Not Necro Again!

Zvi Mowshowitz

"Ban cards until Necro is good again, and then ban Necro" - Chris Pikula

At the time, most people thought that this statement was really funny, but it's actually a very profound statement about how Magic should work. Necropotence should be a broken card. For the mana you get from a Dark Ritual , you get to draw several cards a turn, throwing the card economy equation out the window and leaving your opponent helpless. All that costs is a few life points, but that shouldn't be that important if you draw all those cards. The only question should be finding the right way to use Necropotence . In Chicago two main Necro strategies emerged: NecroPebbles, which used Necropotence to get the Pebbles combination, was one of them, and I consider that one of the top decks. The other was the deck played by Brian Davis and the other version (with Masticore and without Wasteland or Skittering Skirge ) played by Pat Chapin. They were designed by Wescoe and Taylor respectively. I'm warning you now, I'm not going to recommend playing the deck I'm talking about (so don't be disappointed), but it is extremely important for you to understand it.

I missed the boat completely, having dismissed the Necro deck as unworkable. I had some very good reasons to dismiss it. The modern Necropotence deck violates many of the rules of Zvi Decks. It has too much dedicated creature control. It has too many expensive cards. It requires one card. It requires too many lands. It requires too much mana. It has too many cards that can't be used early. It has holes in the mana curve. All of these kept me from finding an effective decklist for modern Necro. I'll go into what I did go out and try at another time. Instead, I'm going to explain my unique perspective on this deck.

The deck works because it deals with creatures for free. Playing creatures against this deck doesn't accomplish anything. If Necropotence is working, the deck will just over-necro, find Contagion and/or Spinning Darkness , and kill your creatures on his end step. He'll pay for a few extra cards, but he'd have to go through those cards anyway to get to the lands, discard and kill cards. Every now and then this costs a few extra life, and in extreme situations you have to burn a Demonic Consultation to get a removal spell, but mostly the other player is just throwing his cards away. By the midgame, playing a creature is almost just a life gaining opportunity for the Necro player. You play a creature, he gets to cast a totally free Spinning Darkness . Ancestral Recall . Oops. I remember a few days ago I was testing for Seattle, and I played a Jackal Pup against Necro a few turns into the game. I said: "I wish I didn't have to do this." The problem was I needed it out of my hand for Cursed Scroll . Chances were all I did was give him three of my life points.

The second reason is that with both Unmask and Duress going for the one counterspell that can stop Necro from hitting the table, and four Demonic Consultations to find Necropotence , Dark Ritual or another discard spell, and the automatic mulligan without a Necropotence or Consultation, this deck can force Necropotence out onto the table scarily often. Even if you don't, blue decks don't have as many real counters as they seem to anymore, normally only 11 or so. With eight discard spells aiming straight at those eleven, the long term situation isn't all that bad. So those two are the good news. Now, an interlude from the Chicago finals…

It is game five. Brian Davis draws his card on turn one. The crowd goes wild. Bob Maher hears them, since we're not that far away, and observes: "Your hand must be a beating." Indeed it was. Davis had mulliganed into Swamp , Dark Ritual and Necropotence , and now he had drawn Unmask off the top. The perfect hand, yet again. Brian Hacker was having a crisis of faith in the commentary booth: "Find out who this guy prays to, Buddhists, whatever…" and Buehler was telling us of rumors that Davis had sacrificed a goat the night before. That was all in good fun, of course, but Davis was indeed drawing excellent opening draws. He cast Unmask , and with the coast clear he used Dark Ritual to get out Necropotence . Maher's reaction was to the point: "Yep." Visions of a second place after stealing two games he had no right to win must have been running though his head. A few turns later, he sits on the other side with his lands Wasted, as he draws one card a turn and watches Davis continue drawing several each turn. The match is all but over. Davis continues to Duress and Unmask , and takes some of Maher's counters away. He makes a mistake taking the wrong counterspell once, but the situation was extreme (Maher had no lands at all) so discount that. Down to low life, Davis starts casting Drain Life and Corrupt .

Then, total disaster for the Necro deck. Force of Will stops his life gaining spells. Maher gets his first land, and Davis has been hurt enough by the Force of Wills that he has to tap all his mana for the next life gaining spell, walking into Disrupt . Davis is locked down by his Necropotence and loses. Maher wins Chicago, despite playing four games sideboard with Swords to Plowshares and Light of Day still in his deck for lack of anything better. It wasn't the first time in the finals, and finals were not the first time Maher pulled this off. I think this was actually illustrative of some serious problems for the Necropotence deck.

First, the deck needs a lot of its life points to get into position if it drops Necropotence early. When you cast your first Drain or Corrupt you're generally in the single digits unless you've gotten free Spins. While you're building to this point you've probably gotten to deal with any threats to your life total without losing anything, but if your opponent just sits there playing lands it doesn't actually gain you that much. If you're trying to use Wasteland on him, that makes it worse, because you're losing life every turn to refill your hand and you need a critical mass of swamps in play to win. In deciding whether to play Wasteland you have to decide whose lands are more important, yours or his. In general, I think the Necro deck should be happier with more lands on the table. Strange as it sounds, crippling your opponent doesn't really accomplish all that much unless you deny him the basic mana to operate. Against a blue deck, all they need is the mana to counter one spell a turn, for example.

That's where the critical problem comes. You get disruption, but on average you can't start killing them until turn five, and it's going to take at least three spells to do it, unless you've had a Skittering Skirge or possibly Masticore out. Even if a blue deck can't stop the Necropotence , it can use Brainstorm and Impulse to find and protect counterspells, and counter the Drain Lifes and Corrupts at the end. This can easily leave the Necropotence deck without the ability to kill its opponent (because of Consultation) or lock him under his Necropotence , or force him to blow up the Necro and resume drawing normally. Other kinds of decks can do similar things. You have good disruption, but you give them too much time. A combination deck not creature dependant will often be able to topdeck its way to victory while you build up the mana to kill. A Skirge helps but the kill still isn't that fast.

Then there's the deck's vulnerability to a lot of hate cards. Circle of Protection: Black must be Disked away or your deck just dies. Compost lets any blue deck easily recover its card count and counter your drains, Ivory Mask has to be Disked or your deck is just a couple of creatures. Null Rod stops that Disk. Dystopia can still do the trick, but it's got a lot of work to do. And I think the best answer is actually Karma . Even if they use Dystopia to kill it that damage is still going to be huge. They lose life equal to a whole Corrupt and might well lose a turn of Corrupting to cast Dystopia . If you have alternate Dystopia food for a turn, it may well be a death blow. Playing around Karma (say, out of an Oath deck) means operating at a much higher life total.

In general, the deck often ends up feeling like a bad combination deck, using Necropotence to blast off but with a horribly slow kill mechanism. The deck's power and easy matchups (anything which gives you a lot of creatures to kill is basically a bye, and qualifiers tend to have a lot of them) make it a good deck. But this deck does not have what it takes to survive as one of the very top level decks. If people start to care about beating it they will. I'm not saying to stay away from the deck, but if it is seen as a major factor in the metagame then I think playing it becomes a questionable decision. The deck doesn't quite have it. If you do run it, I'd say you're basically forced to use Nevinyrral's Disk maindeck and have access to four, given the hate being packed.

Finally, I'd like to make a request. I'm looking for an old computer game called Colonial Conquest, made by SSI in 1986, and was wondering if anyone could help me out. I need a different kind of tech.

Zvi Mowshowitz