[Primer for the Secret Tier above Tier 1] Life-O-Cron.dec!

[Sheik al Kaji]

With Fish becoming so prevalent in today's meta, there is only one way to combat the weenie rush: LIFEGAIN!

Yes, the higher-ups on TMD have been hiding this secret tech from us basic users, hoping that they might completely annihilate us with a deck that contains no fish at all, much like the fish sticks in public school lunches.

Now, on to an overview of the deck that will become the metagame defining DECK TO BEAT!

The Lifegain:

Nourish and Heroes' Reunion are hands down, the best life gain cards in the game. Best of all, they're instants, which allows us to imprint them on the most broken of Mirrodin cards, Isochron Scepter. The combo of Nourish/Heroes' Reunion + Scepter is on par with the awesome combo of Scepter + Time Walk.

Therefore, four of all the aforementioned cards are must includes.

4 Isochron Scepter
4 Nourish
4 Heroes' Reunion

Protecting the Powerful Combo:

Now, countermagic tends to be the best way to counter spells in Magic. But, since the color pie shifts that will come in Kamigawa block with counter magic to green and white haven't come yet, we have to go outside of our primary colors and make a minor splash into blue.

So, we'll go with twevle, because twelve is a bigger number than eight.

4 Force of Will
4 Mana Drain
4 Counterspell

Drawing; because having cards in your hand seems to be good:

Having cards in your hand gives you options. This is something I call "Card Advantage". I coined this term myself, and will begin to write an extensive series of articles as soon as I am done with this important primer.

There are are many good drawing engines in T1, and I like the pretty lady on the Brainstorm artwork, so in goes Brainstorm. I guess Intuition + Accumulated Knoledge is good, but it runs against so many of the basic tenats of "Card Advantage".

4 Brainstorm
4 Accumulated Knowledge
4 Intuition


The Brokenness:

People say that T1 is broken, and I like to joke about how T1 decks should be bound up with duct tape because duct tape is good at fixing things. But whenever I try to fix people's broken decks by binding them up with duct tape, they beat me up. Christ, I'm just trying to be helpful.

1 Ancestral Recall
1 Timewalk
1 Timetwister
1 Balance
1 Mystical Tutor

* A lot of people tell me that there are several broken black cards, but I don't use black cards because my mom says that using black cards is devil worship.

Mana:

Well, we need to be able to cast all these awesome spells, so here is the super-optimized mana base!

4 Windswept Heath
1 Flooded Strand
4 Tropical Island
4 Tundra
3 City of Brass
1 Black Lotus
1 Sol Ring
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Sapphire


The Kill; How Fish Loses:

The truly secret tech to this deck is what is usually dismissed as a design error. 61 cards is truly an awesome kill mechanism. The weenies will be unable to deal with your staggering amounts of life gain, and you will cause the Fish player to deck himself, simply because you were the smarter man and built a deck designed to take advantage of the fact that the other guy just used only sixty cards.