2006-7 also coincides with the loss of my trust Geek Squad flash drive, recently rediscovered in a random box of shit in my attic! What was on that drive. Well beyond a backup of some papers I wrote as in undergrad in the late 90's it had a folder with a few decklists that I was trying out during the Ravnica and Time Spiral blocks. Some of my favorites from the time aren't in that folder. It looks like I only had them in analog or apprentice form and lost those years ago. I'll be sharing some of those amazingly terrible/insane decks with you all this week. The fun never stops here at the HoP.
As a player I tried to eschew most of the meta decks that did things like work properly in favor of setting up the most ludicrous, convoluted victory conditions possible for myself. To me winning consistently was not nearly as exciting as that 1 out of 10 times where my trick would come together and knock the earth off its axis just a little bit. I seriously had a black, green, and blue deck based on elves and tombstone stairwell. The idea was to get a whole bunch of elves in play that would receive all kinds of extra benefits for being elves, +1/1 counters, mana, and whatever. Then, you play tombstone stairwell once you've got a shitload of creatures in your graveyard and use Artificial Evolution to edit Tombstone Stairwell so that it produces 1/1 Elf tokens instead of Zombies. This combo was stolen from the WotC site years ago, but I had a version of the deck that added Doubling Season to make it so you were creating dozens of creatures every turn and giving them +1/1 counters equal to the number of elves in play. I made some other card fetching improvements to the design as well, but the important part is that it was almost impossible to set the combo up, but when you could, holy fuck man! We're talking the ability to cause several hundred damage in one turn or gain that much life.
Speaking of Doubling Season, here's a deck I titled "Doubling Simic" from back in the day. Its hijinks revolve around abusing the Graft ability through doubling season. You'll see the insanity and low likelihood of this Blue/Green deck working pretty readily :)
Creatures (19)
2x Aquastrand Spider
4x Coiling Oracle
4x Cytoplast Root-kin
2x Experiment Kraj
4x Plaxcaster Frogling
3x Simic Guildmage
Enchantments (8)
4x Doubling Season
4x Utopia Sprawl
Instants (4)
4x Cytoshape
Sorceries (5)
2x Thrive
3x Kodama’s Reach
Artifacts
Land (24)
4x Simic Growth Chamber
2x Novijen Heart of Progress
8x Island
10x Forrest
The premise of this deck is to have counters flying around like they're going out of style. The trick is to get one or more instances of Doubling Season into play to let you double the counters.
Here's how the deck (doesn't) work:
Creatures
Aquastrand spider gives you a bit of flying defense just in case and 2 +1/1 counters. It's kind of meh, but starts the counter theme. Coiling Oracle is a useful creature to help you move through your deck more quickly and get to those all important doubling seasons while maybe getting land into play.
Now with Cytoplast Rootkin things go off the rails a bit. He gets four counters. That's 8 if you've got just one doubling season in play. If you've got 2 Doubling Seasons, that's 16 tokens, etc. He also puts an extra (meaning 2+ with doubling seasons) counter on every creature you control with a counter already on it, which should be pretty much all of them.
Experiment Kraj doesn't have Graft, but gains all abilities of creatures with counters on them and can put counters on your creatures. Pretty silly really. The plaxcaster frogling gets graft 3 for more counter fun and the ability to make your stuff untargetable, huzzah. The Simic guildmage lets you move counters around even more and is a nice cheap drop for early in the game.
Not Creatures
Beyond that all of your additional cards are there to either manipulate and thus multiply the number of counters you've got or accelerate your ability to get mana.
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