Cassidy Silver
7/5/2012 11:00:00 AM
Howdy everyone, and happy Independence Day! I had a long, family-filled type of day, so I am pretty exhausted, not to mention a little toasted on some red label. Luckily, I got some back-up this week in the form of internet wunderkind Andrew Magrini. Andrew and I first collaborated back
in April, and we each built a different
Darien, King of Kjeldor deck based off of some ideas we had brainstormed via Facebook. Since then, everytime I have been on the book," which hasn't been terribly often since I moved, Andrew has been making sure that I knew he wanted to collaborate again; no problem, I dig the persistence.
We decided on
Nin, the Pain Artist for our next article, and I was pretty jazzed Nin is the most interesting of the new off-colored legends from Commander, in terms of both flavor and subtlety, (sorry Edric, you're just not sadistic enough). I think it is a little unfortunate that Nin does not have access to cards like Torture, but besides that, we have a wacky little vedalken that will gain all sorts of insight from applications of sustained pain. What a nice person.
The funny thing is, despite the fact that Andrew sent me a decklist and a nice brick of text regarding his choices and such, he had the lack of insight to post the deck on tappedout, which has been down for the four hours or so. I'd like to call an audible, but I have been working on Nin all week, so I'm just going to have to go it alone apparently, unless by some miracle it goes back up, or Andrew picks up on my long-distance telepathic alarm waves, and he wakes up and sends me the deck list again.
Anyways, back to the task at hand. The reason I never ended up building Nin in the past was a lack of inspiration, and I couldn't really think of an interesting way to make her deck without being some sort of UR good stuff. When Andrew and I were first planning for Nin, we were roughly thinking of comparing an
Insurrection deck versus a
Clone deck, but it was still just doing goofy things with Nin, and I was only mildly stimulated.
I had to really sit down and think about what Nin represented to me, and in essence, how to make an interesting deck for an intriguing commander. Her ability is kind of brilliant in its simplicity she deals damage and draws cards, the hall marks of her color identities. Because her ability is based around tapping to
Deal Damage, she is actually akin to an ability pretty exclusive to Blue and Red: pinging. Call it timming, pricking, poking, or flicking, I am going to call it inspiration.
That is the deck I set out to build, and I started at square one with
Prodigal Sorcerer. This is one of the oldest cards in Magic, reprinted about a dozen times, and is the spiritual successor to all the pingers that would be printed over the years. There are plenty of those to choose from, whether we are talking about
Razorfin Hunter (goblin fish!), or
Kamahl, Pit Fighter. There are also some great cards that will turn any of our creatures into pingers, like
Viridian Longbow or
Quicksilver Dagger.
I like the idea of putting a
Quicksilver Dagger on a
Stigma Lasher, drawing a card while preventing opponents from ever gaining life, and I think a
Basilisk Collar or
Neko-Te will make any of the damage effects extra potent.
Charisma is a good card to throw on any creature with a ping ability, and as the build evolves, will prove to be an absurd card.
Kyren Negotiations is a pretty decent way to give all our creatures some player ping-age, and cards I will discuss later Niv Mizzet, the Firemind, and
Stuffy Doll both fit right in here as well as pseudo-pokers.
Where to go from here? Well, if we really want to make a win condition out of
Prodigal Sorcerer, we will need to up the damage out put some. The best way to do this repeatable untap effects, like
Pemmin's Aura,
Freed from the Real, or
Umbral Mantle. Then, we can machine gun a
Goblin Sharpshooter until we are out of mana-mmunition. We can also attach the Dagger or Longbow to a
Morphling,
Torchling, or Hermit Crab to get the same effect.
Thousand-Year Elixir goes great in this category, since it will both give a small untap boost and give virtual haste to the pingers, while
Minamo, School at Water's Edge will let us untap Nin or Kamahl, on a solid land, no less!
We have a few other reasons to untap a bunch of times per turn in the deck, namely
Dual Casting, and
Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker. Kiki-Jiki with
Freed from the Real is pretty insane, and goes quite nice with a Zealous Conscript or
Solemn Simulacrum.
Dual Casting on something like a
Torchling will give a ton of extra mileage out of spells, especially with
Turnabout,
Mana Geyser or
Inner Fire, where we can create an infinite amount of mana;
Reiterate also fits in nicely as a more mana-intense way to double up on spells over and over.
Since we are on the subject of infinite mayonnaise, there is one other mana combo that I included, and it actually goes with another category altogether the suite of cards that improve the activated abilities of our creatures. This section begins with two cards
Heartstone and
Training Grounds. On the surface, either will make Nin hit a little harder for less mana, but when combined with a
Soulbright Flamekin, we can turn three colorless mana into eight Red mana over and over again. These cards also go well with equipment that give creatures activated abilities, like
Umbral Mantle, or
Diviner's Wand we will then be untapping a creature or drawing a card for two, or possibly even one, colorless mana! Both the Mantle and Wand will make win conditions as well, and the Wand has an extra bonus of attaching to Nin automatically when she hits play.
Another important aspect of an activated ability suite is
Rings of Brighthearth. This card is bonkers if used correctly, and is especially potent with planeswalkers, of which there are three in this deck currently. The Rings can copy Nin's ability on the cheap, and will go well with
Diviner's Wand, Kiki-Jiki, and
Umbral Mantle. If nothing else, it will give all the pingers an extra two-mana boost of damage, (you are welcome, Kamahl!)
