Jokesin' with Joros

This segment is for all the casual players our there, or players that haven't yet found that truly competitive magic is for them. That's not to say it's not for people that enjoy winning, but it's for the folks that might not have enough money to compete with the best of them.

Anyway, my column is focused simply on this: make decks that are less than 5 dollars (online pricing) and do well with them. If you have read Building on a Budget column on the Wizards site, and gone...WOW when you add up the prices of these cards it's actually closer to 100 dollars than 50 dollars, this column is for you. If you are skeptical that a good deck can cost 5 dollars and curious to see how it works, this is for you. And if you are like me, and enjoy bruising big egos with only your skills and not much else, then this column is DEFINITELY for you.

A little bit of backstory: I've been making jank decks for only 6 years now. My typical strategy is knowing what the meta is. That means reading message boards on the Tier 1 and 2 decks, and kind of learning the game plans and how game plans in general are modified against certain matchups. The next step is to examine each deck and make jank versions for almost all of them: a jank version of deck would examine all the cards in each deck, retain all the cheap cards and substitute the remainder with comparable cards or just cards that could still fit the overall deck strategy. It would take maybe 1 or 2 weeks of playing these decks on magic workstation (yes, not very good testing grounds) to find the decks I felt really had merit and that were fun to play. No I did not play these at FNMs cause I knew that I would never place high enough, but I did have fun thrashing people on magic workstation staring down cards which individually could be multiple times the cost of my entire deck.

NOW (after 5 major revisions over 4 months) for the deck:

Joros | The Rusty Machete

22 Creatures:  
2 Emrakul's Hatcher
1 Hoarding Dragon
1 Kitesail Apprentice
2 Kor Duelist
4 Kor Skyfisher
4 Plated Geopede
4 Steppe Lynx
4 Stun Sniper

11 Spells:  
4 Adventuring Gear
2 Gorgon Flail
1 Grim Discovery
3 Ogre's Cleaver
1 Virulent Swipe

27 Lands:  
2 Evolving Wilds
1 Gargoyle Castle
1 Jund Panorama
2 Mountain
4 Naya Panorama
8 Plains
1 Swamp
4 Teetering Peaks
4 Terramorphic Expanse

15 Sideboard:  
2 Kor Sanctifiers
1 Maniacal Rage
1 Pacifism
1 Quietus Spike
2 Relic of Progenitus
4 Rest for the Weary
1 Virulent Swipe
3 Vithian Stinger

For those of you that had read about Gerry T's Koros deck, you might have read it in an article called "Crushing with Koros" so I thought it was appropriate to name this article Jokesin' with Joros. As Koros is a combination of the words Kor and Boros, Joros is the combination of Jank and Boros. Pretty clever huh? Probably not. (I think it's brilliant, - K)

It seemed natural to make a jank deck based on Koros...why? Because I started running Koros as my standard competitive deck; I had found out that I had almost all the cards for the Koros deck naturally without any trading...it's mostly just fetchlands, Rangers, Elspeth which I already had. I ended up trading for the other pieces which was easy enough. And, yes the deck is very fun, and for some strange reason very successful with a good bit of luck and mising.

With the high-octane play style of Koros (it typically bashes for 8 during swings OR even DOMES at times for over 20), coupled with the deceptively large amount of interactivity and decision-making, I was hooked. So as it was in my nature to return to my roots—jank decks—I wanted to see if the deck could be translated into a jank deck for online play. Indeed, I was pleasantly surprised.

So the deck plays surprisingly similar to Koros (which means it hits hard and fast early on, then gets slowed down and waits for a mid/late game finisher): it has the 8 land falling aggressiveness in Steppe Lynx and Plated Geopede, it has equipment and the same Kor that benefit from them, and last but not least a somewhat interesting take on the Collar/Sparkmage combo from Boss Naya by using instead the weaker tims (Stun Sniper—which can be sometimes better than Sparkmage even—and Vithian Stinger, along with Gorgon Flail/Quietus Spike/my own janky innovation Virulent Swipe!).

There are big differences of course. No more Ranger of Eos (which provided excellent reach for the deck), no more planeswalkers, no more Siege-Gang...well I hope you see the pattern: in essence the mid/late game of Koros was not present in this deck. In addition to the missing late game, there was also no way to tutor equipment which is key to setting up the "collar combo." The solution: Enter the Dragon...er excuse me, Enter the HOARDING Dragon.

Hoarding Dragon proved exceptional in testing. It can nab a Gorgon Flail as previously suggested, but if you have that in play or don't have a pinger in hand or play, you can search for something that I feel resembles Sigil of Distinction: Ogre's Cleaver...because power really is all you are concerned about. The dragon is interesting in a way though because the tutor effect is not guaranteed...in fact if he is bounced or exiled, you just removed one more piece of your combo permanently. But in other cases he basically is a 4/4 flying for 5 which your opponent really doesn't want to kill...more often than not, this is very important. 4/4 flying means evasion and a big body that can carry an equipment quite well to end the game. In the end though, because of budget constraints on the 5 dollar deck and the fact that the combo is surprisingly NOT essential when you have Stun Snipers just keeping things tapped, I had to drop two of them for two Emrakul's Hatchers, which are late game creatures themselves.

Hatchers are the first thing that come to mind when one thinks about replacements for Siege-Gang Commanders. The good ol' 4 dudes at 5 mana. (4 dudes, srsly. - K, in my best Evan Erwin voice) In the end, I had realized that while saccing goblins to deal 2 damage can be freaking amazing, you really just want more bodies. They help in the damage race when the opponent finally starts attacking and you need chump blockers, and they also are great with equipment: I quickly realized that putting more of those ogre's cleavers in the deck really pushed it over the top. Pay 5 mana to make an otherwise chump blocking eldrazi into a beater that forces an opponent to sacrifice their creatures AND let your other attackers through just sounds like a good deal, at least from my own demented jank deck-building perspective.

Honestly there's still a lot to talk about the deck, but instead I would encourage you guys to play it, whether offline, on MWS, on Magic Online or what have you, and just have fun with it. I HAVE beaten decent decks with it...Valakut Titan, RDW, Soul Sisters, and recently even a UW control deck. My next article will be match summaries taken from MWS (maybe magicleague.com), along with thoughts about the matchups and further thoughts regarding my deck. If you have any suggestions on how you'd improve the deck or questions on how to update it so it doesn't have to be just five dollars feel free to comment below. If you guys like this article and will keep reading future ones, I'll keep on jokesin'.

-HWU