Articles

You are: Home -> Articles -> Feature Article | Editor: Joseph Tobin - 13th May 2006

SINGLE CARD STRATEGY CHALLENGE #1

Welcome to the first of what will be a regular feature here at MTGParadise. I was always a fan of Adrian Sullivan’s single card strategy column over at wizards.com, and was sad to see it go. I’ve always wanted to take up the mantle and run some articles here at paradise, and finally I’ve got the first underway!

The format for these articles will be:

· Cover the decks and winner from the previous challenge (which of course does not apply to this article as it is the first)

· Discuss the basic merits of the chosen card for the article

· Throw out a few combos with the card or ways it can be used

· Perhaps a decklist or two of my own

· A challenge to you to build a decklist that highlights the uses of the chosen card

I intend for this to be a monthly column. I am not intending to give advice on how to make a tournament worthy deck with the chosen card. The intention is assessing what the card does and how it can interact with other cards or strategies to make the most of its abilities.

Our first card is Bloodbond March (as pictured below) -

Symmetry

Bloodbond March falls into the symmetrical category of cards; cards that affect everyone in the game (whether positively or negatively) in the same way. The key to breaking a symmetrical card is to tune the rest of your deck to take more advantage of its effects than your opponent. So, what is happening here? Whenever a player plays a creature spell, all players return creatures of the same name in their graveyards to play. It may be noteworthy that the process is as follows : you play a creature, Bloodbond March triggers, it resolves returning creatures of the same name from all graveyards to play, then the creature you played resolves.

So how do you take more advantage of this effect than our opponents?

You will want to play 4 of most creatures in a Bloodbond March deck, to increase the chance that you will have fallen comrades to march back into play; Bloodbond March is not a friend of Singleton! To really get the advantage from Bloodbond March, we need to be bringing back more and better creatures than our opponents. To bring them back, we need to get them into the graveyard first. Combat is an obvious option; trade creatures, then cast the second copy of the creature you kept in your hand, bringing the other back into play. However, your opponent can do the same with their creatures, so we need to be a bit more ingenious.

Blood Sacrifice

Sacrificing for some effect while a Bloodbond trigger is on the stack is a nice way to get a bonus without actually losing board position. For example, if you’ve got 2 Sakura-Tribe Elders in play who have been holding off your opponents weenies, cast the 3rd in your hand, and while the Bloodbond March trigger is on the stack, sacrifice the Elders to fetch some land. Once you’ve done that, the Bloodbond March trigger will resolve, see 2 Sakura-Tribe Elder’s in the graveyard and put them back into play. There are many sacrifice effects to choose from. Yavimaya Elder will draw you some cards and find some land, a string of Daring Apprentice’s will be a tough wall to face, and Shock Troopers can turn into repeatable direct damage. Viridian Zealot’s can help control artifact and enchantment threats. You can also rely on other permanents to sacrifice your creatures; Skull Catapult and Fodder Cannon can help control your opponents creatures. Phyrexian Vault can help you draw cards. And while we are doing all this sacrificing, how about Gravepact?

Let’s Play!

Your aim is to get more of your creatures into play than your opponent. Comes into play abilities can work famously with Bloodbond March. Casting a mere Merchant of Secrets with 2 in the graveyard and a Bloodbond March lets you draw 3 cards. Recursing Loxodon Heirarchs (who just happen to be able to sacrifice themselves) should keep your life total well out of your opponents reach. Recurring Civic Wayfinder or the like will empty your deck of land to get your hands on the business spells with the mana to cast them.

