BREAKING BAD COOKING LESSONS
George Vincent "Vince" Gilligan, Jr., one of the producers of X-Files (A.K.A. the best ever), also created one of most acclaimed TV shows we have ever seen. He took us for a five seasons ride on the life of Walter “Heisenberg” White where he descent from an ordinary high school chemistry teacher to a drug lord villain consumed by greed, money and power. If I may digress, three characteristics those are often akin to us magic players. He cooked a compound named “blue crystal” and coerced people to his will. This, my friends, is what we are going to do today, on magic the gathering. So if you are still reading and did not got scared with this intro, today we are going to cook evil plans, duress people, and become card game villains of our own, producing in game meth.
So let’s start with the duress part, or in this case Thoughtseize and Cranial Extraction. It’s our multiverse villains call to mess with our opponent’s minds, find what they feel more precious and take it from them. Although as seasoned magic players, I will assume we all know one of this options are gas, being a pillar of a multitude of formats, obviously, we are here talking about “cashseize”. The other one is deemed a bad option, leaving much to be desired on board impact, card advantage and almost every foundation aspect of MTG.
The arcane sorcery is indeed one of the main reasons I tried to build this deck in the first place. Extraction is the flag-bearer of a dozen other cards that have similar effects meeting certain conditions. Like these:
Counterbore
Cranial Extraction
Denying Wind
Earwig Squad
Eradicate
Extirpate
Haunting Echoes
Jesters Cap
Lobotomy
Memoricide
Neverending Torment
Nightmare Incursion
Quash
Sadistic Sacrament
Scour
Shimian Specter
Sowing Salt
Splinter
Supreme Inquisitor
Thought Hemorrhage
It is common ground amongst the pros that these effects are often not worth including in our decklists. Reasons include that taking cards out of their deck is not always enough. Of course you will do fine if you take the only wincon out of a control opponent. But what do you do against another one that is full of threats? On case one you take 100% of their win conditions, case two you are frequently only decreasing their chance of drawing something that will bust you like a DEA cop by anything close to four percent out of fifty eight. If they did not had a copy in their hand or even worse you miss and they are not packing what you named at all, you just exposed yourself, played what would be a very expensive discard spell and whiffed giving them a free turn to make your life miserable instead.
Of course there are cases where it would completely blow them out, but the focus here, is to take it easy, put you, future kingpin of New Mexico in the control of things. So find the middle ground cases becomes them a necessity. Remember the psychological effect it places on them, losing the very option to cast that specific spell, sometimes blow players out off water. In nature, you impose your will and deny the very reason they have even chosen to go with that deck.
And money comes money goes; every block brings us a new twist. What if them we could put them to good use. The first versions I cooked, brought 5 maindeck names a card exile all copies effects spread with Memoricide. It felt miserable every time, for me. Wasn’t it supposed to be a feeling imprinted on my opponents, so after a few games I have dropped the original idea. So last week I was uncluttering up my decks folder and I took another spin at it. So I married the original idea of extracting the hell out of people with an old favorite of mine and voilà. It not only won quite a few games but it did turn out to be the source for Walter White, I mean, this article.
CRYSTAL METH
Artifact (4)
4 Crystal Shard
Creature (12)
4 Coiling Oracle
4 Eternal Witness
3 Sage of Epityr
1 Thragtusk
Instant (5)
1 Go for the Throat
3 Silumgar's Command
1 Ultimate Price
Sorcery (14)
2 Cranial Extraction
3 Explore
1 Inquisition of Kozilek
1 Maelstrom Pulse
4 Serum Visions
3 Thoughtseize
Land (24)
1 Alchemist's Refuge
1 Breeding Pool
2 Drowned Catacomb
3 Forest
2 Hinterland Harbor
1 Island
4 Misty Rainforest
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Sunken Hollow
1 Swamp
4 Verdant Catacombs
1 Watery Grave
2 Woodland Cemetery
Speaking of the villain/anti-hero of Breaking Bad, every Walter White needs it’s Blue Crystal. Methamphetamine is a drug, and drugs are bad for you, I felt like I had to say it here but that’s not the point. Not a huge expert on this as I probably rate Clinton on a Junkie Scale, you know a semi virgin, barely touched the subject as in “supposedly smoked, but never inhaled” kind of way. So enter Crystal Shard. Go ahead, take a look at it. If I do my job here well, you won’t be able to ever look at it again and not see it the same way you did before, even the illustration looks inspired on the drug.
