Budget Decks: Spell Thief

You, my dear friend, know how to make me smile.
Thank you.

I don't know, I still see lots of sub-optimal mill cards and no game-breaking cards to take advantage of that. As has been said before: Milling opponents is DANGEROUS these days! The graveyard is a resource like cards in hand or library and many if not most decks make use of it in one way or the other. 18 years ago you could expect only a handfull of decks that want cards in their grave but today? In Legacy!? I know this is for casual play, but ... reanimator strategies, threshold, flashback, retrace, cards like Anger, Goblin Welder, Gravecrawler, the list of cards and mechanics that want to have cards in the grave is endless! Heck, Tarmogoyf alone is reason enough why you do not want to randomly mill around!

And what all this trouble for? To play a few spells from the grave? Spells that may or may not fit the current situation? If this deck would run 4 Haunting Echoes (it's pretty cheap meanwhile) I might understand but Spelltwine and Talent of the Telepath just don't cut the mustard (and Talent will almost never have spell mastery active in this deck!). Extract from Darkness is good and together with Fog Bank and Dimir Doppelgänger the only card in this deck that is suited for multiplayer. But Extract from Darkness stands pretty much on it's own and simply doesn't need other mill cards.

Spellweaver Volute - THAT would be a multiplayer card fitting this theme because it's reuseable. Stitcher Geralf - THAT is a good multiplayer mill card would fit this theme. And both are cheap enough for budget. But as it is, this is just another sloppily build deck. It doesn't even have a backup plan in case it mills something it doesn't want to mill. You'd expect a deck like this would have at least a Necrogen Spellbomb or something like this that could be popped any time something nasty hits the grave that you can't snatch, but nooo ...

I also fail to see how this should work as advertised. Where are the cards that make this deck "exceeds well in political multiplayer games"? Fog Bank is a good deterrant, but there isn't a single card that is particualrily good playing multiplayer politics. Fact or Fiction is because you can agree with someone to give you a good split if you promise to use the stuff you get to his liking. Icy Manipulator is because you can tap blockers here or potential attackers there. But this deck has no political power.
Or what about "allowing you to choose sides"? Which of the cards does that!?
And of course "scare the s**t out of those who dare to rise against you" - with what!? Random milling only scares noobs and even those will most likely not die from it. Everybody else is happily making use of the additional options you give them.


This sounds like a lot of salt and in some way it is but I am doing this for a reason: Northy started out with good intentions and I applauded that but meanwhile he has become a shadow of his former self! The quantity of the decks you release has risen and with that the quality has declined. I now you can do better, you just don't need to, because your fans eat up anything anyway.
Which reminds me of the other thing I need to get off my chest: This budget thing ... do all you guys realize what is happening to Magic right now? It's like a big bargain sale. Every single card that's relevant for any format gets a reprint in regular or irregular sets. Commander, From the Vault, Modern Masters (and now Eternal Masters!), Conspiracy and what not ... reprints everywhere. And the regular sets are heavily overboosted (because people open so many packs just to get these stupid expeditions), so heavily that any card besides the most powerful mythic costs just a few cent! I am neither joking nor exaggerating when I say that you can get most cards, inclduing rares, for just a few cents. Which kindof beats the whole budget thing - everything is budget these days except the various duallands, the best planeswalkers and a select few exceptional rares.
And THAT means that building cheap decks isn't complicated for quite some time now. Or, in other words, Northy should stop rsting on his laurels and instead step up on his game! Building budget decks is as easy as it ever was, consequently I expect a little bit more from the sitting champion of budget.

I just realized 2 things:

1) This deck was in "active decks" even though the last comment is from last year 0_o.
2) Northy hasn't created many decks in the last couple of months.

What triggered the above post was mostly the fact that there about 10 or so Northy decks within the first page of "Active decks", which usually means, you know, them being actively discussed. So I thought Northy flooded the board again. They all have comparetively high number of likes and comments. Usually I don't post on his decks and leave the budget crowd alone but in this cases I thought "he probably launched a "deckathon" again ... let's see if it is all chaff or some actual goodies". So I opened the first one, which is this, and realized, no, it's actually a run-of-the-mill deck with a very loose focus which would go down and buried here on Vault without any replies or likes if any author other than NorthernWarlord was attached to it. It's only then when I couldn't resist the urge to comment on it.

So my apologies for claiming you are all about quantity instead of quality. MTGVaults strange algorythms made me think that way.

I guess he could fit in.