August 17th Deck Tech [Splicers Shape Anew]

August 17, 2012

Some more Building on a Budget. I try to keep the costs low so you can build the deck for around $20.

Rotation ever looming on the horizon, that means it’s prime time for budget builders. All of our rotation-ready budget cards have hit rock-bottom, letting us play with lots of cool stuff we may not have gotten the chance to use when they were brand new. So this week we’ll be doing some more combo-deck, with Splicers Shape Anew.

This is a fairly frail but totally awesome combo deck. We have several artifact generating cards (splicers), we can then use Shape Anew to sacrifice one of our Golem tokens and trade it for the next artifact in our deck. But since the only artifact we have is Blightsteel Colossus we are garaunteed to hit it. To make this plan work we need to hit 4 mana as quickly as possible, find a Splicer, and find Shape Anew.

Starting at our our first hurdle, hitting 4 mana. Deranged Assistant helps us mana ramp, the blind mill is sub-optimal but the only pieces we have to worry about milling away is Shape Anew. Our splicers are plentiful enough that finding one shouldn’t be an issue, and the Colossus will just immediately be put back into our library should we mill it away. We also need to stall against aggression, Mana Leak serves as our main stall tactic, it stops about everything for the first 4 turns which is all the time we need. The 5-6th counterspell slot can be filled with whatever you like, I like Negate to protect against removal and permission spells later, but Essence Scatter has more power stalling during those first few turns.

Our next hurdle is getting out a golem token. We want to maximize our chances of having a splicer, since they’re core to both our main plan of Shape Anew and core to our backup plan of splicer swarming. Blade Splicer would be ideal, at 3 mana it comes down perfectly in time to curve out with Shape Anew. On a budget we can’t really afford Blade Splicers so we make due with Master Splicers and Wing Splicers being next on the Mana Curve. We only really care about the golem token, and if we have our combo in place, we can gladly throw our splicer in front of attacking creatures to chump block with when needed. Master’s Call fits at the correct mana curve position for Shape Anew, but it lacks the fallback options that the Splicers present, depending on how deep you want to go on the Shape Anew plan it may be worthy of consideration.

The final hurdle, casting Shape Anew to trade up our golem. We have to dig for this option, with 4 copies in a 60 card deck it will come up often, with how important it is we want to get a hold of it as soon as possible. Forbidden Alchemy is probably the most powerful dig option in standard right now, picking 1 of 4 cards lets us grab whatever we need most and removes the dregs we don’t want to see to help us dig deeper. Augur of Bolas is a small wonder in this deck, it helps us find Shape Anew, dig deeper if we don’t see it off the top, and works as a decent wall against attacks.

Assuming Shape Anew resolves, we then get to search out Blightsteel Colossus and win the game. We have two copies of Blightsteel Colossus in the event we draw one. We lack a looter or other discard outlet to get it out of our hands and back into our deck. An Augur or Alchemy may be swapped out for a looter depending on your preference. I like the big burst draws that see a lot of cards, while others may prefer the steady progress of hand improvement through looting.

Now that we have Blightsteel Colossus out, and with Vapor Snag running rampant and no feasible method to get the colossus into play and out of our hands, so we need to protect it. Mainboard we have Cloudshift, this lets us flicker our colossus in the event of targeted removal. Cloudshift also works on our Splicers to get some extra Golems out if needed. In the sideboard we also have a full set of Mental Misstep, this is primarily used to counter Vapor Snags while tapped out and counter morbid boosted Tragic Slips. In the event of a clone effect on your blightsteel you should still have the upper hand, Blightsteel is still a golem and does receives bonuses from your Splicers.



If you’re looking to spend a little more, a few key upgrades would be the aforementioned Blade Splicer to help curve out a bit better. Venser, the Sojourner would also be a good inclusion. With his ability to bounce splicers for value or to make your blightsteel and other golems unblockable he can be a force to be reckoned with.