June 15th Deck Tech [Tempered Steel]

June 15, 2012

After dipping our toes in the Eternal format of Legacy, I want to hop back over to Standard Building on a Budget. I try to keep the cost low so you can build the deck for around $20.

This week I want to talk about Mirrodin’s poster children, Myr Tempered Steel.

While the traditional Tempered Steel decks relied on an explosive and aggressive early start, most of the cards that enabled that strategy are a bit out of our price range. So we need a different strategy, if we can’t start faster than them, we’ll just have to produce more numerous and bigger threats as quickly as possible. We have token generators to overwhelm and plenty of ramp to power out a few big threats.

Our strategy will be twofold, an artifact based Token swarm, and a big artifact beater deck. To buff and enable both, we’ll run the Anthem namesake card, Tempered Steel. As a very efficient buff to our creatures, it effectively triples most of our 1/1 tokens into 3/3 beasts. It also makes our big threats bigger, which is always super.

A quick mention for the mana base, while predominatly mono-white, this deck can really use the splash of red for Whipflare in the sideboard. While Evolving Wilds is usually the superior option for mana fixing, with our very light color commitment and only off-color requirement being a single card in the sideboard, Shimmering Grotto lets us to constantly stay on curve, while also giving us access to our splash color when we need it.

One of the more affordable and powerful ramp-threats is Myr Battlesphere. The battlesphere rewards us for running a lot of Myrs, so we’re going to want to enable that. While it is a token produce itself, allowing it to do 4 unanswerable damage every attack and turning itself into an 8/7, with more myrs those numbers keep going up. Even without trample, it helps to weaponize your little Myrs when faced with a relative stalemate.

Now that we’ve established that our Big Gun is Myr Battlesphere, we’re going to want to have plenty of Myrs to buff it up. Our Myrs are going to be enablers in two methods, mana ramp and token overwhelm.

Since we’re dedicated to Myr tribal, we run the Myr lord, Myr Galvanizer. This makes each of our little myrs that much better. As an added benefit, we can use it to untap all of our other myrs to do a few tricks. This lets us get pseudo-vigilance on all of our myrs, and lets us double activate our mana dorks.

Our two main ramp creatures are Iron Myr and Palladium Myr. Iron Myr produces off color mana, but by the time we have the two plains to play the myr, we have all of the colored mana requirements for the deck, I wanted to enable a Whipflare splash to combat spirits/delver decks. Otherwise our little 1 mana myr is quite unexciting on it’s own since we don’t have any important 4 mana targets we want to hit, but it does help us guarantee to hit those important 3 drops every time. Palladium Myr is a Worn Powerstone in creature form, accelerating us from 3 mana to 5-6 mana putting us in a position to start dropping our bombs. If we have two Myr Galvanizers and a Palladium Myr out, we can infinitly loop their untap triggers and generate infinite mana, though we don’t have a fireball to dump it into, it’s still neat.

While our mana myrs enable our top end, their mana generation also enables us to play Myr Superion. The Superion is very powerful and a great value at only 2 mana. Palladium Myr can power it out on it’s own, but you’ll need at least two myrs to do it otherwise. A value 5/6 that usually coming into play on turn 4, it can tremendously help your board position.

Our other Myr source is from Shrine of Loyal Legions. With every passing turn and each white spell we play we get closer to a small swarm of robots spilling out onto the field. While it doesn’t directly affect the field the turn it comes into play, it is a possible win condition unto itself. The large influx of myrs still have summoning sickness, but can be tapped by Battlesphere for extra power, or be used to gang block when needed. Their potentially large numbers work extremely well with Tempered Steel, and makes Spot Removal very ineffective.

Now that we have our aggro and main win-conditions laid down, we need a slew of options to accompany them. As always, removal is good, so we’ll start there.

Dispatch is usually our best removal spell. Turning metalcraft on is quite easy with our very high artifact count, this effectively gives us a better version of Swords to Plowshares, simply tapping down a creature can still be very effective, but permanently exiling a target can still be invaluable in a pinch.

Perilous Myr is a nice little pseudo removal. It’s still a 1/1 myr to help our myr and artifact count, but uppon death it becomes a Shock wherever we need it. We can recklessly run this little guy in as long as they have a small utility creature they don’t want us to remove, they won’t dare block it.

Steel Hellkite is both removal and a bomb. As a big flyer, it puts our opponent on a quick 4 turn clock, but it’s activated ability is the real meat and potatoes of this metalic dragon. After dealing combat damage, you can activate it for a 1 sided ratchet bomb, this means any pesky permanent they have sitting around you’re ready to remove.

Lastly we have Glint Hawk Idol as a nice little value card. With our high density of artifact cards, you should be able to drop an artifact very reliably every turn, turning this into a 2/2 flying artifact for free. If the late game comes around and you just NEED more damage in the air, you can easily pay the 1 mana and animate it for more evasive damage. Since this ceases to be a creature at the end of each turn, it dodges sorcery speed removal such as Day of Judgement letting you keep a little board presence after a wipe.

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Overall, this deck is very susceptible to a variety of removal. Artifact removal is in every sideboard, and board wipes are everywhere, so we need to plan accordingly.

Against deck with plenty of spot removal, especially RG decks that are packing Ancient Grudge, you should side-board and adapt to focus more on the overwhelm with tokens strategy since the usually don’t have much to deal with enchantments meaning Tempered Steel will be an all star in these games. Spellskite helps by re-directing spot removal from your more valuable larger targets to itself. Indomitable Archangel can also really help against spot removal by giving your artifacts shroud. Otherwise, your threats should just be far to numerous for them to deal with them all.

Against decks that have big wipes, White with Day and Elesh, Black with BSZ and Curse of Death’s Hold/Massacre Wurm, Red has started leaning more heavily on Whipflare (you’re immune) but Slagstorm is still hanging around and is just big enough to ruin your day. You’re going to rely on racing and recovery. Shrines and Idols will be invaluable, sitting by and avoiding all of it. Steel Hellkite should be able to soar over and remove Elesh and Wurm, You also have O-Ring to remove threats if you can’t get to them with Dispatch, either from lack of artifacts or important artifacts/enchantments. Revoke existence also helps against these options.

There is also a copy of Frantic Salvage to get back a bomb or two if you are matched up up against a slow control oriented deck and you need more bombs to end the game.

Timely Reinforcements comes in against fast aggressive decks, gaining some life and a few tokens while you get your engines online is very important.

Celestial Purge is ready to come in against Esper/Vampires/RG Aggro/WRRed/RDW/etc that rely on some nasty permanents, it’s just value removal in this matchup.