All Things Affinity
Affinity is the Best Deck™ in Standard. There’s little doubt about this. Note that this is the abstract judgment about which deck has the most raw power, the best deck in the abstract. Before metagaming, before knowing what other decks are out there, Affinity is by far the best. Affinity is strong enough that it might even be the best deck in Extended, not just in Standard, and we won’t know that for certain until we have an Extended season. That does not mean that Affinity is the only deck worth playing, or even the best deck to play. That depends on how the metagame develops, because Affinity may be the Best Deck and very hard to take down with weaker strategies in traditional ways, but it can be beaten and the other players are learning how to do that.
There is also the question of how best to build Affinity. There are a lot of things that are misunderstood about the proper way to assemble Affinity. I am not here to tell you what the best build of Affinity is, because I’ve already posted my opinion of what the best build of Affinity is and it hasn’t changed. What I am here to do is explain how every possible card fits into the overall picture and to illustrate the split of Affinity into two distinct variants. This division of builds of Affinity separates them into two categories on the basis of what they choose to emphasize with their variable slots. Both versions are strong and the format might be better understood if the two were considered separate decks. One is the standard model that has the backing of most players and has been enjoying a lot of success. The other is the model I recommend, which is much less intuitive and has a much smaller following. Splitting the difference is NOT a good idea. Affinity starts with a base that looks something like this:
If you count those artifact lands as effectively fixed, which I think is fair, then that’s thirty-eight fixed cards. Think about how low that is! Even if you count the other four mana sources as not that important, this still leaves eighteen slots to play around with. At this point, an Affinity deck must choose its focus. Affinity is a deck that feeds on synergy, and while what you are going for is the Affinity engine and all it offers that comes in several flavors.
The traditional strategy is to concentrate on offense. This involves playing zero drops for speed and playing cards that go for the throat from the start. At the most extreme, the deck starts packing quick, mindless offense like Tooth of Chiss-Goria, not just cards like Shrapnel Blast. The more the deck can go to the head, the better it is at winning without the degenerate things that Affinity can do, and the better it is at taking advantage of those quick starts it does get and converting them into twenty damage.
The alternative strategy is not defensive, which is the traditional flip side of offense. Instead, it is card flow and efficiency. The goal of these decks is to assemble great amounts of power in a quick and consistant fashion. Affinity is a deck that builds on the synergy of all its cards. One way to supplement that is to create what is effectively a second mini-deck full of direct damage spells that also have synergy with each other, which is the offensive approach. The flow approach decides instead to focus in on the first strategy of Affinity and mana efficiency and tries to make it the best it can be. The theory is that by emphasizing the exponentially effective central theme, you can generate so much power and also resiliency that not being able to send a few points of damage directly to the head becomes moot.
That’s one axis for the deck, which will determine its main focus. The second axis is the one for utility. How many slots out of this engine are you willing to sacrifice for removal spells? Of those spells, how many are defensive to protect yourself and how many are offensive against their cards? The first axis divides into two sides, and you want to choose one or the other. If you try to split the difference too much, you’ll end up losing the benefits of both sides and getting little in return. Here a mix makes more sense, but you still need to have a cohesive strategy. The more you lean towards an offensive strategy, the more you need to strengthen it with both spot removal and the protection of Welding Jar. The more your deck is about flow, the less utility you need because you can rebuild from removal with your engine and also use it to dig for your removal. This lets you save room for other things, keep the deck flexible and avoid gum.
As everyone knows by now, I’m a supporter of Vial Affinity. Vial Affinity represents the Flow position, and the traditional “Ravager” Affinity deck represents the Offensive position. In my opinion the Vial strategy is stronger, both in the abstract Best Deck sense and in the practical sense but there are two valid ways to go here. The key is to avoid the blunders that people make when deciding to play for the Offensive Affinity team. The term “Ravager Affinity” just means Affinity these days, so it can safely be discarded. A card by card analysis of the various possibilities from the eyes of both ends of the spectrum seems like the best approach. Not only will I look at the most popular cards in both builds, I will look at EVERY card played in every Affinity deck that has won a Regional as well as every card that I have heard suggested seriously enough to warrant consideration.
