So I've been inspired. Occasionally that happens, but not often. When I did my original dig through the Dragon's Maze cards, I didn't think anything special was really out there. Voice of Resurgence seemed powerful, and Deadbridge Chant had potential, but neither really truly inspired me. I drafted up a few boring decks that folded all too easily to the meta. Then I saw something that changed all that: Breaking/Entering.

Breaking Grixis
Lands (24) 4 Watery Grave 4 Steam

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What is it that makes a good control deck tick? Usually it's Card Advantage. That can come from the availability of good, often-mass removal cards, or it can come with extremely strong ETB effects, or it can be discard, or just straight card draw. What I noticed with the current Standard environment is that Golgari's colors actually offer a lot of those things. If you then splash for a small sorcery (like, say, Rakdos's Return) then you've got the makings for a wicked deck.

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I've been toying with the idea a while, and I was actually wondering if splashing for Black was worth the hassle. Then I saw Possibility Storm, and I wanted to tweak the idea even further.

As much as I like aggro, I also like decks like this, where it's slow and grindy. It's also wholly possible that you'll completely lock your opponent out of casting anything while you extort them to death.

How?
Possibility Storm + Curse of Exhaustion means your opponent can...

If you don't know what the pillow fort deck type is, it's a deck where the goal is essentially to make it impossible for your opponent to hurt you. In Standard, that means you're playing a lot of enchantments paired with Sphere of Safety. You're a tapout control style of deck, basically, but with enchantments instead of spells.

Sphere of Safety means you're in White, but what others have thought to do with the deck was to play Naya. That gives you some nice green enchantments,...

I've been building aggro decks lately. If you know me, you're not surprised, even though for several months I toyed with control. Aggro is more my style -- I play it better, and I enjoy cards that do something instead of cards that undo something.

This is where my current Boros Humans deck sits. Keep in mind, this is before any of the really good spoilers have arrived to deliver the Boros Legion into the prominence I expect it to see soon.

Boros Tactical Strike
Lands (22)

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I've been flirting with Control lists for months now, because honestly I've wanted to understand how that mindset works... how those kinds of players play. The drawback is that Control just isn't my style. That conflict (obviously) lends itself to less success than I usually enjoy.

So I'm going back to my roots: G/R Aggro. And yes, this is before Gatecrash comes out and Gruul makes this deck ridiculous.

Here's what I've been thinking:

Deck
Lands (24)

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For those who have been following me of late, you know I've been toying around with a 5-Color Control idea. That's still out there, and I'm still tweaking it, but it hasn't changed substantially in a while. It's all "maintenance" and minor stuff, so... the brewing part of my brain has gotten a bit bored with it. That's why I indulge myself with some other ideas.

And that's what started the ideas that lead to today's deck.

More specifically, I was toying...

Here's my disclaimer: I'm still not sure how many or of which lands I want to run in this deck. It has the tendency to get to low life before stabilizing, enough so that I'm cautious with overloading on shocks. Besides, Chromatic Lantern is amazing as far as color-fixing and ramp goes. I just don't want to rely on it too much.

That aside, I'm still really interested in trying out a 5-Color Control deck, and this looks to be as strong a place to start as any. Whether or not I use...

My experimenting with 5CCControl has actually gotten me pretty excited. If you missed the first blog, I'm not normally a control player, but this deck... there's just something about this deck. Stabilizing at 1, and then pulling out a win is just FUN. And yesterday I did it twice. Granted the deck starts slowly, but that's a control deck, or so I've been told.

Inside the spoiler you can see the current deck. But that isn't what this blog is about. This entry is about taking...

I've been toying with decks just for giggles of late, and mostly because I'm absurdly tired of delver and aggro. I've never been much of a "true control" player, so to flex my gaming muscles a bit I decided to try my hand at that type of deck.

Why creatureless, you ask? Simple: I'm trying to make all the removal in my opponents' hands dead cards. I want them to drown in those cards, especially Vapor Snag, until I run them over with pings and mill and whatever else it...

You probably don't know about this deck. It might look vaguely familiar, since the shell is something you might have even played against, but... there's something new here. Something different.

When AVR was getting spoiled, there were a few cards that just looked so intriguing that I had to build around them. My favorites were probably Ulvenwald Tracker and Champion of Lambholt. Both started out in this deck, but it’s gone through some iterations since then. As you might guess,...

Honestly, there weren't a lot of goodies in the new set, but there were a few. Here's how I think the deck will look with the introduction of the new cards.

UG Splintered Instincts
Creatures (34) 4x Birds of Paradise 2x Llanowar Elves 2x Ulvenwald Tracker 4x Screeching Skaab 2x Armored Skaab 2x Champion of Lambholt 2x Borderland Ranger 4x Splinterfright 3x Phyrexian Metamorph 3x Dungeon Geists 4x Ghoultree 2x Wolfir Silverheart

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Yeah, I'm thinking about the addition of white to the mix of my favorite Standard deck. Looked at red before, and black, so what else is left?

See bottom half of the blog entry for the current deck!

UGw Holy Splinter
Creatures (32) 4x Birds of Paradise 4x Avacyn's Pilgrims 3x Grand Abolisher 4x Screeching Skaab 4x Armored Skaab 2x Fiend Hunter 4x Splinterfright 3x Phyrexian Metamorph 2x Dungeon Geists 2x Ghoultree

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If you haven't heard, my favorite Splinterfright deck has gotten some serious facelifts lately. It's getting more tuned with every waking minute, especially thanks to some overtime-esque devotion in the Standard Dredge Thread on these very forums. If you haven't seen that place yet, do yourself a favor and check it out. And read the posts.

That said, I'm taking the new(er) and improved(er) deck to FNM tomorrow. This will be the second week in a row, which is kind of a feat...

If you hadn't heard, this is the new kid on the block, and it's so fun that even Brian Kibler is playing it. Or at least considering it. Trust me: it gets insane quickly.

That said, the deck has been in serious flux for months, and with Dark Ascension still relatively new, it's been hard figuring out just exactly where the pieces best fit together. This is what I have so far.

UG Splintered Instincts
Creatures (31) 4x Birds of Paradise 2x Deranged Assistant 4x

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