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physcosick
Posted: Tue Jan 30, 2007 3:13 am
Joined: 18 Oct 2005 Posts: 229 Location:
--- description ---
"There can be only one"
--- end description ---
NEDM: A Cobra Cards Intro to the World of Highlander
By physcosick

I. What is Highlander?
II. Can you show me a deck?
III. How does it work?
IV. How can I play Highlander?
V. What are some really good cards to play in the format?


I. What is Highlander?

Highlander is a format that is growing in popularity these days mostly with some of the more veteran players. You’ll see a couple guys sit down and one of them pulls out a big deck box with a bunch of sleeved cards inside and you might be thinking “He must be playing Battle of Wits” but then you see his opponent whipping out the same thing. What’s going on? Mirror match? Even though a BoW vs. BoW match for fun is possible, it’s more likely that these guys are about to play a really great format that, unfortunately, not many people know about. So enough with the brief introduction of your first question, we got to get to how this thing is done. So let me finish answering your question, join me in the next paragraph.

Highlander gets its name from the movie “Highlander”; there can be only one. The format can be played many different ways but the most defining rule about Highlander is that you can only play one copy of each card except basic lands, of course. Technically, you could go to a Standard FNM and play highlander. However, I think you would be beaten to death by some more consistent decks. Those who are going to play this format should determine personal rules for Highlander such as card limit, color requirements, banned lists, etc. At my local store the rule is simply you have to have 150 cards and there is a short banned list. The best thing is, Highlander is meta defined. Which means, whatever your play group says, can be a rule. So if majority decided to ban a card, it’s banned. The only cards that are initially banned are recurring tutors like Wild Research and Survival of the Fittest and a card that in my opinion has to be banned is Tinker. Another fun thing you can do with your Highlander group is to make your own card, named after yourself. This can add to the fun and if done right, could make the game a lot more interesting.


II. Can you show me a decklist?

Absolutely! It took me quite some time to come up with this thing on MWS but I finally got a deck that I was happy with. Now keep in mind, I don’t have many cards for this deck, I just built it to give an example of the insane power available to you through this format. But don’t be discouraged about the format once you see this deck, no one plays a deck like this. I even suggested this idea to a guy at my store that owns all these cards and he didn’t want to play it because it wouldn’t be fun for anyone. So, without anymore delay, here is an example deck:


NEDM: Not Even Doom Music can get you a rating of five stars

Lands: 55
1 Blood Crypt
1 Molten Slagheap
5 Forest (7)
7 Swamp (3)
8 Island (1)
2 Mountain (1)
1 Volcanic Island
1 Steam Vents
1 Badlands
1 Dreadship Reef
1 Terramorphic Expanse
1 Gemstone Mine
1 Plains (1)
1 Vesuva
1 City of Brass
1 Forgotten Cave
1 Tranquil Thicket
1 Barren Moor
1 Wasteland
1 Watery Grave
1 Strip Mine (4)
1 Forbidden Orchard
1 Polluted Delta
1 Bloodstained Mire
1 Wooded Foothills
1 Flooded Strand
1 Windswept Heath
1 Underground Sea
1 Rath’s Edge
1 Tropical Island
1 Breeding Pool
1 Bayou
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Frost Marsh
1 Tresserhorn Sinks
1 Maze of Ith
1 Thawing Glaciers

Creatures: 2
1 Eternal Witness
1 Darksteel Colossus

Spells: 93
1 Assert Authority
1 Cancel
1 Capsize
1 Forbid
1 Undermine
1 Hinder
1 Duress
1 Staff of Domination
1 Putrefy
1 Mystical Teachings
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Wheel of Fortune
1 Regrowth
1 Deep Analysis
1 Bribery
1 Acquire
1 Helm of Awakening
1 Basalt Monolith
1 Reclaim
1 Dismiss
1 Rewind
1 Entomb
1 Condescend
1 Crucible of Worlds
1 Mindslaver
1 Ancient Grudge
1 Red Elemental Blast
1 Nevinyrral’s Disk
1 Oblivion Stone
1 Black Vise
1 Decree of Silence
1 Contract from Below
1 Confiscate
1 Annex
1 Windfall
1 Dissipate
1 Nostalgic Dreams
1 Power Sink
1 Braingeyser
1 Brainstorm
1 Lotus Petal
1 Frantic Search
1 Recollect
1 Circular Logic
1 Compulsion
1 Complicate
1 Doomsday
1 Force of Will
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
1 Impulse
1 Isochron Scepter
1 Counterspell
1 Recoup
1 Treachery
1 Chainer’s Edict
1 Diabolic Edict
1 Intuition
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Living Wish
1 Mox Emerald
1 Beacon of Destruction
1 Black Lotus
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Mind’s Desire
1 Gifts Ungiven
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Diamond
1 Fastbond
1 Mana Vault
1 Oath of Druids
1 All Suns’ Dawn
1 Lion’s Eye Diamond
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mind Twist
1 Memory Jar
1 Time Walk
1 Powder Keg
1 Engineered Explosives
1 Zuran Orb
1 Sylvan Scrying
1 Fact or Fiction
1 Rebuild
1 Hurkyl’s Recall
1 Retract
1 Sensei’s Divining Top
1 Future Sight
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Cunning Wish
1 Reap and Sow