First, there are the six cards that comprise the base of Affinity:
Myr Enforcer, Frogmite, Arcbound Ravager, Skullclamp and Disciple of the Vault
These are easy: Don’t leave home without them. I have not heard anyone suggest not running four copies of these five cards. This is the reason why you’re here, to get free stuff that breaks the rules of Magic. Nothing more need be said, other than to talk about sideboarding. Skullclamp and Ravager can never leave the deck for any reason, but the others can be trimmed in the right (wrong?) matchup. This is not a matchup article so details are beyond its scope, but in essence you trim Frogmite and Enforcer when your engine becomes less reliable and you need the slots for other cards more than you need the cheap men and copies of Disciple leave when it is clear that Disciple is simply going to get itself killed.
Arcbound Worker and Myr Moonvessel
I do want to talk about Worker a little because I have heard it questioned a little. No one questions the need for an artifact creature one drop, but Ken Krouner in particular has been pushing the Moonvessel over or perhaps in addition to Arcbound Worker. Arcbound Worker offers a counter that will survive after the Worker’s death, it offers a place to store Ravager (or other Worker) modular counters and it in effect often becomes a combat trick thanks to Ravager. When you Skullclamp a Worker, you get to keep your power on the table. Myr Moonvessel instead refunds your one colorless mana upon its death, which sometimes will burn you for one but often will let you get in another Skullclamp activation or otherwise speed you up by a mana. In a Skullclamp race, an extra counter is valuable but an extra point of mana is likely to be even more so. The problem comes when you do not have Skullclamp, either because you didn’t draw one or because it got killed. I think that’s an example of a gamble that you most certainly don’t want to make. With a Skullclamp working life is good, and without one life is relatively bad. You don’t want to make this worse, especially when I think the balance of the trade is not in your favor. However, it should be kept in mind that if you find the space, and there is a decent amount of flexibility in the building of Affinity, there is a viable second one drop artifact creature for this deck if one is needed.
Ornithopter is one of Magic’s great comeback stories – or at least it would have been, if there had been anything to come back from. So I guess comeback is the wrong word for it. I’ve talked before about why Ornithopter no longer makes the cut in my Affinity builds: It is too vulnerable to allow you to use it for the purpose it was designed for. The reason you play with good old Ornithopter is so that you can use him to go all-in with a Ravager in the air, and so you can have a free creature to use with Skullclamp. The second ability is nice but there are better things to Skullclamp if that’s what you want (see Moonvessel) and the problem with the all-in play is that there is simply too much removal even in game one to make such a play worthwhile anymore. Too often your opponent can call your move with an Oxidize or Naturalize or even Electrostatic Bolt in response and suddenly you’ve thrown away the game. Don’t let that happen to you. The other note is what having a zero drop does to your Affinity engine. Early on, it can be very helpful in dumping your hand by letting you play faster Frogmites and Myr Enforcers but there is also the phenomenon that decks that drop the zeros often end up having no use for their mana by the third turn. The problem is that you’re buying a burst of speed that is beyond what you need at that point. It reduces the cost of the big cards, but those cards should cost zero anyway once you’ve laid the foundation with your one drops. Instead, you give up drops your mana could productively pay for, and that can leave you with nothing left to do with the surplus or just nothing important. If you have a Skullclamp working, that normally won’t be a problem but I have seen a lot of players who get stuck with the two toughness Ornithopter and use it and a clamp to attack for one because they have run out of gas.
Myr Retriever and Welding Jar
This is one place where a lot of people think that I’m outthinking myself or to put it less politely don’t know what I’m talking about. How can I build the deck without Welding Jar when the card is so strong and so important to so many matchups? First, there’s the Oxidize against Naturalize issue which I will address in more detail later. If your opponent is using effects that prevent regeneration, Welding Jar sits there and looks dumb. Second, Welding Jar may help protect your engine and gives it another artifact for the affinity but it in no way helps you have gas. It doesn’t help Skullclamp or your offense in any way other than making affinity cards cheap or regenerating your creatures. I have found that such regeneration does not win creature battles for this deck that it would otherwise lose.
Keep in mind that what you’re hoping to do is save mana and perhaps gain some card selection by resisting the removal cards at a cost of zero mana, but there is a great risk that by running this zero you are going to not get to make proper use of all of your mana. If nothing else, I dislike the Jar because I’ve seen it do little or nothing far too often. Also keep in mind that while it can save Glimmervoid from Akroma’s Vengeance, it does not net you any additional card advantage against mass removal in any other way. All it does is shift your card loss onto the Jar. Now, when your goal is to launch a quick offense getting the affinity cards down quick for fast damage becomes more important. Protecting them for no mana from removal to get them through more early on for more damage becomes more important. The risk of gumming up the works a little becomes less important, and the loss of ‘stuff to do’ and long term raw power become less important.
