I've been away from Magic for a few months now and de...

[The Grim Reaper]

I've been away from Magic for a few months now and decided to get back into the game by making a new deck. I heard that dragon was decent unpowered and decided to whip up a UB version. Rather than follow the traditional mono black builds or UB with intuition and force, i decided to take a different path.

Without further ado...

Trogdor.dec (Sp?)

The Creatures
4x Worldgorger Dragon
3x Ambassador Laquatus

The Animation
4x Animate Dead
4x Dance of the Dead

Tools of the Trade
4x Buried Alive
4x Careful Study
3x Compulsion

Disruption
4x Duress

Broken?
1x Demonic Tutor
1x Vampiric Tutor
1x Mystical Tutor OR Frantic Search (Undecided)
1x Entomb

Mana
1x Mana Crypt
1x Mana vault
1x Sol Ring
1x Lotus petal
1x Mox Diamond
1x Chrome mox
4x Dark Ritual
4x UG Sea
4x UG River
4x Polluted Delta
2x Flooded Strand
1x Swamp
1x Island

Now let me explain my Card Choices!

3 Ambassador Laquatas
I don't understand why people use less than 2 or 3 of him in a budget version of this deck. You want to find dragon and ambassador ASAP and throw them into the graveyard with Careful Study or Compulsion. By including 3, I always get one when I need it.

No Intuition / Force of Will
I felt that duress and Buried alive were much better for a deck without bazaars.

No Necromancy
I am planning in putting these in the sideboard as I don't see that much control in my metagame.

-----------------------------------------------------------

This deck can goldfish on turns 1-3 quite consistantly. I'm looking for further advice on how to improve the overall speed of the deck. Any comments or questions would be appreciated and happily accepted.

-Grim

[BreathWeapon]

Multiples of Ambassador are bad. Its an auto loss vs Gaea's Blessing. Use 1 Ambassador and 1 Sliver Queen. Careful Study sucks, use Spoils of the Vault instead. ESG is really good, play them. Ya, thats about it. Go look at other threads, this has come up a gazillion times on these boards.

[The Grim Reaper]

Quote (BreathWeapon @ Dec. 11 2003,03:05)Multiples of Ambassador are bad. Its an auto loss vs Gaea's Blessing. Use 1 Ambassador and 1 Sliver Queen. Careful Study sucks, use Spoils of the Vault instead. ESG is really good, play them.

I've never actually seen someone play Gaea's blessing against me in my meta game, and I'm not sure why that makes it an auto-loss. I agree that an alternate win is nice though.

SoTV is NOT good in my metagame. 75% of the decks are aggro... which I would crush if I didn't use SoTV. I don't like the added effect of me having a 20% or so chance of dying either.

ESG has no place in this deck, I have enough mana when I need it most of the time.

Could you explain how Gaea's Blessing causes an auto-loss if you have 3 Ambassadors?

[BreathWeapon]

If you don't have a Compulsion on the board and an Ancestral in your deck, Laquatas can't kill the opponent by milling their deck. The Blessing will activate to reshuffle the opponent's deck again and again and again ... so you can't win.

Why are you worried about Aggro? If you pack 4 Spoils of the Vault and 4 ESG you will consistantly win on turn 2. Its only a 13-15% Chance of losing the game. Entomb is a bad card, I missed that the first time around, cut it.

I don't think there is really much of a reason to play Blue in budget Dragon. Jalum Tome is just as good as Compulsion, and you don't suck down Manascrew.

Do some homework and use the Search Function, you'll learn a lot that way ... and i'm pretty burned out on the subject.

[Binary]

Quote (The Grim Reaper @ Dec. 11 2003,06:14)I've never actually seen someone play Gaea's blessing against me in my meta game, and I'm not sure why that makes it an auto-loss.

That's the trick... they don't have to play the Gaea's Blessing. It just has to be in their deck to trigger when Laquatus starts milling.

If you're going to rely on Laquatus as your only kill condition, you really need to have an instant speed effect that forces your opponent to draw cards. When the Blessing hits the graveyard, continue your milling in response to its trigger until you run their deck out, then toss your instant-speed effect on the stack for the win.

And as for not having Necromancy maindeck, I personally think that's a mistake. What do you do against Chalice for 2 other than scoop?