III. How does it work?

Well the first thing you should know about highlander is, you should look back through time and find the best cards ever made. If you take those cards and put them all in one deck, then you pretty much got yourself something pretty good. However, this deck took me a lot of thought and a lot of time making because it’s full of control cards to stall or protect your combos, cards to find your combos, and cards that make up your combos. So what are some of these combos? Well lets go through them one at a time.

1. Oath of Druids+ Forbidden Orchid

Now at first this may not register to you as a combo but both cards are necessary to have some fun. There are many cards in the deck like Sylvan Scrying, Reap and Sow, Cunning Wish for Crop Rotation, etc that can find you the forbidden orchid and of course you have a lot of cards to fetch Oath of Druids with. So once you get this online you have two options that could work out to your advantage:

a. Revealing Darksteel Colossus, you almost practically win at this point unless your opponent does something insane.

b. Revealing and/or playing Eternal Witness. To give you an idea, you could easily build up your graveyard with a lot of cards because of Oath of Druids. Now what happens? Eternal Witness bringing back Yawgmoth’s Will. Play all your 0-1 casting cost artifacts from your graveyard then using either retract, rebuild, and/or Hurkyl’s Recall you can return them to your hand and play them over again. But what then? Tendrils of Agony? Seems good, eh?

2. Sensei Sensei

This one of my favorite combos and it works by playing Future Sight, Sensei’s Divining Top, and Helm of Awakening. What this allows you to do is basically draw your entire deck and have a very large storm count for any and all storm cards you want to play like Mind’s Desire and the more important Tendrils of Agony. Are you confused? Well if so, let me tell you exactly how this works. Top costs one mana and Helm of Awakening says that all spells cost one generic mana less. Therefore, Sensei’s Divining Top is free to play. When you have Future Sight out, you can see the top card of your library and play it as if it was in your hand. So if the Top is on top, you can play it off the top for free because of Helm of Awakening. And since Sensei’s Divining Top can tap to draw a card and put itself on top of your library, you can just keep tapping it to draw, putting it on top of your library, and playing it off the top for free!

3. Crucible of Worlds + Fastbond + Zuran Orb

This is a really fun combo because with Fastbond and Crucible of Worlds you can play all of your lands from your graveyard as many times as you want, assuming you have enough life. Life? Who cares when you have the Orb? Zuran Orb mixed into this combo means an infinite life combo, which means you can just keep playing lands from your graveyard over and over again. Throw in Strip Mine and Wasteland and you can destroy your opponent’s mana base. But how does this win? Well besides making your opponent scoop by destroying 15 of his lands, you can use Rath’s Edge to repetitively deal damage to him!

4. Doomsday (a.k.a. NEDM)

So last but definitely not the least, the last combo is the trademark of my deck, here. Doomsday was a popular Vintage archetype but I transformed it into Highlander! How does it work? Well for those who don’t know, Doomsday says that you have to search your graveyard and library for 5 cards and remove the rest of those cards from the game. Then you take your 5 cards and put them on top of your library in any order. But what are those 5 cards? Easy: Ancestral Recall, Black Lotus, any spell that you want, Mind’s Desire, Beacon of Destruction. Only 4 cards truly matter in the pile; however, the one “any spell” should be a Mox or something so you can get a spell count out of it for free. So do you know how this works yet? Alright then, lets do this step by step:

A. Play Ancestral Recall, draw Black Lotus, the mox of your choice, and Mind’s Desire.

B. Play Black Lotus and the Mox

C. Play Mind’s Desire, storm triggers 3 times, 4 mind’s desires on the stack.

D. Mind’s Desire reveals Beacon of Destruction. Beacon is removed from the game. In response, to the next Mind’s Desire, play the Beacon. The Beacon gets shuffled into your library.

