Re-Tooling Thada Adel

alter by http://www.cardkitty.com/

Seriously guys? Tolarian Academy too powerful in a deck dedicated to abuse it? Really? Seriously? Ban worthy? Honestly?

Ok, probably. Sometimes. More than likely. I mean, who doesn't love some hot, hardcast Emrakul goodness on turn 3?

What's that? "No-one"? Kill joys, the lot of them. :(

I had put my Thada-Adel "Taa-Daa" deck down for a while some time before Archenemy came out. As most of the cards are either deck specific or I have in doubles, it's one deck that I generally don't dip in and out of for cards to make other decks. This makes it quite simple to just leave untouched until the urge to wind up the robots takes me again. One change had to be made for sure and that was the exclusion of Tolarian Academy for something (which ended up as Oboro, Palace in the Clouds for no other reason than it was the card I replaced in my binders) after the last ban-hammer slammed down on the powerful legendary land. Despite the fact that I really enjoyed playing with Academy and obviously didn't want it banned, it can't argue with the RC when they did because it was a key component in powering up both tame Thada Adel decks (kidding) and broken Sharuum decks (totally not kidding).

As I live in France, we have players who choose to build their decks following the French 1v1 ban list rather than the multiplayer list we get from the EDH RC. If you clicked the link, you'll notice that Tolarian Academy does not feature on the French list. When it was banned on the multiplayer list and there was still grumbling about my use of Sol Ring (which is banned in France), I gave the team an option as to how I built my Thada Adel list: Either I play the multiplayer version with Sol Ring and there's no more grumbling or I change the deck to conform to the French 1v1 list, lose Sol Ring but gain Tolarian Academy. The pause was significant and deep as the potential of 2 colourless mana for 1 on a fragile artifact against, well, possibly the most broken land in the history of Magic was carefully considered. The mature consensus was that Sol Ring was a mere Camel's twizzle in the face of the location that almost destroyed the multiverse. Academy is out of our playgroup and Sol Ring is here to stay.

So I've tinkered with the list I had before to the one below. There's an Echoing Truth that I'm looking to squeeze in due to an increase of tokens in my metagame, though most of the obvious candidates to take out are flavour cards that I'm loath to cut. It looks like Sundering Titan is currently the most likely to be out because I'm not ever happy casting it.


Thada Adel, Acquirer

23 Island
Maze of Ith
Eye of Ugin
Thawing Glaciers

Academy Ruins
Darksteel Citadel
Seat of the Synod
Strip Mine
Faerie Conclave
Tolaria West
Remote Isle
Lonely Sandbar
Minamo, School at Water’s Edge
Oboro, Palace in the Clouds
Reliquary Tower

Sol Ring
Dreamstone Hedron
Mind Stone
Mana Vault
Basalt Monolith
Coalition Relic
Darksteel Ingot
Overflowing Chalice
Worn Powerstone
Thran Dynamo

Nevinyrral’s Disk
Ensnaring Bridge
Oblivion Stone
Voltaic Key
Explorer’s Map
Sculpting Steel
Mycosynth Lattice
Lightning Greaves
Memory Jar
Engineered Explosives
Darksteel Forge
Sensei’s Divining Top
Portcullis
Mind’s Eye
Vedalken Shackles
Tormod’s Crypt
Crystal Ball
Whispersilk Cloak
Avarice Totem

Tezzeret the Seeker
Emrakul, the Aeon’s Torn
Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre
Kozilek, Butcher of Truth
Memnarch
Sundering Titan
Stormtide Leviathan
Etherium Sculptor
Master Transmuter
Platinum Angel
Vedalken Archmage
Karn, Silver Golem
Trinket Mage
Lighthouse Chronologist
Duplicant
Magus of the Future
Verdalken Engineer
Faerie Mechanist

Fact or Fiction
Reshape
Bribery
Acquire
Evacuate
Thirst for Knowledge
Capsize
Brainstorm
Fabricate
Careful Consideration
Rite of Replication
Ancestral Vision
Knowledge Exploitation

Future Sight
Artificer's Intuition

In recent games I've been having the most fun ever running a Lighthouse Chronologist out after a Mycosynth Lattice. I fully expect everyone to kill it on sight as a matter of course and I can generally level it right up to 7 with all my colourless mana. The look of horror on faces around the table when this first happened was probably a Kodak moment but I didn't have a camera on me at the time. Now he "only" provokes an immediate focusing of everyone's attention and fevered digging for answers before I can find a way to protect him. The huge drawback of the Thada Adel deck is that it can be very slow to get into the driving seat. Propaganda is a card that was in there at the beginning but was cut for flavour and space (though Karn art + Karn is probably enough to warrant re-inclusion, hummmm) and finding some way to get this guy into play and levelled around turn 5-6 essentially supercharges your deck. Well, it would do the same for anyone's deck but you're cutting whole chunks out of the turns people would normally get to attack you while you go on your merry way, hopefully torwards the win.

Speaking of flavour and Karn, Silver Golem reminds me that there are so many ways to be a complete barstud with this deck. Ok, we all know the Nevinyrral’s Disk/Darksteel Forge combo? Unlike Oblivion Stone which requires you to sacrifice the Stone as part of the cost, Nevinyrral's Disk says "Destroy all artifacts, creatures, and enchantments." In the normal course of events this would also nuke your Disk however the Forge makes it indestructible and allows you to repeatedly activate the disk. Nasty? Not nearly! Add in a Mycosynth Lattice and all permanents are Artifacts. Now all planeswalkers and, most importantly, all lands in play are artifacts and will also be destroyed by your Nev's Disk. Not your own stuff of course, as yours are indestructible, just everyone elses. So we've established that this is a pretty low move. How about what happens when our friend Karn starts mixing with the Mycosynth Lattice crowd? