The last two preconstructed decks from Mirrodin I wrote about had one thing in common: They both followed sound strategies. The “Little Bashers” deck featured the (in my opinion) very powerful deck idea of using white weenies with Equip cards, giving the player enough tempo to keep up with burn decks. The “Bait and Bludgeon” deck on the other hand worked with Artifact Affinity, giving the potential buyer a solid stock of powerful Artifacts as well as options like “Thoughtcast” to play alongside those. Well, this time we have another deck that follows one set strategy, but as you will see the approach aged rather poorly.
But before I go into the details, here is the list of cards of the deck in question, named “Wicked Big”:
Creatures (25):
2x Brown Ouphe (G)
4x Copper Myr (2)
2x Tel-Jilad Chosen (1G)
1x Slith Predator (GG)
2x Viridian Shaman (2G)
2x Needlebug (4)
2x Tel-Jilad Exile (3G)
2x Tel-Jilad Archers (4G)
4x Fangren Hunter (3GG)
2x Trolls of Tel-Jilad (5GG)
1x Plated Slagwurm (4GGG)
1x Living Hive (6GG)
Spells (11):
2x Battlegrowth (G)
2x Predator’s Strike (1G)
1x Deconstruct (2G)
2x Journey of Discovery (2G)
1x Bloodscent (3G)
2x Creeping Mold (2GG)
1x One Dozen Eyes (5G)
Lands (24):
24x Forest
And, as usual, we do not have to start from zero with figuring out the decks strategy. The marketing blurb on the product page explain the most basic steps in the following text:
The Mirrodin set is rich with artifacts, and the green mages are out to crush them all. As always, green wants you to beat down your opponents with huge creatures, but if you can smash some artifacts along the way, all the better. The “Wicked Big” deck strives to preserve nature against the contamination of artifice. Lots of cards in the deck destroy artifacts outright, such as Deconstruct, Creeping Mold, and Viridian Shaman. Add in the many creatures that have protection from artifacts and you’re packing a ton of artifact-unfriendliness. Use your creatures with protection from artifacts to block your opponents’ attacking artifact creatures and to break though defenders. Brown Ouphe is a tricky anti-artifact card that can be devastating in the right circumstances. For the cost of {1G} and {T}, the Ouphe counters an artifact’s activated ability. You can’t stop mana abilities, and your opponent can pay to activate some artifacts more than once, but the Ouphe can really keep your opponent off balance. It’s especially good if your opponent’s artifact has an ability that requires it to be sacrificed as part of the cost. Since equipping a creature is an activated ability, Brown Ouphe can also make your opponent pay twice to get that expensive Equipment onto a creature. If your opponents have to spend that much mana to get around the Ouphe, they won’t be able to pay for much else. Even with all the artifact craziness going on in the Mirrodin set, the “Wicked Big” deck hasn’t forgotten green’s first love: playing lots of huge creatures. Use mana accelerators like Copper Myr and Journey of Discovery to build up your mana base quickly. Journey of Discovery‘s job is just to pull two Forests out of your deck-don’t bother paying the entwine cost unless your hand is overloaded with land cards already. Once you have lots of mana available, start churning out your heavy hitters. If you have trouble crashing through your opponent’s defenses, use Bloodscent on your smallest creature so your horde of huge monsters can smash some face. Isn’t that what the Magic game is all about?
– Mirrodin “Wicked Big” Theme Deck Product Description
The funny thing about this text is that it mentions beating the opponent using big creatures quite a lot, but fails to mention the cards that are supposed to do that job. But let us start at the beginning: “Wicked Big” is a mono-green Artifact hate deck. That alone is concerning if you want to pick up the deck and play it out of the box in 2021. You will play against hordes on non-Artifact decks and therefore handicap yourself with the choice of cards your deck has available. Sure, options like “Viridian Shaman” are nice if you can destroy an important Artifact, but without a proper such cards are terrible. Worse even, if you have one of the “Copper Myr” or “Needlebug” on the field when “Viridian Shaman” enters, the card will destroy one of those instead. “Deconstruct” should be switched against the much more helpful “Naturalize” since that increases the number of targets by a ton, even though you cannot profit from it being a zero mana card technically; the first change I would make with a card from a different set. The deck is supposed to destroy Enchantments with “Creeping Mold” instead, but this is simply using a much more expensive card for a job that can be solved easier and more efficiently. Cards like “Tel-Jilad Chosen” can only ever be playable if you are able to block much bigger Artifact Creatures. And the much-talked about “Brown Ouphe” (in the marketing blurb, not in general) even has its limitations listed in the text, which also happen to be the reasons you would not want to play the card at all.
Now, the big beaters in the deck come in three forms as I see it. There is “Living Hive“, a solid card to work with, but not a card that interacts with the strategy of the deck in any way due to having no support for tokens or using field-wide buffs, etc. It also happens to be the best beater in the deck. Then there is “Plated Slagwurm” for rare slot number two, which is just a beater with Hexproof that has no business being anywhere without the basics like Trample. And then there is “Trolls of Tel-Jilad“, which was also chosen to be the cover art. I am a bit on the fence about that card, since I would definitely not classify it as a beater due to it simply being a 5/6 creature, but comes with a potential regeneration for your entire creature line-up. And that is basically it at the beater front. Sure, there are four copies of “Fangren Hunter“, but the card is terrible, and the equally expensive “Tel-Jilad Archers” is such a bad joke of a card with Reach that any spider could provide better services. Combine this with the fact that there are not enough cards that make an impact boosting the creatures’ stats, with only “Battlegrowth” and “Predator’s Strike” being available. Or the fact that the strategy of forcing the opponent to block on small creature with “Bloodscent” will rarely work consistently due to only having one copy. Maybe also include the problem that this relatively mana-hungry deck only has two “Journey of Discovery” to speed up playing lands and otherwise relies on placing one land per turn without any way get out cards in alternate ways. Truth be told, this is a deck that does not look good from any standpoint.
As usual, I placed two pictures above: One with the price of my first search result on Ebay, and one with the prices from Cardmarket. The Ebay pricing is incredibly stupid again, and I can only urge anyone reading this to never spend that much money on any card game product without getting further information to why that product might be so expensive. However, the Cardmarket page does actually have prices that not only seem affordable, but seem to be the price of “Wicked Big” at release. The problem this time is that there is really nothing in “Wicked Big” that would be worth picking up from a price perspective: “Living Hive” had a price trend of 0.27€ at the time of writing, “Plated Slagwurm” went for 0.25€ on average, “Journey of Discovery” averaged 0.22€ although I would have been able to pick up copies for 0.02€ a piece. With a price of 10€, there is no way you are getting your money for the product at hand, so I would suggest that you rather buy the useful singles than spending more than 3€ for the pre-packaged “Wicked Big”.
Cubic Creativity 