[dicemanX]

In this type of build (aiming for discarding your creatures) You should cut the Careful Studies and Entomb, as well as 2 Ambassadors. You cannot win if you only pitch a WGD to Study, or fetch it with Entomb. You need Compulsion in play, but if you have Compulsion, why the need for the Study? It would make more sense to me to go up to 4 Compulsions and add a few Jalum Tomes for redundancy. You should also consider City of Traitors/AncientTomb to help accelerate out the Tomes or Buried Alive. Also, there is no need to run many win conditions (Ambassadors). You cannot afford the space. Run just one, and if you want to add more "just in case" diversify a little with either Queen or Verdant Force.

With the extra space created, you can then also run more disruption. 4 Duress is a little thin, even if your meta is aggro dominated. Consider Therapy, Unmask, or Defense Grid.

[Falc]

Question:  What happens when you Spoils away your only Laquatus?  If you run Spoils, then don't you HAVE to run muliple win conditions?  It seems to me like the deck would be better if a single Latquatus was your only win condition in the maindeck with Sliver Queen in the SB.  Am I wrong here?

I also have to agree that Mono-Black is the way to go with this.  Jalum Tome can take the place of your Compulsions and do just as good of a job.  The extra mana sucks, but it's better than needing blue.  You also have to run at least one Necromancy in the maindeck so you can win under Chalice.  Cutting blue will also free up space for four Cabal Therapy and allow your mana base to handle four Ancient Tomb.

- Falc

[dicemanX]

1) Spoils is an OK inclusion, but they aren't too strong in non-Bazaar builds. I would not run them in this build. If you run them then of course you can't just run one Ambassador. Without Bazaar, it is difficult to pull off fast wins, which makes Spoils extemely risky.

2) ESG is a poor suggestion for this deck. They work well in T1.5 Bazaar Spoils-Dragon because there just isn't anything else good enough in that format beyond Ritual. Plus, they sacrifice your mana stability in the interest of winning as soon as possible. Non-Bazaar builds unfortunately are not very fast, averaging around turn 3-4 kills, with turn 2 kills from time to time if you get lucky.  

3) I would support cutting blue entirely. There are enough mono-B builds floating around the forums to give you an idea of what works. The primer has an example of a  budget-budget build as well.


@BreathWeapon: making suggestions is fine, but you speak with such "authority" and yet you are just regurgitating stuff from other threads that doesn't particularly make sense here. This is misleading people that are seeking help. What are you, the Jesus Christ of deckbuilding?  

[The Grim Reaper]

Four Spoils + 1 or 2 Win Conditions = Bad

Four Jalum tome = Not as much discard as Careful study and Compulsion and Frantic Search.
PLUS, you can't cycle more than 1 card a turn!

Removing Blue and a couple of ambassadors = Bad because my metagame is ultra newb. No Gaea's Blessings, No Chalice of the void, no blood moon.

I agree it is light on disruption, but the purpose of the deck is to win ASAP, and I only need a light amount of disruption to get whatever they have out of my way.

Several compulsions and jalum tome's = slow and not needed.

Careful studies and Compulsions are simply GOLD in this deck. They offer what black does not have: Cheap draw and discard. Careful studies offer a first turn draw 2, and discard dragon or laquatass or both. With so much draw, discard, and win conditions, I can easily draw into dragon and laquatas and get both in the graveyard without buried alive.

Jalum tome simply does not do this as well as Blue can.

There is absolutely NO downside to me running blue in this deck. I've never even SEEN a bloodmoon.

However, I will test out many of the suggestions so far, but none seem very promising, especially in my metagame.

[BreathWeapon]

Amen!

Actually you make a good point, I should have just linked him to your Primer and left it at that. There really isn't anything you can't find there anyway.

Still, the search function is tech. This is easily the 4th or 5th thread on budget dragon in general.

I think Spoils and ESG are sort of necessary for Budget Dragon. Without Bazaar you have no long term game play anyway, and splicing the deck with ReAnimator only really makes sense in Hate Light meta's. That said, if his meta is as bad as he says it is, then your probably right that Spoils and ESG aren't the way to go.

