Kitchen Table League Master List
Last time we talked about the Rakdos Hellbent deck I’ve built for my kitchen table league. It’s a little slower than an aggro deck should be, in fact slotting into a more midrange-y archetype. Today I want to talk about possibly the most aggressive deck of the bunch, and how it ended up like that.
In 2009 I purchased a Kor Equipment themed intro deck, probably from Target, to dive into the recently released Zendikar set. I loved Zendikar, with its floating rocks and Burning Crusade-esque aesthetics, and I loved a creature type rooted in white that wasn’t Humans or Kithkin. This deck played way better than the green-red Allies deck intro deck I also purchased at the time, but both were fairly weak for a time when Jace, the Mind Sculptor was dominating the actual Standard environment.
In my quest to recapture that old feeling of a younger Magic, one of the last battle decks I built before bouncing from my online card retailer job was an expanded Kor Equipment list based on the original 40 card intro deck. Once again, I tried to keep the total cost for the deck under $20 and use cards from my chaff box whenever I could.
See the decklist above. It only runs about $6 to build, and hits in this format like a freight train. The play patterns are just too valuable for the other decks to keep up; anything that doesn’t spend the first two turns removing Kor Duelists and Armament Masters ends up drowning under a swarm of 3/3s+. The deck’s turn one, two, and three plays are almost always small threats that grow into big threats, usually with evasion, and it’s only bad match up is against the mono-red goblins deck, which can trade boards and recover so fast that it doesn’t care about the Kor board.
This genuinely surprised me. It really shouldn’t have; white weenies have been a staple archetype in most formats since Magic’s creation. The 1996 World Champion deck was probably the first instance of a competitive weenies deck, and it was created completely by accident. Because Tom Chanpheng forgot to register the 4 Adarkar Wastes, judges ruled he would have to use basic Plains instead. This rendered his single copy of Sleight of Mind useless, but that wouldn’t stop him from dominating the competition. This indirectly spawned the concept of “dead card handicap” when playtesting decks. When using the dead card handicap, decks are built with 6-12 “Dead cards” that do nothing in their build, and playtested against various other meta decks. When the handicapped deck can beat the meta decks with the dead cards, actual tech is swapped in to focus in on blind spots and off-meta matchups.
This WW deck doesn’t need all that, though. Playtests have revealed that nothing can stand against this deck without some serious sideboarding. Which actually brings us to our first big plateau in our KTL: How do we decide on the sideboards for each of these decks? With 10+ in the meta, spread across 10 slightly different builds and archetypes, how can we hope to construct a 15 card sideboard that gives each deck a chance against the other?
The best way to go about this is taking the strongest deck in the meta, Kor Weenies, defining its weaknesses, and searching out the cards in the maybeboards and considerings that make sense for the meta.
The best way to stop the Kor deck is to just destroy its permanents. Targeted creature removal is the best for this, and our format already has some killers for the Kor: none of them survive a Lightning Bolt unaided, and the discard outlets running around in both the Rakdos Hellbent deck and Dihada pseudo-control (more on this later) mean Terminal Agony is hard to cast for more than two.
But what about the Mono Blue Suspend deck and Mono Green Elves? The Ovinizes in the Suspend deck don’t completely neutralize an equipped Kor, and Reality Acid is too slow. Pongify just makes things worse. The real play here is to go up to four copies of Delay, and probably add some Counterspells just to be safe (it bums me out to run something so generically themed as Counterspell in these decks, but it's also the weathervane by which all other spells should be measured, and thus a necessary evil, the same as Lightning Bolt).
The Elves have a harder time of it. Generally (like the Goblins), they just want to outpace the Kor deck by going wider than the Kor can go tall.
What’s really funny is how bad the B/W Exalted deck plays against Kor Equipment. The Exalted deck used to be the king of the pile. Having access to both Knight of Glory and Knight of Infamy makes this deck really hard to remove and run built-in evasion. Unfortunately, the Kor deck outpaces it in terms of damage per turn in most instances, until at least the Exalted deck gets the mana to regenerate Duty-Bound Dead over and over. Turn one Kor Duelist into a Trusty Machete and an Armament Master is just too much damage on the field that early.
Board cards for the Exalted deck are looking like Duress and Oblivion Rings, which can hopefully neuter the artifacts before they become a huge problem.
Now that we’ve got an idea for how to sideboard against Kor Weenies, we can play some test games and see what the Weenies deck needs to win against anti-weenie tech.
Echoing Decay sees play in Pauper right now, here it hits every Kor in the deck before they can pick up any equipment, and still hits the Kor Duelists after they pick up a Bone Saw. Slotting it into the Dihada deck feels both flavorful and mechanically right, considering that deck runs a lot of one- and three-mana spells but sort of peters out on turn two.
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