Stacking the Grave

You can cast your creatures and wait for them to die to removal spells or creature combat before you begin working your magic with Bloodbond March. Or you can be a bit sneakier. You can get them there by other means; filling your graveyard faster usually means more creatures to abuse than your opponent. If you’ve got a copy of a creature in your hand, you can Buried Alive the other 3, then cast your creature to put them all into play. By no coincidence, Ravnica offers us the perfect ability to complement Bloodbond March; dredge. Grave-Shell Scarab and Shambling Shell are perfect because they can also sacrifice themselves, while Stinkweed Imp and Golgari-Grave Troll can dredge out higher numbers. Traumatize or Glimpse the Unthinkable can dump a heap of cards in the graveyard too. You can transmute creature cards into the graveyard (all of the same creature in a chain effect if you like). You can use discard/draw effects like Thought Courier or Compulsive Research.

By the same token, you want to keep your opponents graveyard as low on creatures to march back into play as you can. Leyline of the Void helps out here. Nezumi Graverobber is also a nice choice. If you flip him, you can steal any creatures from the graveyard and prevent them from marching back into play for your opponent.

The Dreaded March of Legends

Bloodbond March doesn’t like Legends; if it brings any back, they all die. OK, Bloodbond March doesn’t like most Legends. Bloodbond March loves Kamigawa’s Legendary Dragons (so long as they’re yours of course). If you just happened to Buried Alive 3 Kokusho’s and then cast a 4th, that’s instant 15 life loss (the 3 in the grave will come into play and die to the Legend Rule before the 4th resolves). One swing of the remaining Dragon and that’s 20, with a nice life buffer. Savra is a nice complement if you are sacrifing a lot of Black and Green creatures (hello Shambling Shell and Grave-Shell Scarab!), but you can only have one of her in your deck; you can play with more for better consistency, but if you have a March in play and a Savra in the grave, any additional copies are dead cards. You can always play some Time of Needs, which can also help with the Legendary Dragon plan.

Replenishing Your Forces

Imagine your opponent has slaughtered all of your creatures. You have a Bloodbond March in play, but all 4 copies of your earth shattering Gharial’s are in the graveyard. You have no more to cast to get them back! There are ways to prevent this. Firstly, this will never happen with dredge creatures (library count permitting). Just dredge one up during your draw step, then cast him to get back the other 3. Otherwise, you can use spells that return cards from your graveyard to your hand. Eternal Witness works well most of the time. She can get you back a copy of the 4th creature, or just get back utility spells more frequently. I say that Witness works well most of the time because sometimes you may have to choose a card you want to be in your graveyard. If you do Bloodbond March some Eternal Witness’ into play, the least number of cards you can choose is two; if you have multiple Witnesses come into play from a March trigger, they can all target the same card for retrieval (meaning failure for any more than 1 Witness coming into play after the first one resolves), then you will have to choose a card for the Witness you actually cast. Generally, I don’t think it will be a bad problem to have! Recollect, Restock and All Sun’s Dawn are non-creature analogues. You can even bounce a creature you have in play just to cast it again to get his friends to come out and play.

If 4 copies of a creature just don’t seem to be enough, you can always play Relentless Rats!

Now it’s time for the deck challenge. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build a deck that highlights the abilities of Bloodbond March.

Here are the criteria that I’ll be looking at:

· Focus on doing something and doing it well

· The deck should showcase the card

· Try to make your deck have the little extra something that puts it above the crowd

· If similar decks are entered by more than one person, the first person will have preference. Be quick!

· You may enter multiple decks, but they must all be sufficiently different and showcase the card in a different way

The deck can be any format; you might like to let me know which card pool you have used to build your deck. A deck that uses it’s available card pool well matters (I will ignore all decks that include the power 9 just because they can). The deck does not have to be tournament worthy or powerful, it just needs to fit the above criteria. Feel free to fully explore an option I’ve written about here, or cook up your own concoction for something I’ve missed.

The winner will receive 3 boosters (to be confirmed after publication), courtesy of MTGParadise, and will be announced at the beginning of the next article in this series.

Entries close one week after this article is published. Stay tuned to the forum discussion thread for this article for more updates in the future.

Happy building, and good luck!

Michael Howell
Forum Name : Bacchus