Articles

Ode to the Familiar

I love familiars. I really do. The mechanic is great, especially for casual play, where the more colours the better, to my mind. So I decided to build a deck around Nightscape Familiar. They have two great and one mediocre abilities:

1. Reduce generic cost of allied colour spells
2. Regenerate from large ground pounding fatties
3. A 1/1 body

Familiars greatly encourage the use of allied spells, but there is a dark side to familiar use.

First, they warp your mind, so that you look at cards which are borderline playable, or just plain bad, and consider them for inclusion in your deck based on the "I wonder what it would be like to cast this with a familiar in play". I think that is flawed thinking. Only play with good cards, period. And if you draw a good card, and the Familiar makes it better, why then you have a *great* card!

Second, good cards which don't have a colourless mana in the casting cost don't receive the benefit of the friendly spells ability of the familiar. The familiar madness which assails us here tries to convince us not to play a good card (like Undermine) simply because it doesn't 'combo' with the Familiar. But so what? They're already good cards. Let's play with them.

Thirdly, they encourage overextension. You only get to play the cheap spells while the familiar is in play, so you tend to be in a rush to cast the spells which will benefit from the familiar's presence (or at least, that's what I used to do). If you completely use up all of your mana in a rush each turn, you also don't have mana to regenerate your little dude.

The first deck I threw together -- shortly after the release of Planeshift -- was one which revolved around Doomsday Spectre. It had both black and blue familiars and was an attempt at being a BU tempo control deck. I made all three of the above mistakes in my deck. Mass removal, such as Rout, was devastating, and basically meant game. So it was a crappy deck.

Hopefully the deck I'm about to build before your eyes isn't so putrid. Ladies and Gentlemen, nothing up this sleeve here, or this other sleeve.

In my deck, I still want to play spells and efficiently use my mana each turn. I also want my familiars to be able to regenerate when needed. Perhaps I've been thinking about this too long, and lost objectivity. Maybe I was never objective in the first place (you be the judge). But it seems to me that using primarily instants lets us keep our mana for regenerating Nightscape Familiar, and still able to cast spells and 'interact' with our opponent. So that's the basic premise of this deck.

Here's some IBC cards which could go in the deck:

Now, Nightscape Familiar is the decks reason for being, and thus needs no further justification. Fire/Ice, Urza's Rage and Fact or Fiction are all really good cards in their own right, are instants, and interact wonderfully with the Familiar. Crosis's Charm and Undermine don't get any benefit from the Familiar, but bless his cotton socks, he can't do everything. They go in just for being really good spells. The charm in particular has three really useful abilities. I can see casting any one of the modes in a match. It carries out the function of Repulse, Rushing River and Spite, all in one card.

That's 6 slots down in the deck. I'm planning on playing 24 land at this stage, so there are 3 slots left to be filled. Prophetic Bolt seems like a clear standout from the list of cards that are left. The cards which I want to fit into the last two slots are Prohibit (more counters), Recoil, Void, Agenda, Probe and Wild Research. Recoil can probably be skipped because the charm already handily carries out it's major function. Wild Research looks like a pretty cool card, but I just can't bring myself to cut anything else.

Next up for consideration is Prohibit vs Probe. Although Prohibit is an instant, and a counter, and benefits from the familiar, Probe is probably the more powerful card. When you're losing, it lets you dig for answers, and when you're winning, well, you don't need anything, but announcing 'probe you with kicker' just seems wrong somehow. I'll go with the proactive Probe over the reactive Prohibit for now.

Void has great synergy with the familiars, serves as non-targetted removal, and gives you a sneak peek of your opponents hand to boot. Let's add three of then for now. Agenda doesn't really have much synergy with the rest of the deck (except Fact or Fiction) but it's too good to ignore. A single copy should suffice. Now, in a deck with non-tutors, success corelates very closely with consistency. What this means in deck building terms is that your deck should be packed full of 4-ofs, and only about 9 distinct spells. The two exceptions to this are when you can search your deck for specific cards, or when the cards are late game finishers. Both Void and Agenda are late game cards, and that's my justification for playing with less than four copies of either.

Mana Breakdown

The way I work out what basic lands to add is by counting the total number of coloured mana symbols in the deck.

Number of coloured mana symbols:

So the number of coloured mana needed is fairly equal. Dividing it equally among the three colours leaves a solitary land left over. Because Undermine is a UU spell, I would be inclined to make the extra land an Island.

Here's the deck with land: