In my previous post on my Alpha Lich deck I mentioned that for a time I had tried to make the biggest of the bad creatures work in the deck — Lord of the Pit.

The actual card text was amazing:

7/7 — OMG

Flying — A much needed flier

Trample — The only other tramplers in my D&D group was the dude from Foriys (my love for whom is a topic for another day) and a Mammoth

You must sacrifice one of your creatures during upkeep or you suffer 7 damage!

At first I had this bad boy bare in the deck and while it was fun to play and swing with on occasion, I found the card to be problematic.

Seven damage in a Lich deck makes for bad times

A reminder about just what Lich gives you:

Your life total goes to zero, but you don’t lose .

. If you ever gain life points then you draw that many cards instead.

If you ever lose life points then you sacrifice that many cards instead.

If you cannot sacrifice enough cards then you lose .

. If the Lich enchantment is destroyed then you lose.

In a total card pool of a couple hundred cards such as we had in my old D&D group then something like the Lich was extremely powerful. Minimally the card was a last-ditch effort to stay alive and maybe get another turn or two before your cards in play were sacrificed away. However, with some life gain you could draw a bunch of cards and hopefully draw into something to win the game. For me, at least in the early days, that something was Lord of the Pit — and in the rare times when it hit the battlefield uncontested and with morsels to munch on it was a guaranteed game winner.

However, it was a rare circumstance for the Lord to hit the battlefield under such favorable conditions. Instead, he’d hit the table, my opponent would play a something to block or tap him and I’d eventually whittle my creatures down and take big damage and sacrifice every card I had access to. My friends knew he was in my deck, so they played for him to come down. Twiddle, Regeneration, and Icy Manipulator were the bane of my existence. In all, I must’ve taken more damage to the Lord than I ever dealt. So I tried really hard to come to a solution.

Simulacrum to the rescue?

The first attempt at solving the Pit problem was to use Simulacrum to redirect the damage:

As written the card states:

All damage done to you this turn is redirected to a creature you control

You suffer none of it

The creature can be regenerated.

This was a pretty good solution since I had Drudge Skeletons and a Wall of Bone to take the hit and regenerate. The sad part was that I only had one Simulacrum and the combo of Skeleton + Lord + Simulacrum + 3 available mana was fraught, but it worked on occasion and was wholly satisfying when it did. That said, I tended to avoid casting the Lord at all.

Better Solutions Abound

After I inherited the Lich deck from Max I went on a trading rampage and determined that I could solve my problem three different ways:

More Simulacrums — deck slots that could be filled with Scathe Zombies

Find a Forcefield — one damage is ok…

Find a Circle of Protection: Black — …but zero damage is way better!

Being the thematic nut that I was at that time, I thought that the COP:Black was the best possible solution.

There’s just one problem…

In this age of limitless information available in your pants pocket or purse and accessible with the touch of a finger it’s easy to learn of trivialities like MtG set anomalies. However, in 1994 learning that there was no such thing as a Circle of Protection: Black was not as simple.

An artist’s rendition.

Instead, to learn about such things in 1994 you had to (apparently) post message thread after message thread on local BBSes, meet people in person and ask if they had one, refuse to trade for Forcefield at least twice, offer exorbitantly lopsided trades, and then eventually give up — trading for a Nightmare instead.

Wild West

The early days of MtG were like the wild west. People barely knew how to play and even when they did they didn’t know all of the possibilities. On top of that, bumblers like me were flailing about trying to make the jankiest of the jank work.

“Looks like a build-around to me!” — Me circa 1994 probably

There was no such thing as netdecking and the sources of information were few and far between — you were on your own (what even is a mana-curve?!). I mean for the love of Pete one of the best decks around was one filled with Rats! The weirdest part was that occasionally the jank worked miracles and the joy derived from that fact made everything else worthwhile.

It was great.