All of the Throwback Thursday decks I’ve posted so far have been good ones – decks that I’ve played to top finishes in tournaments, or that I might not have had great success with but felt like were particularly fun or interesting. This deck is neither of those things.

Well, that’s not entirely true – it’s “interesting” in the sense that one has to wonder how in the world I actually ended up playing this deck in a Pro Tour, especially when I was testing with a group of some of the best players in the world.

The event in question was Pro Tour Osaka back in 2002. At the time, I was working with a group that was engaged in something of a unique experiment – the Magic Colony. The idea was that a group of players would get together and live for a while in a house testing for the pro tour.

It’s funny looking back that this was so unique at the time, because it’s basically standard practice for big teams to get together for a week before each pro tour, if not longer. I was still in college at the time, however, so I wasn’t involved in the actual “Colony” part of the group. I was contributing via email and testing over Apprentice (the predecessor to Magic Workstation and the like), playing against other Colony members online.

The full roster of the Colony was very large, including myself, Ben Rubin, Chris Benafel, Brian Hegstad, Brett Shears, William “Baby Huey” Jensen, Brock Parker, Alex Borteh, Matt Linde, Phil Freneau, Peter Szigeti, Ken Ho, Terry Tsang and Jeff Fung. I don’t recall exactly who was in the house in Washington, but somehow with so many pro players working together, we almost all ended up playing this deck.

4 [card]Darkwater Catacombs[/card] 10 [card]Island[/card] 7 [card]Mountain[/card] 4 [card]Shadowblood Ridge[/card]

3 [card]Cephalid Looter[/card] 4 [card]Psychatog[/card] 4 [card]Aether Burst[/card] 3 [card]Chainer’s Edict[/card] 4 [card]Circular Logic[/card] 4 [card]Compulsion[/card] 4 [card]Fiery Temper[/card] 3 [card]Shadowblood Egg[/card] 4 [card]Violent Eruption[/card] 2 [card]Upheaval[/card]

Sideboard

2 [card]Aboshan, Cephalid Emperor[/card] 2 [card]Aura Graft[/card] 1 [card]Cephalid Looter[/card] 1 [card]Chainer’s Edict[/card] 2 [card]Divert[/card] 2 [card]Flaming Gambit[/card] 1 [card]Haunting Echoes[/card] 1 [card]Shower of Coals[/card] 2 [card]Skeletal Scrying[/card] 1 [card]Upheaval[/card]

Look upon that list in awe. This was a format that had some of the worst mana fixing in the history of Magic. Ken Ho, who dissented from the rest of our group and wisely played U/G instead of this monstrosity, ended up winning the tournament with a copy of [card]Tarnished Citadel[/card] in his two color deck, simply because he was so desperate for any kind of mana fixing. With that in mind, take a look at these:

[cardimg align=none]Violent Eruption[/cardimg] [cardimg align=none]Aboshan, Cephalid Emperor[/cardimg] [cardimg align=none]Haunting Echoes[/cardimg] Somehow, in a world that didn’t even have two color dual lands, we ended up playing *three* colors, and on top of that we played cards with double and even triple colored mana symbols in their casting costs. Our only mana fixing to cast these cards were eight filter lands – which didn’t even produce colorless mana by themselves – and three Eggs. Eggs are mostly known as enablers for combo decks nowadays, with even the non-Egg-containing versions known by that name, but we apparently thought that they were good enough as mana fixers that they could fix our disastrous colored mana situation.

The idea behind the deck was that [card]Compulsion[/card] was incredibly powerful, and we wanted to be able to maximize it with the likes of [card]Fiery Temper[/card] and [card]Violent Eruption[/card]. We realized fairly quickly that the deck was weak when it didn’t draw discard enablers, which led us to add [card]Cephalid Looter[/card] and eventually [card]Psychatog[/card] as a splash, which brought us to adding [card]Chainer’s Edict[/card] to give us a better way to deal with [card]Wild Mongrel[/card], which could otherwise be a problem. Now, keep in mind that this is a format in which U/G Madness was one of the most popular decks, if not the single most popular. How playing a deck that was weak to [card]Wild Mongrel[/card] seemed like a good idea at the time is beyond me, and how [card]Chainer’s Edict[/card] seemed like a good enough answer when every U/G Madness deck had four copies of [card]Basking Rootwalla[/card] is even more insane in retrospect.

We thought that our deck had a huge edge against Monoblack because of their inability to interact with [card]Compulsion[/card], but we didn’t consider that many monoblack decks would have the ability to aggressively sideboard into [card]Braids, Cabal Minion[/card] and [card]Rancid Earth[/card] – the latter of which was particularly powerful against our precarious mana base. We thought we’d ultimately get them with [card]Divert[/card] for [card]Mind Sludge[/card] and [card]Flaming Gambit[/card] to win long games (along with [card]Upheaval[/card], which was somehow partially relegated to our sideboard because [card]Compulsion[/card] seemed like a better plan than [card]Upheaval[/card]/[card]Psychatog[/card]), but in the end, we had a bunch of inefficient and difficult to cast spells and got run over.

Perhaps the craziest thing about this deck is that I somehow made day two with it, beating William Jensen in a mirror match midway through day one that neither of us really wanted to win because we knew the deck was terrible and we wanted to be done with it. I also managed to beat Jon Finkel in the very first round of the event by actually piecing together the right cards and the mana to cast them on time, but reality hit hard on the second day, and I finished the tournament in 92nd place.

So the next time you play a terrible deck and feel bad about it, think back to this. Realize that somehow multiple future Hall of Famers thought that the best deck they could play was one that could start the game with this opening hand, and you’ll feel a lot better about yourself. [cardimg align=left]Shadowblood Ridge[/cardimg] [cardimg align=center]Shadowblood Ridge[/cardimg] [cardimg align=left]Darkwater Catacomb[/cardimg] [cardimg align=center]Darkwater Catacomb[/cardimg] [cardimg align=left]Shadowblood Egg[/cardimg] [cardimg align=center]Aboshan, Cephalid Emperor[/cardimg] [cardimg align=left]Violent Eruption[/cardimg]