MTG Salvation

I’ve been playing EDH for a while now. My first deck was Sharuum, the Hegemon and it wasn’t perfect (I still had the cheap creature aggro mindset from Standard), but let’s be honest, who of us had a perfect deck on the first try with our very first deck? After playing it for a while, about three games a week for a whole semester, I decided that I wanted something different. Showing up each week with the same deck just wasn’t what I wanted, and so I decided to build a few decks and every time I did, they would come together and be scrapped because I just didn’t want them. I was in dire need of a change, and even gave up on EDH for a couple months because of it.

Eventually, however, I came across a general I thought was so awesome that I just had to make something around him, Gaddock Teeg. I built it pretty simply: a boat load of cheap enchantments (which hit me as an inkling right after finding out that I had a Sylvan Library stashed away in a box of commons) and a bunch of White and Green beats creatures. I ran Avacyn, Angel of Hope, Admonition Angel, Terrastodon, you name it, and you know what? I loved it. I loved that deck to death.

But I am too nice of a person. After playing Teeg for a while, everyone hated playing against me. Yeah, my meta used to be packed with people who just complain, tell me about it. But everyone hated Teeg, and for good reasons. So the deck got scrapped, and I went on to something more ‘fun’. I was sad inside and everything.

One day, I was looking through my binder, trying to find a card for someone else and I went through my green stuff. All these foils, all these amazing cards that I just loved to play, and I scrapped them all; even traded a few of them off. Nostalgia hit me like a freight train at full speed. So I told myself that I wanted to build a deck with these cards, for old time’s sake. But the idea trailed off as I continued my search for my friend.

Return to Ravnica came out, and it was the prerelease. I bought a pack of M13 for my girlfriend and I. She opened a Chandra and flipped (it’s her favorite) and I exclaimed ‘I probably won’t get lucky twice with both of these packs’ and when I opened it up, a foil Yeva, Nature’s Herald was staring me in the face. The idea for the deck flashed back to me, and I knew that it had to be built.

After that, it took me 30 minutes to put together the first draft of this deck. I looked through it, sleeved it, and knew that it was going to be janky (I mean come on, 30 minutes?) but I took it to an EDH game anyway. Give it some testing. The first game, I squared off against Kresh, Angus, and Trostani. Lots of green, and loads of fun.

Kresh gets stopped constantly by Angus and eventually dies out to Trostani’s huge army. My friends all know that this deck is brand new and assume it is pretty bad, despite being almost completely foil, so I am pretty ignored. Trostani is building up life and Angus is just sitting back waiting for a win con. I drop Avenger of Zendikar, Wolfbriar Elemental for 18 wolves, and Craterhoof Behemoth in three consecutive turns. I hit Trostani for 943 damage in the turn that Craterhoof dropped, and Angus got dropped when my Terastodon hit his only blue mana producers, making it impossible to fog me. I laughed, and the legend of Yeva beats was born.

Originally, this was a beats deck that abused a lot of ETB effects, which is what you expect from a Yeva deck. Then it was a beats deck that used some ETB effects and used cards that gave infect to win. Now, it is strictly a beats deck, and I love it to death.

I do not have a running change log for the past year of this deck’s existence, but I will keep one here from now on.

This may seem really stupid, but we have all heard of or seen an episode or two of The Office. A few games into this decks existence, a few of my buddy’s are sitting around the table at my house playing EDH with the tv on. I dropped Mossbridge Troll out and swung at one of the guys around the table. I pumped him a good 30+ times ( I had dropped a boat load of plant tokens from Avenger of Zendikar plus I had a bunch of creatures out that were just getting tons of bonuses). The total was somewhere around 600 from the one creature alone and he had Trample. One of the guys at the table said (and I’m cleaning this up a bit) ‘dude he is SO BIG’. The stars aligned that day, just for me; because right afterwards, a commercial for The Office had Michael yelling ‘THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID!’ We all died laughing and thus, the deck’s name was born.