The closer you get to the pure offensive build, the better Jar becomes. The closer you get to Vial, the worse it gets, both for that reason and because you’re reducing the utility of the Vials themselves. Myr Retriever is the opposite. In the mode of the quick attack, this card does little for you because most of the cards you’ll be looking to recurse the most to finish someone off aren’t artifacts and this is a slow way to do things when you’re trying for a quick knockout and don’t have AEther Vial in your deck. With Vial, the cost becomes less important, the flow advantages become more important. The resilience and momentum and added raw power all work in your favor now, so you want to take advantage of these openings.
The Stinger is a bad Worker for those who value flying highly or feel like eight Arcbound creatures just wouldn’t be enough. I think that while I would accept more Workers or Ravagers into the deck if they were legal Stinger is not in the same league. I watched multiple playtesters cripple themselves by wasting their time with this card and have noticed that it is very rare among the builds that have been successful. Stay away.
Pyrite Spellbomb and Shrapnel Blast
How good is Shrapnel Blast? That depends on what you are trying to do. If what you want is a lot of direct damage at an affordable price, Shrapnel Blast is excellent. I can’t argue with its statistics. However, note that Shrapnel Blast is only good at a few things. It is good at finishing off players who you can get into range but not finish off, which is its best use. It is good at killing things with a lot of toughness, particularly Leonin Abunis. These are worthy things to be good at, don’t get me wrong, but their value changes depending on what your deck’s particular goals are. If you aim to made the damage add up to twenty, then not playing four Shrapnel Blast is criminal. However, if your goal is to invoke the Powell Doctrine and deploy overwhelming force, you can do twenty and fifteen damage with surprisingly similar effort levels. The danger of Shrapnel Blast being gum also rises as your strategy revolves more and more around the flow of your deck – the Offensive version doesn’t depend on its flow. However, in the control matchups where your offense can be stalled or you can face Abunis on a regular basis being able to do those five points is valuable and that makes this a worthy sideboard card.
Pyrite Spellbomb is another matter, because the Spellbomb is primarily used to remove problematic creatures. Shrapnel Blast just gives it a little extra push, as does the ability to use it as part of a direct damage plan together with cards like Tooth and Ornithopter. There is a consistant pattern going on here. Spellbomb for a Vial deck is about removing Disciple of the Vault and certain problematic Goblins while maintaining your deck flow in emergencies. Both sides should use the Spellbomb, although I wouldn’t consider it part of the core. The Offensive side shouldn’t leave home without all four, while the Vial side should likely run two or three maindeck and sideboard the others.
Oxidize and Naturalize
If some of this repeats what I’ve said before, I believe it bears some repeating. At first, these were sideboard considerations only, but then they crept into the maindeck. At this point, my only running two Oxidize maindeck is considered a low level of maindeck removal rather than high. Given how important Skullclamp is to this deck, and how many decks have good targets to hit, not running a card like this only makes sense if your mana can’t handle it – and even then there probably aren’t enough people running two color versions taking as long a look at Shatter as they should be. Oxidize is so much better than the other options that you’re willing to run an extra color to get access to it. However, there is still a stubborn streak that says that you want to run Naturalize in your maindeck.
Snap out of it, wake up and look at what is out there. Welding Jar is everywhere, protecting Skullclamp. Artifacts are everywhere as well, but enchantments are not. In fact, let’s go through all the enchantments one by one. Worship is not a problem because you can get around it with Disciple of the Vault. Oversold Cemetery should be slow enough to not be worth worrying about, and that deck almost always runs Skullclamp so you can hit that instead. Astral Slide decks run Damping Matrix, which is the most important card for you to kill, so while you suffer a little here the Oxidize will again not be wasted. As far as I can tell, there does not exist a deck where Oxidize would be dead and Naturalize would be alive – and in no case am I unhappy with Oxidize. This choice is easy. If you want to sideboard Naturalize, I respect and even encourage that to deal with certain matchups, but that card should stay in your board where it belongs.
