Well... Here we are again. The decks were brewed, tested, submitted. Then they were judged, comments were made, laughs were had. And tallies were tallied and here we are again back to the brewing. The cycle is complete. The cycle is eternal. The... ah forget it. This is about as deep as a Hallmark Holiday Special with Tim Allen as the starring lead.

So, as most of you are probably already aware, DCG-MTG was the winner of last round and, after much deliberation, has named the build around card for this round. It's a sweet little multifunction toolbox of a card, too. Long Road Home! Rescues creatures from all removal (even sweepers!), triggers revolt and ETB value, kills embalmed hydras dead, and has the distinction of being the only blink type card in Duels that WON'T kill your Walking Ballista. How cool is that?

However, since this is an uncommon non-permanent card, I am using my discretionary privilege to tack on a secondary card with similar properties. That card is Supernatural Stamina! It can't kill tokens and won't rescue things from exile effects but it does buff and works fine against sweepers, plus its a common and only 1 mana!

So here are the rules - the only changes being to the judging section (same as last round but edited for clarity).

The rules:
0. I will announce 1 or more cards for each round.
1. You may submit a deck that utilizes one or both of the announced cards. Decks that use multiple announced cards may get a small bonus in the judging (at the judges' discretion)
2. Your deck should "break" the chosen card(s). A card can be considered broken if it has a normally weak effect that gets utilized in an exceptionally powerful way. A card that has trade-off effects can also be considered broken if it is used in such a way that all of its effects are positive for the deck.
3. You ARE required to run full playsets of each of the chosen cards that you use.
4. Unless explicitly stated, there are NO deckbuilding restrictions (color, rarity, or otherwise). As long as it's legal in Duels and breaks one or more of the cards, it's valid.
5. The building part of the contest will last for a week. After that, I'll still consider submissions, but probably with some sort of late penalty.
6. Submissions must be sent by PM. For this round, submissions will NOT be anonymous.
7. Judging is open to anyone who tries each submission. Judges can use any pertinent scoring criteria they choose but must submit their final score in a ranking format as follows:
Last place gets 0 points
2nd to last gets 1 point
...
First place gets n-1 points where n is the number of submissions.
In case of ties, add together the points for the ranks that the tied submissions would occupy if not tied and then split the results as follows:
Tie for last place would get (0 + 1)/2 = 0.5 points each.
After the judging period is over, I will tally all the points given and announce the winner(s).
8. The winner of each round gets to decide one of the cards for the next round.

The deadline for submissions for this round shall be... Wednesday, December 20th. Or, less specifically, up to whenever I post the lists on the 21st.

Hello, and Good Luck!

Here are our submissions for round 5!

joesenshu:


Wintervoid:


Mowie666:


Cucho Lambreta:


CardboardNomad:


bzzt:


I guess with this being a busy time of year for many people, we can take a little extra time with the judging. How about Saturday, Jan 6th? If people finish up earlier, we can call it sooner, too.

Since everyone seems to be done judging, I'm calling it a day early! Here are the final results:
Wintervoid’s Highway to Hell: 25.5 (Winner!)
Cucho Lambreta's Rakdrazi Stamina: 23.5
CardboardNomad's Scrappy Stamina: 16.5
bzzt's Long Road to...?: 10.0
Mowie666's Recycled Servos: 8.0
Josenshu's Rakdos Electric Cars: 6.5

Congrats to Wintervoid for winning Round 5!

Was I mistaken that this contest was about breaking bad cards? I thought we were supposed to be trying to make bad cards good. Long Road Home is at worst mediocre; Supernatural Stamina is plain good. At this rate, contestants are going to be submitting competent decks instead of frustrating nightmares to play.

That’s the downside of letting the winners pick the cards. If it were me, we’d be banging our skulls against the likes of Ghirapur Orrery, Cultivator of Blades, Aid from the Cowl, etc. But having a token prize is fun and, ultimately, fun is the main reason for running the contest in the first place.

But have faith, Soup. I’m sure at least one of us will manage to ruin these respectable cards.

Lol soup, Stamina is absolute garbage. I love that you’re a judge , it makes this so much more Fun. It’s like having a cooking contest judged by Khadaffi or something.