E. Repeat step D three times and you will deal a total of 20 damage since Beacon Destruction is the only card in your library.


IV. How can I play Highlander?

So you want to play Highlander? Well hopefully my article has intrigued you slightly, or at least enough to see what you can do to play. Let me first say that you should not be intimidated by my deck list. It was just an example of the immense power that Highlander can offer. But the truth is, if I took that to my card store (even though I don’t own any power) no one would want to play with me. But if they did play with me, a bunch of the cards in that deck would be banned in a second! The point is, guys who play Highlander like to play their favorite cards throughout time. They can go and look in their bulk and find currently unplayable stuff that they love and actually put it in a deck! Highlander is about fun and playing cool cards not about playing ridiculous combos that no one can beat. So if you want to play Highlander, you might have to spend some money, but by no means should you have to go out and buy yourself 10 original dual lands and power 9, that would be stupid.

So what can you do? Well if you have been playing for a few years, I’m sure you have a lot of rares. I, for one, have a big box of bulk rares and an even bigger box of uncommons. Don’t even get me started about commons… So look through all those bulk rares, I’m sure you can find some stuff. But just because you have a deck of 150 cards, doesn’t mean that you can win. It’s just a start. Once you start playing, you can edit your deck and put money into it to make it better and sooner or later you could have an awesome deck! But like I said, you will have to pay a good amount of money to get this thing started cause there are some things that you need for Highlander. There are just some cards that you HAVE to play.


V. What are some really good cards to play in the format?

One thing that most good Highlander decks need is a good Counterspell base. So you need several good counters. Examples of these are Counterspell, Forbid, Undermine, Hinder, and most importantly Force of Will. You almost have to have Force of Will, it’s too good not to use! Another one of my favorite cards to play is Mind Twist. The card is ridiculous and you just force your opponent to discard his hand, or at least some important parts of it: Mind Twist is amazing! Thawling Glaciers is an amazing card but you will also need Onslaught Fetch Lands as well as a solid mana base with ravnica duals and if you have original duals they work, too. If you want a cheap land that is very good, try Mirrodin’s Core. But don’t go spending all your money at once because you never know when things are going to change.

However, this all depends on what type of deck you want to play. You could easily play a budget aggro deck full of cheap creatures and burn like Lightning Bolt, Savannah Lion, Kird Ape, etc. If your meta doesn’t specify color requirements, you could easily just build a simple Mono Red deck with the best burn available, cheap creatures, and awesome some finishers like Arc-Slogger (150 cards in your library seems good). Your options are pretty much endless but it all depends on exactly what you want to do and what you can do. I can’t just give you a list of cards you should definitely play, only cards that are really good in the format. However, there really isn’t any point in me doing that because every card has a chance to be good, that’s what so great about Highlander. Everything serves its purpose; everything has potential. Highlander is an amazing format with almost infinite possibilities and therefore it is extremely fun. Not to mention, you can get some awesome use out of cards that are not playable in any other formats. Why just have these cards sitting around collecting dust when you can sleeve them up and have some fun?

I trust that my article has helped you guys learn about this format that is spreading amongst the magic community. I strongly suggest that all of you guys look into it and see what you can do. Get a few friends to build a deck and play against them. It’s a lot of fun and you can play all or your favorite cards from current and past sets all in one deck. If you need any help building a Highlander deck or setting up a group of people to play highlander with you, just send me a message and I might be able to figure something out for you or give you some advice. Well, hopefully you enjoyed my article. Give me some feedback and have a good one!

- This has been physcosick. You stay classy Cobracards!
Felipe Musco
Posted: Tue Jan 30, 2007 11:15 am
Joined: 18 May 2006 Posts: 2434 Location: Florianópolis, SC, Brasil
Amazing article, physcosick! It’ll take me a while to analyze it, since I’m not familiar with the format, but from here, it’s already a 4, so you’ll probably get a 5 from me.
I don't like YOU.
La_Sin_Grail
Posted: Tue Jan 30, 2007 10:56 pm
Joined: 14 Aug 2005 Posts: 806 Location: Maryland
I haven’t had time to read the whole thing, but major, major props for writing about highlander!!!
c3poquino
Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 12:15 pm
Joined: 04 Sep 2006 Posts: 47 Location:
I don’t like Highlander very much, but I have one "request" for this article. You say that Highlander is all about house rules, and explain yours, but if you’re writing for the common public, I think you should show a 60-card Highlander decklist, since most people would start from here. Is it possible? Great article, though!
physcosick
Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 2:16 pm
Joined: 18 Oct 2005 Posts: 229 Location:
c3poquino wrote:
I don’t like Highlander very much, but I have one "request" for this article. You say that Highlander is all about house rules, and explain yours, but if you’re writing for the common public, I think you should show a 60-card Highlander decklist, since most people would start from here. Is it possible? Great article, though!
A 60-card highlander deck kind of defeats the purpose of highlander. I could build a 60-card highlander deck but then I can build a 150 and play them both... what one do you think will be more fun? Highlander is all about fun.