Shatter, Detonate, Echoing Ruin (and friends)
These are the alternatives for players who decide not to invest in green mana. I highly recommend making that investment. If you don’t, try to make your game plan without involving too many outright removal spells because your removal spells are weakened. If you have to choose, go with Shatter. Anything else is far too romantic or even an act of arrogance.
Thoughtcast is good stuff, and when I didn’t play it at the PT I just didn’t recognize how valuable it was. You draw two cards for one mana and one card. That’s as good a deal as you’re going to get, shrinking your deck and making it far more likely that you will generate a degenerate engine. The Vial deck needs this card to make the deck flow as reliably as possible, while the Offensive deck wants it to get more of its gas and help add up to twenty damage as quickly as possible. Vial can and will pay the colored mana costs involved in playing this card, but Offensive decks have a legitimate choice to make. I think the card is still probably worthy, but I understand the impulse to leave it out especially given the recent rise of Akroma’s Vengeance and the resulting desire to run Darksteel Citadel. The two don’t mix in some builds.
Atog and Slobad, Goblin Tinkerer
That’s an odd pair, but they’re the two casting cost red creatures and both serve as a way of letting you sacrifice artifacts to trigger Skullclamp and sometimes dodge Echoing Ruin. Atog offers the possibility of far more turn four and five kills for you if he is unopposed. The downside is that he often is unable to make an impact against decks that block him forever, but given the new rise of control decks that’s a risk that I am willing to take. The results so far have proven Atog’s value. His value against control and combo decks via speed kills makes him a consideration for the sideboard of Vial decks as well, because Vial can help bring him out and the boost is gigantic. Offensive decks would want him in the maindeck
Slobad is a card that I have not tested, but I have seen some good theoretical cases made for it. It certainly can perform a valuable function at minimal cost, especially for the Vial deck. It is possible that this can take the place of Myr Retriever, either in the maindeck or in some matchups after sideboarding. However, I wouldn’t recommend him without testing and I would definitely avoid playing more than two.
Chromatic Sphere and AEther Vial
Finally, here we are at the core of the Vial strategy. By now the overall theme should be clear. If you value deck flow, the Vial helps with that flow and its value increases drastically as your flow improves. If your deck does not seek flow, then Vial won’t help you because you already were casting everything you needed to cast except when you had the full Skullclamp engine going strong so you would simply be giving yourself more mana sources than you need. I wouldn’t mind experimenting with running drastically low on lands and running Vial anyway, but if you value Vial that much then you would run the real Vial versions instead. I’m not here to preach that my way is better than the other way. I’m just here to note that which way you go changes the value of all the other cards and Vial is the one changed most of all. At first I thought that those who didn’t like Vial weren’t playing the card properly, or didn’t understand the dynamics. That might still be true in a lot of cases, but I think that even more than that people try putting Vial into an Offensive deck in place of spells, then curse as they have nothing to do. That’s why you do all the other things I do!
Chromatic Sphere helps with flow by making sure you can cast your spells and getting you to key cards. If your color is more focused, you don’t need it as much and if you’re trying for pure offense you again don’t want to go for flow so you only need enough to shrink your color problems down to acceptable levels.
Talismans of All Sorts, Glimmervoid and How NOT to Build an Affinity Mana Base
DO NOT PLAY THIS BUILD:
Ravager Affinity by Meister Roland Bode
Finished 1st Place at 2004 Regionals Niedersachsen, Germany
Main Deck
Sideboard
Creatures [20]
Spells [22]
Lands [18]
Deck Total [60]
Sideboard [15]
That build is horrible in several ways. Nothing against Roland Bode, he won his tournament, but do yourself a favor and don’t touch that list with a ten foot pole. If there’s one thing that I wouldn’t think would be necessary but I find I still have to say, it would be this: Do not run a Talisman in your deck. Talisman is either a very bad AEther Vial or a very bad Chromatic Sphere, depending on your deck’s build and your point of view. A deck that only needs two mana to operate has no business using two drops to provide additional mana, especially continuous mana. It just doesn’t make sense and oh man do they gum up the works at times when every point of mana counts. I knew I didn’t like them, but Seth drove home to me just how bad they are when he tested the German build with them against me in the mirror and constantly showed me his useless Talismans. If you don’t have enough color without them and Chromatic Sphere is not an option, first turn to Glimmervoid. I hate Glimmervoid because it’s not an artifact, but if your deck is not based on flow then you don’t need to be as worried about that. It’s all right to pay three mana for a Myr Enforcer so long as you had nothing else going on this turn anyway, or at least nothing worth speaking of. Welding Jar also helps this card a lot, letting you play it on turn one with minimal risk or letting you keep the Glimmervoid after an Akroma’s Vengeance. Don’t run four unless you have to, because of the risk of drawing multiples and nothing else, but still be thankful that they aren’t Talismans.
