I had the early board locked down with removal spells, weenies, and utility creatures. A few late game fliers, including the Murder of Crows but also Spellbound Dragon and Niv Mizzet, the Firemind, would all be major threats if allowed to stay on the board.īut something was missing – the mid game. Of course, the burn itself was powerful – Shock, Lightning Bolt… the standard stuff. Powerful cards that were fueled by constant burn, such as Gelectrode, Wee Dragonauts, and Murder of Crows. With the chaff gone, I surveyed what remained. Also gone were the overcosted fliers with mediocre abilities, spells that didn’t generate card advantage/equality, etc. First to go were things like Ball Lightning and Skizzik, which were essentially no worth trying to cast in a two-color deck (at least, not early enough to be worth it). My goal was to weed out the worst cards, then look at which ones were best, determine why they were good, and reinsert anything that made them work better. I unlocked all the deck’s cards in single player and began my experiments.

A lesser mage would have given up, but an Izzet mage? Not fucking likely. My first forays into playing the deck yielded similar results. Cloudburst was constantly derided as either too slow, too quick-burning, or both. Everyone on GameFAQs and the Wizards DOTP board were bemoaning the weak, ineffective card combinations and constant mana/color screw. My initial suspicions appeared to be correct. There was no mana fetching/fixing, a large number of disposable creatures, and no obviously potent win conditions. Of course, looking at the l eaked DOTP2012 deck lists, I wasn’t thrilled. With over a decade of experience constructing, drafting, and toying with blue/red decks of every sort, I was determined to make Cloudburst, one of the three new DLC decks of Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012, work.

If anything, it drew me into its chaotic, exciting realm. But just like today, the unpopularity of a particular strategy never pushed me away from it. I can clearly remember picking up a copy of Inquest magazine as an older player goaded me into reading it, and coming across an article about the fun and trickiness of this particular color combination.īefore Tempest block, back when I began playing, these colors were infrequently allied and even less frequently played. The first deck I ever constructed in Magic: the Gathering was blue/red, or “purple” as I referred to it back then.

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