All right, so we are probably going to end up with a good amount of mana, which makes the X damage spells very appealing. I went with three of them
Banefire,
Fanning the Flames, and
Comet Storm.
Banefire is the quintessential kill-card, making the end-game plan a little more secure by cutting out the possibility of a counter spell blow out.
Fanning the Flames is a more reliable card, allowing for more versatility and potential utility.
Comet Storm is just about the coolest card available, especially at instant speed, and every time I cast it, I see the Meteor spell from FF6 in my
Mind's Eye. Such a great game. As a final note, these X spells will also pair well with the
Dual Casting shenanigans detailed above.
The last thing I want to mention before we start digging into Nin-specific tech is the fact that this deck loves its artifacts, especially equipment. With equipment filling up so many roles, I thought that a few ways to tutor them up would help keep things running smoothly. First in was a personal favorite of mine -
Godo, Bandit Warlord as well as
Tezzeret the Seeker. Tezz goes great with the
Rings of Brighthearth, and can function like a
Garruk Wildspeaker with a
Sol Ring out. Since these artifacts are so crucial to the build, I deduced
Fabricate was another good inclusion.
Now that we've discussed what makes my version of Nin different to other decks, I want to talk about what cards and strategies I included as a way to take advantage of our pain-loving commander. First off, her ability is a little odd, in that she deals damage to creatures and gives that creature's controller cards. In order for us to draw cards, we have to torture our own dudes, and in order to kill threats, we need to flood the opponent's hands.
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Well, let's start with the fun part, aka. hurting our own guys to draw some cards. The first thought on my mind was indestructible, and this leads me to the best card in any Nin deck
Stuffy Doll. It's indestructible, so we can benefit from some guilt-free torture, and it will still end up damaging an opponent. Factor in that it also has ping ability, well, sort of anyways, and that it is being reprinted in M13, we can see how well the Doll fits into this deck.
Darksteel Plate also came in as a nice way to make any creature indestructible, and is another one of those equipment cards that makes Godo so good in this deck; I really want to slap the Plate on a
Mogg Maniac, giving us another
Stuffy Doll. The
Mogg Maniac also fit in the deck rather well, flavor wise that thing is about the only creature in the deck that likes to be Nin's art project. Just look at that psycho! Yikes.
Another fun way to draw cards off of Nin's ability is to steal opponent's creatures and then squeeze out all the colorful goo, discarding the subjects like a used tube of paint. Red and Blue both have a ton of ways to pull this off, but I went for just a few, including the Zealous Conscript I already mentioned, alongside
Dominus of Fealty. Andrew's deck was dedicated to this type of play, so I wasn't really going to include too much in my own deck, but you could also employ cards like
Control Magic or
Threaten.
Since we are drawing a lot of cards at a time, we can plan ahead to take advantage of our large hands. The most obvious are cards to protect our hands, like
Venser's Journal or
Reliquary Tower. I have already mentioned
Diviner's Wand, which acts almost like
Firebreathing when combined with a big spurt of card draw.
Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind will do a lot of damage if it is in play when Nin torture's a
Stuffy Doll, as will
Psychosis Crawler.
Psychosis Crawler also benefits from the large amount of cards in hand after they are drawn, and
Sturmgeist fills in that role as well.
Soulbright Flamekin makes another appearance, giving trample to the Crawler and
Sturmgeist, making their large sizes all the more brutal.
Sometimes, we will want to use Nin's ability to take out creatures that
Threaten our board sufficiently, and unfortunately, this will net the controller some cards, which is universally accepted as a sub-par trade off. In this case, I am looking to make a positive out of this negative, and I think there is a way to do this. First and foremost, I included
Adamaro, First to Desire to the deck. With Adamaro in play, sometimes we will want the opponent to draw cards and lots of them! Along similar lines are cards like
Cerebral Vortex and
Runeflare Trap. In addition to being an awesome card,
Cerebral Vortex also has some classic art, and Runeflare Trap's alternative mana cost makes it a great card to dual cast. To top off this part of the deck, I added
Tibalt, the Fiend-Blooded, but to be honest, I am not sure if he is good in here (or at all). I figure his drawing ability is pretty handy to bust through mana clumps, and his damage ability will be great against large hands, if he ever gets there, anyway. There are other cards that have a similar effect as Tibalt's -4 ability, but I can't recall them at this late hour
Well, tappedout is still down, and that means I have no deck to present from Andrew, and I can't use the ~ 500 words he wrote for me. I'd blame myself for procrastinating, but that is just how I roll.
Beyond that little snafu, I think I presented a deck that has a lot of avenues to victory, and can be altered pretty easily without losing a lot of the synergies. I've been a fan of pingers since the good old days of prodigal prick and
Zuran Spellcaster, and that lead me to building this deck all these years later. The deck is kind of goofy, especially since one of our main goals is to
Massacre our own
Voodoo Doll, which really makes it all the more endearing.
Next week, I am going to talk some M13, commander-style!
See you then, and thanks for reading!
and sorry, Andrew!
Cassidy Silver
@WriterofWrong
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