I’ve seen a few lists that run City of Brass. Glimmervoid is a better choice for this deck, considering the importance of damage these days even to such an offensive deck. If you feel that’s not enough color, there are two possibilities. Either you’re being too greedy with your colored cards, or you’re too paranoid about your mana base. It’s not going to be perfect.
Nexus hurts your color and your affinity but helps you do more effectively direct damage to help you get to twenty. If that is what you are after then Nexus is worthy and you should sneak in as many as you can, understanding that if this means paying for Enforcers then so be it. You can play a worse mana base (by which I mean worse for the flow) in an Offensive deck if you’re willing to pay the price. In exchange, the Nexus gives you powerful renewed game against BG and against the control decks in some situations. Vial decks value the ability to use it to keep a Skullclamp engine alive, but here they need the lands more in the long term and are less likely to get that desperate so the flow advantages such as they are are more valuable for the Offensive strategy. Offensive decks should likely run two or three, at which point the damage to your affinity starts to get severe enough that you should back off. Vial decks should avoid this card, and remember that reports of matchups swinging thirty or more percentage points around this card are based on small sample sizes.
Electrostatic Bolt and Shock
Shock is a strong sideboard card against Goblins because of the time you gain on them and the ability to take out their key creatures. Electrostatic Bolt is a slightly worse card there but has some other uses. If you’re never going to be going after artifact creatures with Electrostatic Bolt then obviously Shock would be better. Since neither card belongs in the maindeck due to the risk of being dead or almost dead in the wrong matchup, the question is whether Electrostatic Bolt is coming in for the mirror. For the Offensive strategy the card makes sense: On the cheap, clear a path. Easy enough. For the Vial strategy, the loss of flow in putting in Electrostatic Bolt isn’t worth it. You’d rather keep the card in the sideboard, and if you’re going to do that then it would better serve you as a Shock for those matchups where it is worthy.
Friends don’t let friends. I still don’t know where this card came from, since you already have better ways of getting more cards that don’t expose you to board sweepers and the casting cost of 1BB on a non-creature card is impossibly hard for this deck even if you run a full set of Talismans and Chromatic Spheres. In short, the card can’t be cast and would do little for you if you did cast it even in its best matchup. I find it ironic that a deck with this in its board became the “standard” Affinity deck due to being highlighted by the great Kai Budde, with Talismans also showing up where they don’t belong for the same reason. We must move on.
This is obviously only good against Astral Slide. In that matchup, I find Naturalize to be better because Stabilizer doesn’t hit Damping Matrix and the Slide deck does not depend that much on cycling after sideboarding. Meanwhile, Naturalize is flexible because it can come in against other decks where you want more artifact removal or a little enchantment removal, including random Regionals decks – I wouldn’t maindeck something for them but it can’t hurt to be prepared. It is possible that Stabilizer is marginally better against Slide, but that’s hardly a matchup worthy of your sideboard’s undivided attention at this point. The only person I know running Slide is doing it because personal tragedy limited his card access.
Tooth (and Scale) of Chiss-Goria
Tooth is as lightning speed quick damage oriented as a card can get. There are few combat tricks that go along with this card; its only real value is in pushing through damage to speed up your clock. If you draw it early, you can use it to get to larger affinity cards and get in a few points of damage, but it in no way helps your flow beyond being on the table and only does one point a turn at best. Those are not good numbers to me. In a pure Offensive version at the far end of the spectrum, some copies of this card may be worthy for your one track mind but everyone else should avoid them and those that do start the card should sideboard it out freely when they need more room. As for the Scale, it can be a neat trick against Electrostatic Bolt or Pyrite Spellbomb in the right situation but that situation does not come up often and neither do blocking situations where this would be a valuable enough trick to justify its existence. It will also often be flat out dead and certainly can’t be sideboarded.
