The Garbage Bin

Features

jkarnes

13 September 2012

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Premise

I have been and will always be a player who enjoys putting blue cards into decks and playing islands. There's something naturally intimidating about sitting across from a player with untapped blue mana and a smile and it feels good to be that guy. Golgari and Junk though have always appealed to me as a player recently because of the flavor that they each brings to the table.

Golgari is about maximizing your resources even after they have been depleted. If your creature died back in original Ravnica and you wanted it, what did you do? You dredged it back... in Return to Ravnica, if a creature dies you can bolster another living creature through the scavenge mechanic. To me, this type of maximization or optimization is the ultimate goal of every magic deck: To never have an under utilized or un-untilized card.

Junk (for those who don't know) is usually a utility deck running WBG with weird numbers for cards. It's tricky to play because of its inconsistency in games. You may not win every game, but you're likely to win every match if the metagame is ripe enough for it. Junk usually needs diversity to do well because it tools its mainboard to evenly match every deck at least somewhat and then has silver bullets in the sideboard. What we are building below is NOT a traditional JUNK deck.

We are going to make a prototype deck with what we've seen so far from RTR and the ISD / M13 cycle. It's going to be WBG and it's going to be a strategy that everyone has been talking about being highly viable once Ratchet Bomb rotates... we're going to build Junk Tokens.

Why Junk Tokens

I've been getting flack from a couple angles about going WBG when the Selsnya Guild (the token queens) is coming back. Arguments include that Black just doesn't have enough to add to the pool, that Black hasn't the synergy in the creatures to do anything, and that Black just underperforms in the flying token realm.

We're playing black for a couple of cards: Blood Artist, Lingering Souls, and Grisly Salvage. The original version of this deck also played Falkenrath Aristocrat and Sorin, Lord of Innistrad but in testing this proved to be a simply worse idea than anticipated. Multiple "Vampire" effects (Like Blood Artist) get increasingly nastier with the Tokens archetype, which is why this card makes it into the sideboard... but Sorin 2 does not.

Due to the rotation of Ratchet Bomb, Whipflare, and Slagstorm, the "easy outs" to tokens will be gone which give us a great deal of flexibility in how to build our strategy. The Junk Shell that I'm presenting you with today can also go into WBG reanimation (another deck I will examine later).

The Shell

We're going to play as many nonbasics as possible because when it comes to land, this gives us diversity. I'm not going to play the Guildgates because they enter play tapped and we don't want an agro deck to be running behind.

Lands: 25

4 Overgrown Tomb 4 Woodland Cemetery 4 Isolated Chappel 3 Swamp 8 Plains 2 Forest

This gives us 10 green symbols, 15 black symbols, and 12 White symbols. We always want access to black mana because we never want to discard or sift through Lingering Souls and be unable to flash it back.

Filtering Cards: 4

4 Grisly Salvage

This card is actually just insane. No one is giving it the credit it deserves. We're going to hit at least some level of insanity and it will almost always replace itself.

Flashback Spells: 8

4 Lingering Souls 4 Unburial Rites

These are cards we can cast from the GY and will never be disappointed in seeing through the Salvage effect. In essence, hitting one of these with a Grisly Salvage only gives us more options for the mid or late game. We are now up to 37 cards: the remaining 23 will determine what kind of deck you're playing. We're going to go with a Tokens Strategy here.

Creatures: 12

4 Thrabeen Doomsayer 4 Blood Artist 4 Bloodline Keeper  ^Flip

We want to try and have a decent number of creatures because of the Grisly Salvage. 8 of these 12 make tokens and 4 of the 12 make board wipes detrimental for the opponent. Unburial Rites will typically hit a Bloodline Keeper and make our opponent's day somewhat miserable. We have 11 slots remaining.

Instants (that aren't Grisly Salvage): 5

3 Abrupt Decay 2 Murder

Abrupt hits Oblivion Ring, that annoying New Oblivion Ring, and early creatures that give us headaches like Dryad Militant. Murder takes out specific threats and can be increased from the sideboard if we find ourselves in trouble against creatures like Olivia Voldaren. We have 6 Slots left.

Enchantments: 6

3 Rancor 3 Intangible Virtue

Rancor going on Tokens is silly. Tokens will generally get thrown under the bus or get blocked out and Rancor is a great way of making sure that they get through little by little. Intangible Virtue makes our tokens even stronger. We slot these at 3 because we don't want to have a lot of non-creature cards without flashback.

Thoughts on This Deck

I have begun testing this version of the deck and will finalize a sideboard for it by the end of the week. I will let you know how it works and hope sincerely to see this archetype really shine. I know it feels like we're playing a lot of junky cards with no overarching strategy; however, throw this list together and you'll quickly be surprised at how well it performs.