I’ve had more access to Magic: The Gathering cards than most players could hope to see in their lives. My coworkers and I were responsible for the integrity of probably the largest single collection of Magic cards on the west coast, and possibly the world. Something like 250,000+ individual SKUs spread across four graded conditions with another thousand released every three weeks. You’d be surprised how quickly you memorize the names, art and locations of 250,000 Magic cards.
Four years of unfettered access and an employee discount did a number on me, on a large scale altering who I am and what I want out of a career, but that’s not what I wanna talk about. On a much smaller scale, working at CK so completely altered the way I enjoy Magic that I doubt I’ll ever be the same.
A 10% discount on singles would be enough to get any competitive player salivating at the possibilities. I had more than a few coworkers who loved to grind the comp scene, and they did very well generally at events, due to the ease with which they could swap out decks to match the meta.
While never a real competitive player, my first purchase when I was hired was the dominating Standard deck of the era, the infamous Risen Reef landfall deck. I never took it to an FNM, and instead just punished my roommates with it for a few months before taking it apart.
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| Slithering Shade - Daren Bader |
Then it was March 2020, and the competitive scene for Magic was effectively dead in the water. A recent Reddit post generated some discussion on the topic, but mostly it was the inability to play in physical spaces and the nightmare meta of the time that found many players disenchanted with the game as WotC was selling it. Folks became more invested in their private pods and play groups and turned towards casual, kitchen table Magic, as one redditor puts it.
I’m of a mind to agree, mostly. While my disenchantment with the game came from a different source (“seeing how the sausage gets made,” as it were), I also found myself experiencing a nostalgic longing for the Magic that originally enticed me as a child.
2012 saw the release of Innistrad into Standard and also the release of Jeff into high school. Though I’d been collecting cards for as long as I could remember, it wasn’t until then that I started to really grasp the intricacies of advantage and threat assessment and optimal mulligans and all that. I had picked up the 2012 vampire themed Event Deck as well as the Zombies one from later that year (from Avacyn Restored). With no money for valuable singles we played exciting best-of-three matches in class, at lunch, before and after school; basically whenever we could find a flat surface large enough to encompass the field. Our decks were cobbled-together Frankensteins built from the remains of the one or two drafts we could attend, whatever intro/theme/event decks we could get our hands on at Target, and the singles we could trade for. This meant decks with only one or two copies of what would be considered their “key cards” and a lot of on-theme chaff. This, to me, was the perfect Magic. A constructed format with a pseudo-limited access to cards. Deck’s power levels were insanely swingy, and almost entirely depended on who could draw their rares. Games were won and lost on the merit of your wits, usually.
There’s a concept in baseball called “small ball,” which sits in opposition to “big ball” (I know, crazy). Small ball is an offensive strategy that calls for putting runners on base, moving them into scoring position, and then advancing them home in a slow, methodical way. It’s the opposite of “big ball,” where flashy home runs make up the majority of runs scored. We were playing small ball Magic.
Maybe this is all a misguided attempt to recapture the nostalgia I feel for younger days, and maybe that’s fruitless, but that didn’t stop me from purchasing the cards I needed for something like two dozen battle decks for my Kitchen Table League. I’m not sure if I’m looking to write primers on these decks, or just discuss their play style in the environment I’m creating. The former seems a bit out of place, since the goal of these decks is ostensibly that you’ll be able to pick them up and play without much pregame planning, so maybe I’ll stick to the latter. Who cares, it’s my blog.
I think it was the release of Modern Horizons 2 that initially sent me over the edge. By then I had mostly divorced myself from constructed Magic, keeping my EDH decks together in sleeves because it was the only format I could play reliably, casually. Limited formats were scratching my itch, but I needed to more (or, less, I guess).
A 10% discount on singles can get you a lot of cards. Especially if you aren’t purchasing anything expensive. Especially if those inexpensive cards are playsets of every card with hellbent, the worst mechanic from Dissension. Well, not true, forecast was in that set as well.
The reintroduction of the Hellbent mechanic in that set got me thinking about one of the favorite MTG products: the Dissension theme deck “Rakdos Bloodsport.” I got this back in 2005/6 and played it religiously in casual games between class. Feeling the nostalgia poison that many of us have acquired here in the early 2020s, I purchased the deck list singles for less than $10 and got to work on expanding it and living out my teenage dreams.
Hellbent was never a great mechanic since its design is counterintuitive to how you want to play Magic. Typically, it’s always beneficial to have more cards in your hand. Hellbent cards have small to medium buffs when you’re top decking, which is usually not a position you want to put yourself in. As soon as this mechanic rotated out of Standard (or type 2?) it was quickly forgotten. Modern Horizons 2 printed a small spattering of new hellbent cards, so I wanted to see if you could make a playable deck from them. I knew it would never stand against anything at an FNM, but it looked like the deck would top out at about $20, so I hit send.
This deck was the first of the Kitchen Table League and it remains one of my favorites. It’s an aggro deck that gets advantage in an untraditional way (going hellbent) and plays against the disadvantage of not having cards in hand by using newer draw/discard mechanics that weren’t present in hellbent’s original environment.
Rakdos Headliner is the best new card to compliment hellbent decks. A 3/3 with haste is a ton of damage on turn two, and its echo cost is more of an upside in this deck than downside. The original Rakdos Bloodsport deck used Drekavacs to pitch the lands and extra spells from your hand to the graveyard, but that was always a sub-optimal choice (we’re keeping the Sadistic Augermage from the original deck because while it fulfills the same role, its symmetrical effect is a funny way to lock our opponent’s draw down). Anything we can’t cast, we want to get value out of as we pitch it. That means using Terminal Agony and other madness cards to cast spells while we don’t cast spells.
Also helping us clear our hand are a couple big early threats. Avatar of Discord, Rotting Regisaur and Bloodrage Brawler will dump your hand way quicker than you’d expect. However, they run the risk of kneecapping you early if you can’t hang onto any spell in your hand.
That’s where Bottled Cloister comes in. This unique artifact from the original Ravnica block seems like its intended use is protection from sorcery-speed discard on your opponents turn, but here it’s our hellbent-enabler and extra draw. Think of it as the KTL environment’s The One Ring in terms of advantage generation (this is a huge stretch).
The issue with hellbent at the time was draw was a lot weaker in red in 2006, but the new ways red can loot and impulse draw (is that really what we’re landing on for that?) lets you filter through a hellbent deck without filling up your hand needlessly, or splashing into blue. Faithless Salvaging and Reckless Impulse are the two I bounce between, eventually one or the other will go to 4 copies.
That’s about it. Anthem of Rakdos, Nihilistic Glee, Gibbering Descent and Taste for Mayhem are just there for fun and flavor. Anthem, Glee, and Descent are just heavy investments in a deck that’s trying to be aggressive, but they can save you in games that go long. They also make great cards to discard to The Underworld Cookbook or Viashino Lashclaw.
I realize the maybeboard is 86 cards long. I've really gotta clean that up.
Notably I've maybeboard'd Infernal Tutor (for possibly being too good for this format), Slaughterhouse Bouncer, Tragic Fall, and a few others for fearing of ruining the deck's curve. These cards make good side-ins against decks that'll force a long game (I'll write up some of those later). Cutthroat il-Dal always excites me but ends up being too fragile in this meta.
For the record, purchasing the deck didn't wipe away the embarrassing nostalgia I have for simpler times. But it did start me along this deck building project that I could use to distract myself from the nostalgia. So that's something.
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