Two damage a turn is a reasonable deal, as long as you’re on the pure offensive side complete with Ornithopter. I have more respect for Bonesplitter than I do for Scale of Chris-Goria, and I don’t think this card is worse than the Tooth. Two damage a turn is very different from one damage to me, but the equip time can be troublesome. By going to this card, you’re making a statement that your deck is not about gaining cards or gathering advantages. You’re going to the head, and you’re doing it now. If I went in with a card like this, I would be inclined to go in hard: All the Ornithopters, probably more than four one drop men, Teeth: All out offensive. That’s not my cup of tea, especially at a tournament like Regionals and I think it is a very weak mirror strategy as well as not very resistant to removal. I know what this is trying to do, but I recommend staying away.
I’ve heard this mentioned a few times, and it was correct for the block PT but in Standard it does little in any of your major matchups because everyone is wiping the board clean. It does do a great job of making Death Cloud look like a dumb card, but it is already bad against you if you know when to mob the playing field.
Drooling Ogre and Dwarven Blastminer
I already dealt with the red staples, so now for the wild ones. Drooling Ogre is a two mana 3/3, which I guess is nice in the right matchups but not nice enough to be worth the sideboard slots. Due to mirrors you certainly can’t maindeck it. Dwarven Blastminer has not been tried in Affinity and your mana base looks at the card with nervous eyes for a reason but it just might be worth it for your sideboard given the recent rise of T&N and MWC. They can’t handle this card, almost period, so long as you find three lands to go with it. That seems like an opportunity that is fast becoming hard to pass up. Again, I’m not going to change decklists without confirmation but I think this is at least worth trying. That goes double for Vial versions that can get him into play that way.
**Dark Banishing, Echoing Decay,
Terror and Smother **
Color requirements override the desire for more removal, even for the Offensive
side. If you do decide to go here, go with Smother to take out key cards in the
mirror. That’s where this kind of thinking will do the least damage. Dark
Banishing is too much mana for this deck, especially in the mirror where it
can’t take out the all important Disciple. Echoing Decay doesn’t do what you
want it to do and again has backfire risks in the mirror matchup. You can get
the same effect for one mana if you look to red.
It’s a great idea if only the mana worked. It does not in fact work, not well enough to make this a viable strategy for a standard Affinity strategy. In order to make this card work, you’ll need real Mountains and that sends the deck off on a tangent towards a third variant that might be called Red Affinity and had some respectable showings when Affinity was dominating more due to being ahead of other decks in metagaming and technology. I doubt it will be relevant by the time of US Regionals.
This is a sideboard card against Bidding and also now normal Goblins. In my experience, you are better off using the precise removal of Shock than trying to sweep the board, because you want to preserve your own cards and conserve mana. Several times in my testing I was very happy that I had Shock and not Pyroclasm. You definitely don’t want a full set, as the gum factor is far too high, but you can reasonably consider one or two if you feel it works better than Shock – but I much prefer the other way.
Mana Leak comes from a good impulse, wanting to stop key cards like Wrath of God and Akroma’s Vengeance and Patriarch’s Bidding. However, Affinity has far too hard a time saving mana to make proper use of this card even if you don’t worry too much about the color requirements. You give up too much pressure to hold back a counter, in addition to the gum factor. When it works it will be great, but that won’t be that often.
I am confused. How many one drops were you planning on running? There is way too big a chance that this card will backfire on Affinity and I can’t see running it. If Culling Scales blows up your side rather than just self-destructing when your opponent refuses to play one drops, the card is not worth paying three mana and a card for, especially with the delays involved.
I saw it in one sideboard but I have no idea what this is aimed at. The world doesn’t exactly have a ton of counters running around these days.
Like the Arena, this doesn’t do anything particularly scary given the protections the opponents you want this card against are likely to have and the casting cost is far too prohibilitive. Again I bring it up because someone won a regional with it in their board.
Let me remind everyone that the casting cost of this card is 3R. Affinity does not play four drops. It plays its four mana cards for free. If you’re sideboarding this card, you didn’t count the number of lands you’re playing or you vastly overestimated the amount of damage this spell will inflict on your opponents. If I was playing MWC I would gladly hand this card to an Affinity player after game one.
I said I’d mention every card, so here it is: Someone made it packing Echoing Truth. I can’t see running this card and have no idea why you would want to, but I thought I’d mention it was out there. I suppose it could be a way to force though extra damage, but Affinity has better ways.