Jalum Tome is better because its colorless and Blue has nothing to offer of anyvalue unless your running FoW and Intuitions.\n\n

[dicemanX]

If you consistently get Careful Study + WGD + Ambassador + Animate in your hand and win quickly, I suggest you try your luck at the casino instead. Much more profitable .

It you want maximal speed that isn't so luck dependent, here is one such build:

4x Buried Alive
3x Intuition
3x CunningWish
4x Read the Runes
1x Entomb

4x WGD
1x Aerial Caravan

3x Animate Dead
3x Dance of the Dead
1x Necromancy
--------------------------
27 combo pieces


1x Demonic Tutor
1x VampiricTutor
-------------------------
2x Tutors/Utility


3x FoW
3x Duress
-------------------------
6 disruption


4x Dark Ritual
1x Mana Crypt
1x Mana Vault
1x Lotus Petal
1x Chrome Mox
4x Ancient Tomb
2x City of Traitors
4x Underground Sea
4x Polluted Delta
2x Swamp
1x Island
-----------------------
25 mana


SB:

1x Stroke of Genius
1x Rushing River
1x FoW
12x other (meta dependent, although I’d consider DefenseGrid and Powder Keg along with Verdants)


This is an old tried and tested build, and its pretty fast. It might work OK with Spoils of the Vault, but I'm not sure how good they would be here. My initial guess is that they would be very good. You can even trim the disruption down further and go for even more combo pieces.\n\n

[The Grim Reaper]

Should I run 4 Fow's? I run the same number of blue cards as in the decklist you posted DicemanX, (Excluding the FoW's of course). I don't think it's necessary to run 3x Intuition AND 4x Buried Alive. Buried Alive is 1983501580x better in the budget version anyway.

I seem to be getting constant ambassador + worldgorger + careful study in my hand, or Ritual + Buried alive.

Perhaps I should try my luck at the casino after all...

I think I will remove 2 animate cards for 2 necromancies, or possibly one, just so that I have a better chance against control with my low amount of disruption. Perhaps I shall include FoW in the sideboard for against combo and control as well.

Are intuition and FoW really worth it in this deck? I mean Intuition = 1 type of card in your graveyard, and Buried alive = combo in your graveyard.

Also, people who run 1 laquatas will lose if they can't get a buried alive.

A 1/60 chance of drawing into a laquatas is not too good.
I like my chances of drawing Laquatas and discarding him for the win, although I am going to include a sliver queen as an alternate win as suggested.

Is sliver queen really the best choice? I mean, wouldnt a creature that deals X direct damage be better? Actually, the queen could help me a lot against aggro.... even without dragon.

[dicemanX]

Intuition is worth it even if you run Buried Alive. If you want to get fast kills consistently, then you have to try to be as redundant as possible. Furthermore, Intuition is a kill card if you happen to discard a WGD via Read the Runes or fetch it with Entomb: you Intuition for 3x Cunning Wish and kill with Stroke. In the build I presented it is *not* necessary to get a Caravan into the graveyard to win, so the fact that Intuition doesn't put your combo (WGD+ Caravan) into the grave is not so crucial.

FoW is not critical in this deck; I just put in 3 as an example. The main point is that you have 6 disruption slots, which can be used in any way you see fit. You can run Unmask, Therapy, Defense Grid, etc.

[The Advantage]

Quote (The Grim Reaper @ Dec. 11 2003,16:05)Also, people who run 1 laquatas will lose if they can't get a buried alive.

Drop Tome/Compulsion before you start the loop.

Quote (The Grim Reaper @ Dec. 11 2003,16:05)Is sliver queen really the best choice? I mean, wouldnt a creature that deals X direct damage be better?

Do you really want to splash red?

If anyone knows Dragon, its dicemanX or Shockwave.  Trust anything they say on the subject...you won't be sorry.

[Razvan]

Quote A 1/60 chance of drawing into a laquatas is not too good.

That's why you have compulsion, so you draw all the cards. DON'T GO OFF WITHOUT COMPULSION OR SIMILAR IN PLAY. I did that last night. It was not pretty  .

Intuition is better, because you can fetch compulsion with it too I would say it's 1983501580x better  .

Quote "...because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know."

-US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld

I am in near tears now  . That's awesome.