Last time we looked at a Fifth Dawn Preconstructed Deck, we had a mess of a card pile that actually (at least in my opinion) turned out to be the start for a solid strategy; so good job there WotC. This time, we take a look at the Blue-Black option in form of “Special Forces”. Now, with “Ebon Drake” on the cover, I would not claim to have high hopes, but since “Nuts and Bolts” featured the absolutely terrible “Synod Centurion” maybe there is something of value here.

A friend of mine, Alex, who was not really that interested in Magic the Gathering before seems to have taken the plunge into the cardboard realms after finding, downloading, and playing Magic the Gathering Arena. However, there are certain limitations to that game, so the next step into buying real cards did not take that long; and as many new players do they test the limitations of the game in question. He likes Phoenixes, and Magic the Gathering happens to have a few chickens on fire available; so why not make a deck out of it. I was sceptic at first, but then thought that this could be a deck building challenge I could take on, both improving Alex’s deck while learning more about Magic cards I had no particular interest in before. So, after quite a while, here is another deck building experiment, this time using a rather unusual tribal theme.

Two sets down, one to go. With all the decks from Mirrodin and Darksteel being taken care of, there are only four more left to look at in Fifth Dawn. Now, Fifth Dawn was a weird set, since WotC probably realized that they went way overboard with Artifact Affinity and the supporting cards, so that they decided to stop fueling that madness further and rather produce some pearls like “Spinal Parasite” instead. But, even though Fifth Dawn had a lot of absolute rubbish in its ranks, there were still some really powerful cards in the set and I do hold it in good memory for being rather unique.

Another Wednesday, another Preconstructed Deck. This time, we take a look at the last remaining deck that was released with Darksteel, a mono-Blue Artifact deck called “Transference”. That is certainly a promising combination since Blue Artifact support from the first Mirrodin block was not only plenty but also very solid in most cases. Combine that with the fact that the Artifacts themselves have quite a lot of crazy stuff going for them and we can definitely hope for an amazing list.