It is Wednesday yet again, which means that I prepared another article for a Magic the Gathering Preconstructed Deck of Yesteryear. In fact, the candidate I have chosen to feature is the last deck for Urza’s Saga, a Blue-Black deck named “Tombstone”. Or so I thought, because while reviewing this deck I found a few things that I could not quite understand, the secrets of “Tombstone” so-to-say. While Blue-Black is an excellent color combination due to the many cards that support the Aggro-Control idea that comes with pairing the two, “Tombstone” did not yet find such a silver thread to follow; which shows in the cards they used to build this deck with. But enough preamble, here is the article:

The “Urza” sets started quite promising with “The Sleeper”, a deck build around enchantments that come to live a kick the opponent white weenie-style, and lost some steam with “Special Delivery” and its Red-Green weirdness; however, with two more decks in Urza’s Saga alone, I am excited to see what else the deckbuilders came up with back in the day. This brings us to today’s topic in form of “The Plague”, a White-Black deck that spreads pestilence in the truest sense of the word. Funnily enough, Beats and Skies did an article about what decks seem to be the most powerful in the MtG community on Reddit and this ranked third in mentions, only being behind the “Rat’s Nest” deck from Betrayers of Kamigawa due to “Umezawa’s Jitte” being in it and the sillyness that is Artifact Affinity in form of “Bait & Bludgeon”. So, being hyped and ready, let us see what “The Plague” has to offer.

The second deck for Urza’s Saga brings us the usual Aggro combination of Red and Green working together to beat the opponent into a pulp. But to stand out from each other, the Red-Green Aggro decks usual all have their own special touch, so what does “Special Delivery” give us? Well, apparently we have Echo and Cycling as major themes, which is certainly an interesting approach for an Aggro deck. But why judge before I have seen any of the cards in the package? So, lets see how Aggro was handled back during Urza’s days.

I am pretty sure that I mentioned my love for Coldsnap before. The idea of Snow cards was really cool, especially since it produces special mana that you can bar people from using if they do not have the “Snow-Covered” versions of the basic lands; and who uses them just for fun in unrelated decks? Also, Coldsnap had a lot of cool ideas being the misfit one set between the first Ravnica block and the giants of card design that are Time Spiral, Planar Chaos, and Future Sight. That was Magic the Gathering at its best if you ask me. But while a Snow deck as the thematic “Budget Deckbuilding” would be as appropriate as it would be expected, I wanted to feature one special creature first. I have no idea if there is something I can do with it, but being the casual player that I am there is little stopping me from chasing after silly ideas and writing articles about it. You see the picture of what I am going to work with up top anyway, so here it goes: