Reject Rare’s Zendikar: Part 1 (Taken from Pojo)

Forlorn cries of pain and abandonment cry out from the confines of your binder, why have some seen unequaled glory why we must rot away in darkness, unused, unloved and unappreciated. Why are our brothers and sisters showered with praise, why do the God’s abandon us and let others victoriously shine? We have value the cost of our powers is great but does that not make our power all the more formidable? Alas the masses cries out in opposition your casting cost is too high, your auras, you have no immediate impact on the board and you’re a waste of a rare slot. They decry our usefulness; they do not see the power we are able to bring to the kitchen table.

Our legion swells as those gifted by the God’s are able to wield our true power. Enough of the fancy introductions my name is Paul Wessendorf and this is my perspective.

For this article I have decided to tackle the topic of reject rares of Zendikar and this editions gem is Arhcmage Ascension arguably the least played of the Ascension cycle but it holds tremendous power let’s see what we can do.

The key to exploiting is obviously having a deck built to take advantage of its activation and triggers. I just happen to have one right here within the confines of my mind. First things first we need to draw multiple cards a turn easy enough, cards like Howling Mine and Font of Mythos give us the ability to activate our multiple draws per turn clause, combined with Teferi’s Puzzle box we can assuredly get our counters on Archmage Ascension and then be able to tutor for any combo piece in our decks. Speaking of combos I think the best approach to building this deck is to cram as many blue oriented combos into the deck as possible. To start off we need a card that can help fuel our combo shenanigans, Vedkalen Mastermind is the perfect bet for a single blue mana it can return any permanent to our hands. Now what to combine this with, Vedkalen Orrery allows us to play our non land spells at instant speed. Combine these cards with Jester’s Scepter we can mill the opponent for a five at a time with an artifact that cost 3 mana at instant speed and one to bounce and reset it. Continuing the trend we need protection for our other combos and a way to lockdown the opponent, combining the mastermind with Declaration of Naught while we have the orrery out makes us able to counter any spell an opponent plays for a mana investment.

As a way to insure we are in the game long enough to pull of these combo shenanigans, utilizing Academy Researcher, Fools Demise, and Life Chisel we can sacrifice the creature during our upkeep and trigger the life gain as well as Academy Researcher going back into play and triggering fools demise, loop for profit. Summoning station, Arcum Daggson and Intruder Alarm all play particularly well with Myr Servitor and Myr retriever allowing you to pump out tokens with Genesis Chamber and gain life with Scrapheap as well as fetching artifacts from your deck. The deck utilizes an insane amount of artifacts and card drawing, adding Fabricate will allow us to search for a particular artifact piece early, Quest for Ancient Secrets insures that we can return used or destroyed combo pieces and not deck our self. So putting everything together we have something that looks like the following.

Making decks utilizing underappreciated rare’s and giving players a glimpse of what possible combinations are capable of being assembled by rares’ people often overlook as powerful decks for casual games around the kitchen table. Join as next time as I continue to show reject rare’s of Zendikar and what can be done to build around them.

Written by: Paul, 2010, www.pojo.com