Today’s deck
stems from one of the earliest available combos in history, harkening back to
the Antiquities expansion and the
awesome cards that it brought to the game. I know I know, yes another old deck
with some Ancient improvements. So can
ya guess which format I’ve been playing these days? The funny thing is, the
combo itself is pretty good as far as 3-card combos go; in fact, it’s also
gotten to be pretty expensive, as the price of its key cards have quadrupled
thanks to its relative prominence in 93/94 Magic. Now I know what you might be
thinking: dude, the two formats are quite different. My question is: So? In our
case, that’s beneficial because we have better cards to enable/protect the
combo. Alright, enough with the introduction, let’s start chiseling away at
today’s deck: Power Monolith.
I’d say a good
place to start today’s article is with the name of the deck: Power Monolith –
which we shall now refer to as P. Mon. While we don’t play with the original Basalt
Monolith that made P. Mon possible back in the day, the awesome
coincidence-ness of the game means we get to keep the name and use a better
card in Grim Monolith. Same effect(ish) with a better CMC? Yes please. While
Grim does cost 4 to untap, it’s not really relevant because of Power Artifact –
it just means we can play it for less mana and thus win the game on a tighter
clock.
Speaking of
mana, next let’s talk about Mox Diamond. Because we don’t have the use of the
original Moxen in Ancient, that means
Mox Diamond has to do twice the work. Not only does it help ramp our mana, but
it also helps fix it (along with our Bird pals). In a three colour deck where
we want two U mana open for Power Artifact and Counterspell, the Diamond/bird
duo can certainly be relevant.
Why two colours?
One of the things the Old School versions are doing is including G for Regrowth
and Stream of Life. I am a bit divided on this as Regrowth is an awesome card
but we can use other graveyard recursion without going into another colour. I
think the addition of Regrowth on its own doesn’t warrant it in Ancient, however the 4x Naturalize available to us in the sideboard does. Enchantments are one
of the best ways to destroy our combo and if we don’t get them with a counter
spell then it would be Game Over without a way to destroy their defenses.
The win! When
deciding on how to win with the deck, I had started with Kaervek’s Torch – a
somewhat obscure Sorcery from the Mirage expansion. Why Torch? The original
deck uses Fireball, which provides some defensive versatility as it has the
added benefit of being able to take out a bunch of aggro creatures should you
need to. I decided to go with Torch because this is not a control deck and if we are going to use one of our X
CMC cards then I want to do it to win the game. To cut to the chase - Torch
helps protect itself from counter magic, which is awesome.
What do you
Recall here? The last decision I want to talk about is the addition of Recall
in the deck alongside the Regrowth . While it’s true that Regrowth is generally
the better card, (it’s a Demonic Tutor for the graveyard), there are scenarios
where you might prefer the one with the card disadvantage. Recall can often be
the superior card in P. Mon because it can get you any number of your combo
pieces to win the game. If you had a Power Artifact on a Grim Monolith and the
latter gets destroyed, then you might want to get both of them back if there
are none in your hand.
Power Monolith
Land
4 Island
2 Mountain
2 Forest
4 Tropical
Island
4 Volcanic
Island
8 Fetch lands
Total: 24
Creatures
4 Birds of Paradise
Total: 4
Spells
4 Mox Diamond
4 Power Artifact
4 Grim Monolith
4 Brainstorm
1 Sleight of
Hand
4 Force of Will
2 Kaervek’s
Torch
1 Stream of Life
1 Regrowth
1 Braingeyser
1 Stroke of
Genius
1 Recall
4 Counterspell
Total: 32
Sideboard
4 Naturalize
1 Red Elemental
Blast
1 Pyroblast
2 Pyroclasm
4 Tormod’s Crypt
1 Ground Seal
2 Peek
