Welcome to Deck Diaries. In this series I'll be taking a deck and giving updates on the deck's performance and the tuning process to get the deck into shape.
I used to play EDH multiple times a week, but life forced me to take a pretty long hiatus. While I sold quite a bit of my collection, I held on to my two favorite decks. Kess and Mimeoplasm are really fun and engaging, but they're a bit rough for fair tables. I wanted something a bit softer so I have more options when I sit down. Due to budget constraints, I decided to get a Preconstructed deck and update it over time. I figured out I can put 50-100$ into the deck each month. All I had to do to get started was pick a deck.
I settled on Varina. I chose Varina as my first build on returning to Magic for a few reasons. I like U/B as a color combo and Varina rounds out the three color combos with U/B. Looking for a slower, fairer deck also naturally pushes you towards white. Orzhov has the best answers with Vindicate, Anguished Unmaking, Utter End, etc. This would be true about any Esper legend, but Varina caught my eye.
People generally build her as zombie tribal. While she is good in that role, it overlooks that she can feed her own abilities. Varina is an engine card. She converts cards in graveyard to creatures. Then she uses those creatures to fill the graveyard. Cantrips are a way to generate some initial velocity and smooth your draws while simultaneously filling the yard. Varina works along the same axis as Delve. Generating cards in the graveyard as their own resource to be exploited and putting less emphasis on the value of specific cards in your graveyard. Zombies that are good for the plan still make the grade since they're all looters. What I don't want to be doing is including zombies for the sake of it. I want to stay true my vision for the deck.
Varina also rewards being aggressive and attacking. While I'm not averse to having some combos in the deck to get games over with, a deck that's aiming to be fair needs to have a proactive plan for getting people dead. Varina has a built in plan to snowball the game. You get a couple zombies, which loot cards, to make more zombies, to loot ever more escalating numbers of cards. She also makes racing situations awkward since she gains you a significant amount of life.
I started with the Pre-constructed deck:
https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Commander_2018/Subjective_Reality
I played a few games with just the precon to get a sense of what should get replaced first. The deck did surprisingly ok given its low efficiency. I was expecting to get creamed playing a precon, but I won a few games. I think a big part of why was that Varina gave me a lot of value during games that when long. The steady stream of zombies and looting continuing to present threats even while everyone else ran out of gas. I still identified quite a few cards that need to get swapped out.
The first pass: https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/varina-week1/
This is the deck after a pass with cards I already owned or was able to trade for at the shop. I played 10-15 games with this version to give me an idea of what I wanted to pick up on my first order. Its a bit more 'on brand' for the goals of the deck. I got in some more enablers and some cheaper zombie bodies to get the party started. While I was a still a dog in most of the games I played, Varina is proving her strength in matchups that go long. She kept being recast and making 3-4 friends to start the party again. The largest problem is the number of tapped lands. A 3 color deck needs a lot of fixing, especially one that wants to have 3 colors by turn 4. Thankfully, cantrips are really useful at fixing mana early and slot directly into our Delve-esque strategy.
However, when most of our multi-color lands enter tapped we get compounding issues. The enablers are there to help smooth your draws and find what you need. If you can't make early plays and get a foothold in the game then slower more powerful decks will be able to capitalize on you. Priority 1 then is to update the mana base to include as many dual lands as our budget will allow.
The second thing that I noticed is that the average cost of the deck is way too high. EDH does lean towards the Timmy, but many of these high cost cards are superfluous. Things like the Entreats or Sphinx of Uthuun are there for Battlecruiser magic which is decidedly not Varina's game. We don't want to be ramping to 8 mana, we'd rather be filling the yard and attacking. We also don't have a high enough density of zombies. While the deck is not built as zombie tribal, each zombie is a natural looter. We want to be able to fill our graveyard and reduce the average cost of the deck. Priority 2 is to drop some of the monsters for cheap enablers.
So, here is the change log for week 2
Out:
Halimar Depths
Meandering River
Orzhov Guildgate
Forsaken Santuary
Azorius Guildgate
Tranquil Cove
Dimir Guildgate
Submerged Boneyard
Jeskai Infiltrator
Entreat the Dead
Entreat the Angels
Adarkar Valkyrie
Telling Time
Sphinx of Uthuun
Ninja of the Deep Hours
Yuriko, Tiger's Shadow
Yennett, Cryptic Sovereign
In:
Glacial Fortress
Drowned Catacomb
Isolated Chapel
Caves of Koilos
Underground River
Sunken Hollow
Prairie Stream
Adarkar Wastes
Thought Scour
Mental Note
Carrion Feeder
Undead Augur
Zombie Infestation
Shepard of Rot
Shadow of the Grave
Tomebound Lich
Preordain
Now the deck looks like this: https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/varina-week2/?cb=1569896405
I've goldfished some hands with this version and its a lot smoother. It definitely has too many land, but I am erring on the side of too many for right now. When you have this much looting, you can usually turn them into real cards and they ensure you can get Varina down on time. I think the deck is starting to take shape. I am excited to smash this against other people at my store and see what shakes out.
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