From: **TiM** <guillett@ici.net>
Newsgroups: rec.games.trading-cards.magic.strategy
Subject: Strategy Discussion: Necropotence + Agonizing Memories???
Date: Sun, 03 Aug 1997 23:50:47 -0400

I came up with an idea while toying with my MirViLite Black Weenie
deck... while flipping through my uncommon cards for support stuff, I
stumbled upon "Agonizing Memories" and "Painful Memories"... The first,
from Weatherlight, lets you look at your opponent's hand and put two of
them on top of his deck. The other, from Mirage, only lets you put one
of his cards on top of his deck, but costs B1 instead of BB2.

At first, these may appear useless. But if your opponent is drawing the
same cards over and over, they aren't getting any new stuff that could
help them. The result: card advantage, at least for Agonizing Memories.
And even though Painful Memories has no card advantage, (one of mine for
one of yours) it can still stall your opponent for a turn.

Let's say you have 4 Painful Memories and 4 Agonizing Memories in your
Necrodeck. On any given draw in a sixty card deck, you have a 8 out of
60 chance of drawing a Memory. This translates to 4 out of 30, 2 out of
15, and 1 out of 7.5... for simplicity, let's assume the chance of
drawing a Memory is 1 out of 8, or 12.5%.

Now, let's pair this with Necropotence, black's most powerful
card-drawing tool. (This is NOT in MiViLite, but these Memories cards
got me thinking back to Type 2, my native element) Drawing 4 cards per
turn is not unheard of with a Necrodeck, altho it assumes the Necro
player has the resources to drop a land and three creatures (or
whatever) per turn. Now, our chance of drawing a Memory becomes 4 out of
8 per turn, or 50%. In other words, given sufficient mana, you can
Memory your opponent EVERY OTHER TURN.

Result:
You draw 4, Painful Memory your opponent.
Your opponent draws the Memoried card.
You draw 4, Agonizing Memory your opponent.
Your opponent draws one Memoried card.
You draw 3 (since Agonizing Memory costs so much, you couldn't play as
much last turn)
Your opponent draws the other Memoried card.

So, over this span of three turns, while you have drawn 11 cards, your
opponent has drawn effectively zero. Since you used two of your cards to
cause this, You have gotten a monstrous card advantage of NINE CARDS!
Also, the time this buys you could help your weenies kill your opponent,
whereas he could have normally drawn the Wrath, blocker, or Disk he
needed to save his butt.

Now, this deck is a very rough draft, but I believe with some work this
concept has a lot of potential.

-------------------------------------------
Necro-Memories:

4 Shadow Guildmages
4 Sewer Rats
4 Black Knights
4 Knight of Stromgald
4 Nekrataals

3 Necropotence
2 Nevy's Disks (should be more, but this is a very rough draft)
4 Drain Life
4 Agonizing Memories
4 Painful Memories

2 Lake of the Dead
4 Gemstone Mine (so the Guildmages can boomerang Nekrataals for
re-usable Terrors)
17 Swamps

Total: 60 cards
---------------------------------------

Comments, suggestions, discussion and flames are always welcome. Enjoy.
:)

    -Tim Guillette