08 October 2015

Two decks in one

Regular readers of this blog and my twitter feed know that I'm obsessed with Splinter Twin.  Noah and I play almost every night and I'm trying to find ways to beat the deck.  And I mean beat it without the sideboard...I want game 1 wins.  This fits into his need to learn to pilot the mainboard deck and the fact that we haven't built a sideboard yet.

Then going through his binder cleaning out some stuff, we happened upon a playset of Delver of Secrets that were supposed to go into his standard Jeskai deck when it lost all of its cards to rotation, becoming a Modern deck.  A lightbulb clicked when the next page had three Young Pyromancers that were taken out of the burn deck when we got the Eidolons.

A sideboard is 15 cards....if we added four Delvers, four Pyromancers, a bunch of cheap cantrips to trigger those two, we could take out all of the Twin combo pieces and a few lands and have a Transformer deck.  Not just change Twin's style, change into a whole freaking other deck for game two.

You know the song:

The Transformers! Robots in disguise!
The Transformers! More than meets the eye!
The Transformers!
Of course, there are no robots in this story but the transformation is real.  It's probably a really bad idea since the same decks that beat Twin probably beat Delver.  Maybe what they sideboard in becomes a dead card (you get to ask them, "what's that Torpor Orb for?").  But the point is that it will be fun.

On my tennis team in high school we had an ambidextrous player (Marlon something) -- it was always fun watching his warmup to see the moment his opponent realized that this guy doesn't have a backhand!  Game 2 should be like that.  In my imagination at least.  The guy would say, "where does that Delver come from?  You can't switch decks!  JUDGE!"  And then turn two Young Pyromancer, turn three lots of spells, 3/2 flyers and little elementals doing crazy things.  It's a really fun idea.

Of course no idea is complete without taking it to an extreme so the next question is what other deck uses our blue / red manabase?  Storm!  But, alas, a good storm deck would have about 36 different cards to add, not quite sideboardable.

It does turn out that Delver isn't really that much fun to play compared to Twin but it did beat Tron once last night and Noah might just need some practice with it.  Until we have a proper sideboard, this is the strategy just to see if we get the reaction we're looking for!

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