Proliferate.dec

I love to base a deck around a new mechanic and despite this deck pre-dating when I started this blog it serves as a good example of that. These kinds of new mechanic style deck very rarely make the A cube as many mechanics are limited to a single block and thus don't have anywhere near the required depth. This means that the decks are slightly underpowered due to including a whole bunch of weak mechanic key word cards that would otherwise never see play. Those cards in turn never being in the A cube don't get a chance to really shine and so as a tribute to cool mechanics at least gives them an opportunity to strut their stuff with the big boys of magic!

I lost every round with this deck rather unsurprisingly although it put up an impressive fight and was refreshingly different and fun. A control poison proliferate deck was also tried but after horribly losing to Necropotence it felt a lot less fun. This deck was full of cards that had very little synergy with each other and were at cross purposes much of the time. I did however manage to cram as many different things with counters in as possible. When your deck can't be tier one you may as well get as much testing of different cards in different situations done! When setting out to build a silly fun deck it is rather a surprise when it puts up a competitive showing. The deck was a quirky agro deck that sacrificed a lot of tempo and consistency for proliferate synergy and trickery.



25 Spells

Everflowing Chalice
Engineered Explosives
Mox Opal

Enclave Cryptologist
Arcbound Worker
Stromkirk Noble

Arcbound Ravager
Power Conduit
Kargan Dragonlord
Lighthouse Chronologist

Pentad Prism
Contagion Clasp
Thrumming Bird
Umezawa's Jitte

Throne of Geth
Fire/Ice
Keldon Marauders

Tumble Magnet
Volt Charge
Steady Progress
Tangle Wire

Jace Beleren
Trinket Mage

Tezzeret's Gambit
Chandra, the Firebrand

15 Land

Sandstone Needles
Saprazzan Skerry
Great Furnace
Seat of the Synod

Izzet Boilerworks
Cascade Bluffs
Steam Vents
Volcanic Island

Scalding Tarn
Shivan Reef
Inkmoth Nexus
Darksteel Citadel

2 Islands
 Mountains


Unsurprisingly most of the wins were Jitte based ones but the deck did feel like it was holding out sufficiently to get to Jitte winning territory. I was most taken a back at how hard the deck was to play with so many things happening with each proliferate that it was awkward planning your ordering. Lots of things were a bit annoying in regards the counters as you had to have at least one to get more. This meant you couldn't expend your lands that added two mana or the Pentad Prism and you had to begin the levelling process with the level up dorks and you had to have charged Jitte etc etc. Choosing when to waste a potential future resource or when to conserve it was really tough, both because the deck style was unfamiliar and because the interactions were all very different. Some boosted your dorks, some ramped you mana and so forth.

I learned several things and had a lot of fun from playing this deck. I confirmed my suspicion that a deck based on arbitrarily proliferating stuff is not viable. I found Contagion Clasp to be a highly viable all round utility card for the a cube. Most decks have a few things that benefit from proliferation and it can be used well against opponents persist creatures, obviously you play Clasp in a non proliferate deck for it being an artifact as well as a cheap creature disruption card however it does often become a great mana sink later in the game. I learnt that being able to level up at instant speed with a proliferate card is a really cool trick that while reasonably hard to conceal it is not looked for by players.

While I might have been stomped on for my silly deck I got more satisfaction from the few wins it managed than I do from auto piloting a known power archetype to a flawless victory. Fun is the aim of playing games after all and so I can heartily recommend using the cube as your forum to scratch all those itches to build silly decks around silly cards.