheap for all the abilities they have, for example, the hypnotic spectre is a win if it survives a few turns. And the deck is cheap, being the most expensive card Demonic tutor (17€) and the playset of sinkholes (40€). The best start of this deck is to play discard spells. It is important to note that both Hymn and Mind twist discard cards AT RANDOM so we can luckily take out all the lands from his hand and win ASAP. It’s not very difficult to take two lands off the hand, then Sinkhole or strip another one and ride a knight to the victory.

But this deck is not perfect, it has disadvantages:

1. It needs a lot of black mana. There will be matches that we lose because we only draw colorless Mishras and Strips, and we need at least two swamp to work.
2. Due to the colour pie, Black has no removal for artifacts or enchantments. Yes, we have a lot of kills and creature control, but we are sold to an Abyss. That’s why we rely heavily in artifacts. In the deck above I play to Nevynirral’s disk main to deal with things like this.

As you have seen, a cheap and easy deck (I made it for 60€ without sinkholes), but we are now looking to make it better or at least different, so what cards can we change? A creature that never sees play in Old School and I think is very great is Cuombajj Witches.

Obviously, if you put in this creature, you have to take out the 1 resistance knights because they are going to die. I love this creature in more controllish shell, is a great blocker and it pings the opponent too. Against creature decks is very effective because it kills all the critters, and against control decks you normally would have more life than them and with this witches you won’t need to play the combat phase.

Another option is to go all in and play the “Black Weenie” version, as seen with the previous deck. Here you have some ideas:

Okey, so you now see how it works. The problem here is that the white version is probably superior, due to the removal. So if you want a Weenie, you should probably play the other white deck. But if you already own a Monoblack and you wanna try and experiment something different go for it! Old School is about having fun and not about winning.

Here ends this series of two articles. I hope you really enjoyed them. For the next time I am going all in on one Old School deck with SB guide and all the pro stuff, to diversify the things I write about. Until the next article, play budget and enjoy white border! Remember you can hit me up on twitter (@diliz13) for anything you want.

Old School Budget – Part 1

NOTA DEL AUTOR: Si quieres encontrar este artículo en castellano, lo tienes en este enlace:

https://showandtellmtg.com/articulos/old-school/944-old-school-barato

Hello to all! I am new on writing on this page. My name is Diliz (@diliz13 on twitter) and from today I am going to write about Old School for you. Before we start, I want to say a thing or two about me. First of all, I am new on this page but no new to writing. I have written a few articles in Spanish that can be found here:

https://showandtellmtg.com/component/contact/contact/30?Itemid=107

Second, you have to know that English is not my second language: is my third. So I want to apologize from the beginning if something is wrong written or badly expressed. And last, this article series is gonna alternate between new articles (written in both languages) and old articles that I’m gonna translate to English. The original Spanish can be found in the link above.

This is one of the las type. Is an article I used for introducing Old School to the people willing to play the format but hasn’t got much budget (like all of us). To make this possible, I am going to put here one deck of each color, but with certain conditions:

1. Budget means no Pack, no Bazaar of Bagdad and no Library of Alexandria.
2. I’ll try no to put very expensive cards but there sure will be cards up to 30€ (this is reserved list).
3. If I want a Chronicles Erhnam djinn, it will be 50 cents. If I want Arabian Nights one, it will by 500 bucks. So like every format, budget adjusts on how much you pimp your deck.
4. The main idea is to put some top 8 decks and to cut the expensive cards to make a good deck affordable.
5. The decks are EC (Eternal Central) format as is what we play in Madrid. Moreso, four strip mines make aggro better, and Fallen Empires has some decent creatures.

The great thing about this format we love, is that this writings and the decks never get Old (see what I did here?) so we can rewrite this series and they are totally “actual”. After this long introduction, we are ready to welcome the action! The first color is green.

MONOGREEN

Green is the color of mana accelerants and all the doping stuff. It has a lot of small great creatures, and disenchant effects. In this color is our friend Erhnam djinn too, one of the biggest threats of the formats. With his 5 ass is very difficult to kill without Swords, they will need two bolts for sure. And in the case they were thinking about blocking our little critters, we have the two best doping spells in the format: Giant growth and Berserk, not counting Pendelhaven.

This top 8 deck is very fun to play, it works as a land destruction deck. With Strip mines and 4 Ice storm, it has 4 Nafs asp that taxes mana too. If all of this does not work, you always can play the aggro style, with a lot of creatures (Mishras included) and the Growths to finish before the opponent can do anything.

Is very easy to make this deck pocket friendly. To start, we have to put 3 more Strip mines in, because it was a Swedish top 8 and they play with a single Strip. The cards coming out, are the expensive ones: Mox emerald and Berserks. If you still have gaps, you can put in a pair of Erhnam for the matches that go long. Is a great deck that puts up results consistently and is very fun to play.

MONORED

Instead of making the typical Sligh deck with a lot of artifacts, we are working with oldest tribe in magic: Goblins. Before existing in Legacy, Historic or Standard, this deck started with the first Lord (Goblin King) in Alpha. The two cards you don’t see in the photo are two shatters. This deck is a true budget, from a player of our Liga El Norte no Olvida (North Remembers) that does not have money and is buying in expensive cards from month to month and little by little. That’s why there is only a Blood moon and the vast majority of the deck is white bordered.

Setting creatures aside, this deck has best bolts in the format: Lightning bolt and Chain lightning to deal with blockers and Fireball as a finisher. The idea is simple: start dealing damage with our little goblins (the best is Goblin balloon brigade, because of the evasion) and to finish with the bolts.

If we want to control opponents creatures, we can put Meekstone in. It won’t affect our critters and our opponents are going to suffer because they habitually would play strong creatures. It sure is not going to be the first time a tapped Serendib kills his owner on his upkeep. We can meke this deck even more aggressive with more direct damage as Goblin grenade or creatures as Ball lightning, but the first thing I will buy to make this deck even better is to buy another Blood moon or two. If the card is played in Modern or Legacy, here is much better with all the duals played, it can be game if you play it soon enough.

MONOBLUE

The best of playing blue in this format (above the P9) is the counters. And of course, we have one of the best creatures in the form of Serendib efreet, wich you can have a Revised playset for 40€. If we want to go budget with monoblue, all we have to do is play another well-known tribe: Merfolks. This deck won the Liga Ilicitana:

As you can see, it´s playing all the Power 9 pieces he can, and a Chaos Orb too. They make a difference, but we are talking about budget and the best thing you can do is take them out and play more counters. Change the Mox and the Lotus for mana, and put in more Counterspell and /or Force spike. I think Force spike is a very underestimated card that works well in tempo or fast creature decks, and this deck fits into this definition. As you can see, this deck has answers for everything and is very fun to play.

This is all for today, folks! Next day I’ll talk about the two missing colors, that I think they are the best. Every month White weenie and MonoBlack put great results on all the Spanish monthly leagues.

Funniest thing making this article, has been founding that each deck (and each color) has a different approach to the game, and the way they win and interact with the opponent. I hope you liked this article as much as I liked writing it. I apologize again for my bad English and remember, if you want to say anything (how good/how bad has been this, new article ideas or simply say “hi”) I am @diliz13 on Twitter. May the Black Border be with you!