This is one of the odder movements I’ve heard about, but it does make a certain twisted amount of sense. Misery Charm can save your Disciple of the Vault or take out his, and that’s something no other mana efficient card can do. It also goes to the head for two on occasion and if by some odd chance you run into a Cleric deck then you hit the jackpot. The fact that this card is being talked about seriously should tell you a lot about just how important it can be to the mirror matchup. However, it is randomly important rather than automatically important. Many games have nothing to do with Disciple, because no one draws it or yours never die or some other process determines the winner. More flexible removal is available with Pyrite Spellbomb, which should come first, and Oxidize is too good not to pack. After that, if you wish to consider the Misery Charm for the mirror from the Offensive side where you have this kind of room I actually like the idea of one or two but don’t go overboard. The mass of direct damage makes both reclaiming Disciple and going to the face far more interesting options than they would otherwise be.
Purge and Leonin Abunis
Leonin Abunis costs four mana, so see Flashfires: You didn’t realize what your land count was so check again. I’ll wait. As for Purge, it doesn’t seem like it is substantially better than a card like Smother would be and it requires you to choose white mana when there are better reasons to want the other four colors. You can’t get all five.
One mana is reasonable, but the tendancy of Skullclamp players to let their hands stay huge the entire game rules out using this card for what it most wants to do. It’s also just not powerful enough to justify gumming up the works.
While Vial could potentially create some very nice synergies with this card, the number of cards you have to sacrifice to pull off the effect you want is too high for me. Actual red removal seems far better in every matchup where you might want this.
As a reminder to those who don’t want to look it up, this is what my deck continues to look like:
Vial Affinity 1.2 by Zvi Mowshowitz
Main Deck
Sideboard
Creatures [22]
Spells [20]
Lands [18]
Deck Total [60]
Sideboard [15]
Now comes the hard part for me, which is judging what the best way is to build the deck from the other side. First, let’s look at the core plus the cards that clearly go into such a build once we agree that green is worthwhile:
That takes care of the lands and thirty-two of the spells. I’m confident all of those have to belong. Fifty four maindeck slots down, six to go. Welding Jar and Ornithopter are the staples of this side that I’ve been avoiding, but as I’ve argued on this end they make sense. Atog has also proved its value, with many decks getting away with four copies despite the card being relatively bad in multiples. Finally there is Chromatic Sphere, which I feel is key to avoid being punished for all the colored cards here. However, you can’t get all of that with just six slots. When I accidentually didn’t have Skullclamp listed here because it somehow got left off of a copied list of the core and I didn’t notice, I had the space to get enough of all of that. Instead, I will divide those slots between Welding Jar and Chromatic Sphere. Atog and Ornithopter are reasonable but I’d consider them less important.
I know what’s coming in the sideboard, so Chromatic Sphere is there to be ready for it. Now we need a sideboard. On my end, I believe in a light touch because the flow is so important. This deck lets the flow of Affinity go to hell, so we don’t have to worry about that too much. In a mirror matchup I can safely take out Blast and Jar for seven slots and I didn’t even feel that. Goodbye Shock, hello Electrostatic Bolt. We don’t have ten slots or anything drastic like that, so unlike previously posted versions (oops!) we don’t have room to mess around with things like Misery Charm. Let’s instead be as direct as we know how. That means that it’s going to hurt to get in all four Naturalize, and it’s close whether or not you want to do it but I’d lean toward trimming like the Vial deck does to make it happen. That leaves the sideboard as a very blunt instrument. If you face control, you get to call on four Atogs.
Excellent, those will be fine blunt instruments. Push the envelope you have: If beating people to death is what you’re good at, be the best. Remember Trunchbell’s Law: Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it.
This leaves us with the following deck:
Aggro Ravager Affinity by Zvi Mowshowitz
Main Deck
Sideboard
Creatures [20]
Spells [22]
Lands [18]
Deck Total [60]
Sideboard [15]
I also recommend those considering playing Affinity to review my previous Affinity-related articles if they have not already done so: The Affinity mirror, Affinity vs. Bidding, Bidding vs. Affinity, MWC vs. Affinity. If you choose to follow my path, congratulations, I think you’ve made a wise decision. If you choose the Offensive version then that is also a fine choice as long as you understand your goal. Value your flow, but emphasize your ability to deal twenty damage and win games in spite of rapidly diminishing resources when necessary. I think that Affinity is still a fine choice for Standard, although I think that other decks have caught up. If all goes well, I’ll return next week for my take on red Tooth & Nail.
- Zvi Mowshowitz