Crystal Shard is married with the junkie-face-looking-Wendy Eternal Witness, provides us infinite copies of our mere two Cranial Extractions. It also synergizes bouncing opposing creatures to be later ostracized away. So much fun I’m getting high! It does the same thing to our other creatures to repeatedly use their 187 “Enters The Battlefield” effects, borrowing here a page or two of the article Isle of Mann, Venturing Modern with UG Wild Pair. Coiling Oracle and Sage of Epityr complement the utility, card manipulation package here.
A singleton Thragtusk is one of the last inclusions and wildly untested still, but you just imagine casting it and bouncing it back over and over again. It’s the thug we need, and the one we deserve too.
Meanwhile, we Explore new ways and have Serum Visions with all that crystal, doubling up with their somewhat equivalent creature counterparts. They provide card selection allowing to go lower on raw numbers while enabling consistency to the card-crack play I describe here:
Turn 1: Green/Blue land, Visions or Sage leaving spell, land on top;
Turn 2: Green/x land, Explore or Coiling Oracle, drop a 3th land into play B/x and cast Thoughtseize seeing their hand an tempo playing them;
Turn 3: Any land, Cranial Extraction them naming a key piece, hopefully digging doubles of their hands, or Crystal Sharding back their on curve creature, our snake, or even Sage of Epityr;
Subsequent turns, rinse and repeat…
The secret to most wins is developing your game board while disrupting them at the same time, much like tempo playing them and locking them under card advantage and or recursion. But as every planeswalker mage out there, villains also need to take care of their foes. And while all the aforementioned shenanigans are cool, we need more tools to maintain ourselves in the game, especially against over aggressive strategies at the other side of the table. Go for the Throat, Ultimate Price and Maelstrom Pulse offer relative quick answer from Tarmogoyf to Elesh Norm, Grand Cenobite. Pulse being our miser catch all response against other kinds of permanents. Lastly here, Silumgar's Command is do as Gus told you. The numbers of tricks it can pull out of Eternal Witness are many. It finishes the answer package while synergizing well when you have yet to draw a Crystal Shard of your own.
Did you notice the strict color / time requirements on the play a few lines above? Witness, Seize, Oracle, Visions… they all ask a lot of your lands. I could see us packing other utility lands like Alchemist's Refuge. I know what you are thinking, after all that cooking chemicals speech, we obviously needed to include a laboratory. It finds its worth when time walking people at their draw steps shooting instant speed Thoughtseizes and other nasty sorcery speed spells. I am just glad we skip the burden of having to handle a nerdy lab assistant like Gale Boetticher (Sage of Epityr perhaps, oh d*mn). If your cash is low, you can go with Khans of Tarkir fetch lands replacements with Polluted Delta and Windswept Heath.
Last, I just wanted to say that if you still have not watched the show, I urge you to. Get past the first two seasons that I found a little slow paced for my taste (says Sir Durdlealot) and stop seeing before the last episode if you can (there is a good chance you will get hooked). While writing the introduction here, I also discovered that vince Gillian was also a producer of my favorite series of all time, The X-Files, so maybe sooner than later another piece like this must be produced, that time highlighting alien conspiracies, inexplicable phenomena, urban myths, Scully and Mulder goodness.
Thank you for reading, puremtgo and mtgotraders for publishing this and as always, leave your feedback below and find me online if you dare. I’m available at:
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Deemed at Magic the Gathering Online