Subject: a submission Date: Sat, 11 Apr 1998 09:07:13 +0000 From: Luis Buenaventura II To: fkusumot@ix.netcom.com I'm not really sure what got into me that day. Maybe I was bored. Maybe I was delirious. Maybe I was just plain crazy. Whatever it was, I started looking through my green cards. A lot of you have no idea about the weight of that statement. I have never played Green. Never. Really. I know what you're thinking. "But he must've started as a scrub like all of us, so how could he not have played green?" Simple, kemosabe. I wasn't that scrubby. (The only time I ever played Green was when I acquired a set of >Japanese< Titania's Songs in a big trade, and I thought, what the hell, I've got four Icies, Wraths, etc. The people old enough to be familiar with this deck know that it's only got FOUR green cards. Guess what they are.) Anyway. So there I was. Looking through my collection of green cards. I admit I was a little surprised by the amount. I have never actively purchased or traded for green cards, so all of these probably came from packs and starters. Wow. Llanowar elves, Elvish Rrrrranger, Stampedes, Giant Growths ... I even had 6 Emerald Dragonflies. I had over a thousand green cards in that pile. Gosh. When I got to the end, I thought, "This is such a waste. A thousand+ green cards and the only one that has ever seen daylight is the Titania's Song." So I went through the pile again. And then it hit me. (OUCH!) I would make a really horrible green deck, just to show all the people in the newsgroups how baaaad green can get! Heck, I had the whole weekend, I could even build a sideboard, and stuff it with stupid things like Emerald Charms. Wow, what a plan! So I set to work! I knew my first must-have card ... Llanowar Elves. I found enough foreign-edition versions that they actually looked good together. They may have been scrubby cards, but at least they were handsome scrubby cards. So, 4 Llanowar Elves. Ok ... At this point, I was running out of ideas. I had never read a green deck listing, and I was loathe to look for some on the Net since I had just spent the past week living in front of my PC downloading The Complete Command & Conquer (around 2.5 Gigs) from an FTP site. So I had to improvise. Then I remembered something I had read in Inquest ... the magic 3 ... 1 blue mana for 3 cards, 1 black mana for 3 mana, 1 red mana for 3 damage, 1 white mana for 3 life, and 1 green mana for ... +3/+3, I think. So I set about looking for that card. And I found it! Giant Growth, was the name. I was a little surprised that there were so many versions of it, one for every standalone. I knew that Ancestral Recall had been restricted for over-efficiency in the early days, and I had assumed this card would have been banned for over-stupidity. But I checked the copyright and it said 1997. So I thought, what the hell. 4 Giant Growths. Whew. I got my work cut out for me. While I was looking for the fourth Giant Growth, I came across this card with a snake in the water, a River Boa. For the people who aren't familiar with this card, it's 2/1 regenerating for G, islandwalk, and 2cc. Hmmm. I said to myself, "Self, this card is not that bad ... if your opponent wasn't playing Edicts, Incinerates, Pacifisms, Terrors, Dark Banishing, Disintegrate, Quicksand, any large creatures, any flanking creatures, any first-striking creatures, any flying creatures, any pokers, any creature-stalling enchantments, any mass creature (burial) removal spells ..." So, I stuck 4 River Boas. Then I remembered something else I read in Inquest ... green was the color of mana porducers. So I looked at my 4 elves, and thought, that's definitely not enough. So I searched for more mana producers ... and I came up with 4 Quirion Rangers. Ok, so it's not really a mana-producer. But it was 1 green for 1 mana -- with a special ability, so I figured, what the hell, it's better than an Ornithopter, right? After this, I thought, "Ok, enough with the mana. Let's look for phat." I came up with Rogue Elephants and Lhurgoyfs. I remember a funny comment my friend made, while busily trading like mad for 4 of these Elephants. He looked at the card text for a long time after releasing his 2 traded Strip Mines, and he told me, looking a little queasy, "Crap, I thought your OPPONENT was gonna throw a land!" I wasn't too sure about the Lhurgoyfs, but something told me that my creatures were gonna be dropping like flies, so I might as well make the most of it, right? By this time, I had a whole bunch of green cards that I thought were pretty darn scrubby, so I just tossed in some more random stuff I'd never heard of, along with 18 forests. And that's when my great plan hit a snag. I looked through the finished deck and found that I only had 56 cards. Great. My masterpiece, and it was incomplete. There was nothing left in the pile that I could stick in this deck. So I did the only thing I _could_ do. I got up and started doing Taichi forms on my bed. I was right in between White Snake Shows Its Tongue and Raise Leg when it hit me. (OUCH!) That's it! The crowning insult! The card that was revered and used in a whole bunch of tournament-winning decks now finds itself in the company of crap. Man, those newsgroup guys would probably kill me if they saw what I was doing. So finally, my obra maestra was finished. A tribute to the stupidity of green, and the utter uselessness of forests. Anyway, that's how I spent my weekend. I'll just leave the deck listing with you guys, with a challenge to make a green deck even scrubbier. 4 Llanowar Elves 4 Quirion Rangers 4 Rogue Elephant 4 Ghazban Ogre 3 Llhurgoyf 3 Uktabi Orangutan 4 River Boa 2 Jolrael's Centaur 2 Wall of Roots 4 Giant Growth 2 Elvish Fury 2 Sylvan Library 4 Winter Orbs 18 Forests ------------------------------------ (Don't take it TOO seriously.) Luis 2 luis@pinoymail.com Team PhilCoA