What is the Box of Chocolates?
When I learned how to play magic, it was at a kitchen table. My playgroup didn't know what was good, and we didn't really care. At the end of it all, we were just trying to have a good time during high school. I wanted to put together a set of seven decks that were based around the decks used in my casual "meta" when we started to learn the game, mostly for nostalgia. Most of these decks weren't balanced, weren't ideal, and had too many colors. I tried to capture the spirit of those decks when putting together this set while adding minor improvements and changes.
How do you play?
Each deck is double-sleeved with Dragon Shield Clears in a certain color of Ultra Pro Eclipse sleeve. The deck is stored in an Ultra Pro 80 card solid color deckbox with the same color as the sleeve, and the deckbox has a number on it. All seven Box of Chocolates decks are stored in a Quiver Leather Carrying Case with one extra black deckbox containing dice and tokens in black sleeves. At the start of the game, each person rolls a d8. The number you roll is the deck you get to play with in an ensuing multiplayer game of Magic. Rolls of 1 through 7 correspond to one of the seven decks, and a roll of an 8 means you need to reroll. If two players roll the same number, they reroll.
What's this deck about?
This deck was always a bit strange in our group. The person who ran it was known for making very strange decks. He was actually the first one of us to play the game: he started playing around the M12 release while most of us started with M13 and Ravnica. Anyways, at the time when he made this deck, none of us even knew that fungi were a tribe. Our meta was very removal-light, and the fungi were often left alone as a result. The end result was, on occasion, over 1000 saproling tokens through things like Mycoloth and Sprout Swarm and Parallel Lives. I tried to tone down the amount of tokens it can make in this version, but it is very difficult to balance this deck without nerfing it to oblivion and back. The original version of the deck was actually Bant, including
Pallid Mycoderm
and Gavony Township. I tried to reign in the deck a bit and went with
Thelonite Hermit
and Oran-Rief, the Vastwood instead. This deck was very dedicated to its combo/tribal synergies and included no interaction whatsoever; my version of the deck tries to reflect this decision (for better or worse). Also, you may have noticed the Sol Ring. Thallids is a very slow deck, and multiplayer can be quite fast. The original deck had a lot of artifact ramp to remain on par with other players, so I did the same here.
You may be wondering why there are four Doubling Seasons in a deck that would otherwise have a net worth of around $40. That is because they are proxies. The original owner of this deck always wanted to own and play Doubling Season in his thallid deck, but due to the . . . fairly large price tag, that never really ended up happening. Until now. Because these are kitchen table decks, I'm perfectly fine with a few proxies rather than spending over $200 on four cards for a casual battle box. If these things ever get reprinted and the price falls to 2013-era $15-per-card again, then I'll probably go for it. I just want this deck to be as stupid amazing in casual as it can be.
Also, this deck is in blue sleeves rather than green mostly because it's the only color left. But also because I insisted that this deck could be mono-green, but the original deck's owner insists that it absolutely needs Paradox Haze, so the deck having blue sleeves is a bit of a riff on that.
