Welcome to Gaia! ::

I'm not a huge fan of tribal decks because I find that a lot of the people who play them are fairly poor deck builders, but get arrogant because tribal decks are potentially powerful, especially slivers, elves, goblins, and zombies. The thing is, it doesn't take much skill to build or play one of these decks. I also have a particular grudge against a player who has an elf deck that is only legal in the eternal formats (vintage and legacy) but would get whipped in those formats, so he plays it against type two decks. Half the time, the decks beat him anyway, but when he does win, he's such an arrogant pain. I decided to build a deck that is legal in legacy/vintage, and while I don't own the cards to build a deck that could hold a candle to a vintage archetype, I sure can make elves cry.

Deck 1

Because he "WoG answer" involves sacking an elf in response to fetch Caller of the Claw and then flashing in Caller after WoG resloves, I could either load up on mass destruction or find another way to clear the board. Mass bounce found in
Evacuation and
Wash Out
should help

He cries when his stuff gets countered. In:
4x Counterspell
2x Remove Soul
3x Force Spike
4x Rewind

4x Lobotomy, to deal with those pesky 4-ofs

Ostracize seems like a good turn 1 play if I don't have a counterspell in hand to start with

I'm also considering Daze, Exclude, Foil, and Thwart

My finisher will be Dunerider Outwlaw. He should provide a slow and painful ending to the game, but guarantee it will end before I run out of hate. I'll throw in a few more creatures like Vodalian Zombie and maybe one copy of Dromar, The banisher.

Then some card-drawing instants via either Brainstorm, Inspiration, and/or Opportunity.

Sounds like you know this guy personally. LOL theres always going to be arrogant players, just whoop him till he gets it.

I don't, I've only seen him a couple times, but the way he acts makes me sick.

Oh yeah

ARCANE LABORATORY.

So what? BB builds new decks every week or two. He and I used to build different theme decks every week for casual games after FNM, and then tear them apart a day or two later.



Total stress from time and energy spent building a deck: D

Total stress a cocky player receives from being knocked down a few pegs? P

Net funniness from watching cocky player's reaction = P - D = F

If F > 0, then the deck was worth building.


Knowing BB, he'll show up with the custom deck as well as 3 other decks in his pockets.

Adding to Mooby's response (because he already said what I wanted to).


Even the most pigeonholed hate decks can stand up against decks other than the one they were designed to beat.
The deck I'm running now was originally designed to take down an entire meta. When I moved, obviously my meta shifted, and it did again when Xth came out. My deck isn't useless however, and consistently does well enough that I can stick with it until I have the time and money to work on another deck.



Because I play neither Vintage nor Legacy, this would require more effort than throwing together a hate deck. Most of my decks are standard legal (outside of the casual theme decks I used to build). I am not about to try digging up a lotus, moxen, FoW, duals, Recall, Time Walk, etc... to build an archetypal deck for a format that I never play and that is hardly ever played where I am.

I could tweak one of my t2 decks, but his deck runs many cards that are difficult to answer effectively and consistently in t2. I also hardly ever run blue competitively anymore. Now if this were the year 2000, and Masques block were still legal it may be a different story. Then again, some of the more annoying cards in his deck wouldn't exist then.

I know that there are archetypes in every format. A T2 rock-style control deck (let's call it 8WoG) may be ideal for handling a T2 weenie aggro deck (say elf machine). Take 8WoG into extended and you're going to face a host of new problems that you won't be able to meta for (at least not as easily). Especially if you're talking about extended goblins.

Take it into Legacy and you're facing goblin food chain, and anti-WoG tech. 8 WoG will have a much more difficult time dealing with decks in this format, decks it was designed to beat.

That is why I mentioned not playing in vintage.

Essentially what I did was meta against a specific deck with the cards that I own, taking an archetype I know it had difficulties against (UB control) and making card choices based on what would hose his tech. I also considered WUR control, but UB made more sense.

As far as being an a** clown goes, you need a sense of humor in everything you do. Sometimes that means being an a** clown. I know that of all the people who know about this, you're the only one who was not at least mildly amused. This guy was laughing his a** off, despite having an 0-6 record when we were done. He kept asking for one more game too.

There are three archetypes: Aggro, Combo, and Control. Burn is aggro. Lockdown is control.


The card pool changes as well. I don't think you're getting the concept.
You're arguing, "It's all rock-paper-scissors, so you should logically be able to use your paper from T2 to cover up the Vintage rock." The only problem is that while the T2 napkin is great against the pebbles of its format, it doesn't do jack s**t against the boulders of Vintage. What BB is arguing is that there is absolutely no reason to spend hundreds of dollars on a stack of newspapers to kill a niche deck when another niche deck will do just fine. For him to build a competitive format deck as you suggest, he'd need to spend hundreds of dollars on cards he doesn't have rather than just using the cards he has.


A hate deck doesn't necessarily imply hatred for a deck or person. It describes a deck designed to hose another deck for whatever reason. Building a hate deck is an exploitation of a stale metagame. The only way the deck is viable is if the metagame is 100% predictable, which it is in this case. The hate deck serves a vital purpose in such a metagame precisely because of its glaring weaknesses to more general threats; thus, it encourages the hate victims to build new, innovative, creative decks rather than playing the same boring one over and over.

As you saw in BB's last post, the player responded quite positively, and appeared to actually ENJOY losing multiple times to a fresh deck. Thus, the hate deck was far from petty; it breathed new life into a meta AND educated another player! What exactly is your gripe?

wow, thanks...that long paragraph told me nothing I didn't know about a lot of decks.

As for the three vs five archetypes, I simply believe that burn and agro have enough basic differences to be able to be split, same with lockdown. Hell, I might even say that combo and engine decks have enough differences to be classified separately (they have the same end goal but tend to be different in how they go about doing it).