Extended Glimpse Elves deck

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Revision as of 00:48, 15 November 2009 by 72.230.42.252 (talk)
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Elves is a primarily green creature based combo deck which was widely popular during Pro Tour Berlin 2008 and Extended tournaments during the subsequent PTQ season. Most notably it won PT Berlin as a version piloted by Luis Scott-Vargas.

The deck uses mana producing elves such as Llanowar Elves, Birchlore Rangers and Heritage Druid to very quickly ramp up mana, specifically by the Rangers and Druid. They would also be aided by Wirewood Symbiote and Nettle Sentinel. The Symbiote can untap Llanowar elves or any other to be tapped again for Rangers or Druid while the Sentinel just untaps himself whenever a green spell is played. Using Glimpse of Nature, the player can just repeatedly play Elf cards, draw cards of them for even more elves while tapping the Elves in play for mana to cast the spells. Elvish Visionary is also a frequently played card due to it's interaction with Symbiote. Summoner's Pact is primarily used to glue the deck together.

Even though the core is the same, there are various versions of the deck mostly differing in the cards used to end the game and the means to search for them. Some decks use Weird Harvest to quickly assemble a large number Nettle Sentinels, amass a Storm counter and kill with Grapeshot or sometimes Brain Freeze. Other decks use Wirewood Hivemaster to produce a large amount of Insect tokens to fuel a Chord of Calling for a Predator Dragon who would eat the tokens and most other creatures to attack for lethal damage. Yet another version would go for Mirror Entity. Even Blasting Station has seen play in this deck. The deck is capable to use cards of almost all colors as well as other support cards such as Thoughtseize due to Birchlore Ranger's ability producing any color of mana.