c3poquino wrote:
I don’t like Highlander very much,
Trust me, don’t knock it till you try it. There is a reason this format is growing in popularity every day, because it is a lot of fun. What I am trying to do here is give this article contest some variety other then just the normal type 2 stuff or casual, etc, introducing new formats and different ways of playing. I’m simply introducing the format and giving you some advice, trying to broaden people’s horizons.
La_Sin_Grail
Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 6:27 pm
Joined: 14 Aug 2005 Posts: 806 Location: Maryland
Granted, the format can get a little old, but less quickly than standard because the deck is different every time you draw!
Felipe Musco
Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 6:39 pm
Joined: 18 May 2006 Posts: 2434 Location: Florianópolis, SC, Brasil
They’re right. I played Highlander in Lord of the Rings TCG, and boy, was ut FUN! Have you ever played Battle of Wits? It’s like that, but only BETTER! SOOOO cool! Kudos on physcosick for inspiring the masses! I’m writing about that other format (I don’t know the name in english, if someone can help me...), which inspired the Unhinged card Richard Garfield, p.h.d. It’s one that you play with onlt the junk cards, and you can only play a card in your hand if you play it as another spell of the same kinda, and with the exactly same mana cost. So, for instance, if you have a Last Gasp in hand, you could play it as a Terror, but not as a Last Gasp. It also mixes Highlander in, since you can play each spell only once.
I don't like YOU.
physcosick
Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 6:49 pm
Joined: 18 Oct 2005 Posts: 229 Location:
Felipe: the name is mental magic

Who gave me a 3?! explanation? the only one that has talked so far is felipe, sin, and c3po. C3po, did u give me a 3? was it because you "don’t like highlander"? what kinnd of reasoning behind voting is that?!
mojo
Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 7:47 pm
Joined: 09 Aug 2006 Posts: 32 Location: your mom
Felipe Musco wrote:
They’re right. I played Highlander in Lord of the Rings TCG, and boy, was ut FUN! Have you ever played Battle of Wits? It’s like that, but only BETTER! SOOOO cool! Kudos on physcosick for inspiring the masses! I’m writing about that other format (I don’t know the name in english, if someone can help me...), which inspired the Unhinged card Richard Garfield, p.h.d. It’s one that you play with onlt the junk cards, and you can only play a card in your hand if you play it as another spell of the same kinda, and with the exactly same mana cost. So, for instance, if you have a Last Gasp in hand, you could play it as a Terror, but not as a Last Gasp. It also mixes Highlander in, since you can play each spell only once.


i know what ur talkign about...its mental magic i think cause its pretty much testing ur knowledge of all the cards in magic:-p.

also highlander is so fun...you can even build a cheap deck and still have alot of fun cause alot of good cards are so cheap since they are out of standard and extended except a few cards for obvious reasons.
Cobra
Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 8:25 pm
Joined: 12 Jul 2005 Posts: 1202 Location: Austin, TX, USA
Cool article, physcosick!

Expensive decklist. If people really shell out this kind of cash to use Black Lotus, Moxes, and so on in their casual games, I may need to look into expanding our inventory backwards quite a bit... Wink

Let’s say (totally arbitarily, feel free to correct me) that an average Highlander game lasts 8 turns, so you’ll see 15 cards. That gives you about a 10% chance of seeing any particular card in a given game, a 1% chance of seeing two specific cards together, and a 0.1% chance of seeing three specific cards together! The point of all this is that while your combo section is very interesting, I have to wonder how much relevance it really has to the format.

If you’re ever in the mood to expand this article, I’d like to read more about what’s strong in the Highlander format in particular. What cards inherently work well in a huge deck without duplicates? (The idea of Arc-Slogger with a 150-card library cracks me up... Laughing)
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