I’ve lost access to NGA once again so Flaky I need you to email me lists early on the Thursday or I won’t be able to judge this round

I hope the holiday season doesn’t kill participation. Looking forward to playing this stuff. Stamina is a weird choice cuz there’s no way to « break » that card, no? Cuz it is so simple. Whereas Long Road Home can be built around, blinky counters and such. It would be fun to live the dream and blind a Snek with that card

Great job as always F’aky. You’re great at this

Don't blame me for Hour of Devastation not making it to Duels. If I had my way, we'd be deliberating over Swarm Intelligence now.

I was thinking this morning about how to use exiling opposing creatures with LRH to your advantage and remembered the Processors. A quick search then reminded me that all the Processors are absolute trash.

I got a perfectly good supernatural stamina deck... thanks Flaky!! XD

Yeah, I'm gonna live barney's dream and submit a -1/-1 token deck with the staminas.

Actually you could make a.pretty cool amalgams deck with them too. Rakdos reanimator... So many options...

Hell, you could even cast Supernatural Stamina on an opponent's creature, too, if you wanted to trigger Erebos' Titan.

Edit: Erebos' Titan is apparently German.

OMg I hope Haven isn’t teasing

Bant control or black drazi aggro?

Think outside the bag, Couch: boros control or mono-black aggro!

I wanna try Abzan

The Bant list it's definitely competitive, Barney I think you are going to like it.
But it is the obvious choice so maybe I will try to brew something a bit different, revolt might work.

Flaky can we keep future rounds to a single card? I want to honor DCG's pick but there's also no way it can compete with Stamina in a contest.

The Bant pile it's now 7-0... not much LRH but the pile is effective. The other SS pile it's on the laboratory but I'm starting to like LRH a bit more coz SS wont trigger ETB shenanigans at will, its more of a combat trick while LRH can interact with the battlefield in a more direct way.

Yup. You’d need sac outlets to exploit etb effects with SS.

@Nomad: we’ll see. My biggest qualm with cards like LRH is that they are one shot cards. For a build around contest, you’d want to get multiple uses out of the build around card, but with instants and sorcs, you get 1 or two uses (especially hard with uncommons). I’m hoping that we’ll get a mix and possibly some decks that run both (which is why I’m keen to try an Abzan build). But if SS totally eclipses LRH, I’ll consider sticking to one card (possibly with some restrictions on card choices for future rounds).

Here is what I have been working on. Wanted to try something different then Bant.

Highway to Hell

Creature(12)
3x Reflector Mage
2x Spell Queller
1x Mirrorwing Dragon
3x Cloudblazer
1x Archangel Avacyn
1x Torrential Gearhulk
1x Combustible Gearhulk

Instant(18)
3x Essence Flux
4x Fiery Impulse
3x Long Road Home
3x Censor
3x Harnessed Lightning
2x Scatter to the Winds

Split(2)
2x Commit

Planeswalker(2)
1x Saheeli Rai
1x Nahiri, the Harbinger

Artifact(1)
1x Dynavolt Tower

Land(25)
2x Prairie Stream
2x Plains
2x Wandering Fumarole
5x Island
2x Needle Spires
4x Mountain
2x Clifftop Retreat
2x Glacial Fortress
4x Evolving Wilds

To view this deck go to: https://www.magicduelshelper.com/deckli ... ead9985427

Created using Magic Duels Helper: http://www.magicduelshelper.com

Dig the mirrorwing tech. Would glorybringer make sense there, using the blink to reset exert?

Doing a little hybrid between my old Stamina build and Amalgam fun, working pretty well so far.

Creatures (21)
2 x Dread Wanderer
3 x Reaver Drone
2 x Asylum Visitor
2 x Glint-Sleeve Siphoner
2 x Scrapheap Scrounger
1 x Liliana, Heretical Healer
2 x Prized Amalgam
1 x Bontu the Glorified
3 x Haunted Dead
3 x Bone Picker

Spells (20)
3 x Sinister Concoction
2 x Gonti's Machinations
3 x Fatal Push
4 x Supernatural Stamina
1 x Heart of Kiran
2 x Smuggler's Copter
2 x Key to the City
2 x Grasp of Darkness
1 x Aethersphere Harvester

Land (19)
17 x Swamp
2 x Drowned Catacomb

Guys, these decks are looking far better than some of the horror-stacks submitted in previous contests. I'm looking forward to judging you. This just proves you're picking too good a card for the build-around!

#MakeAlliesGreatAgain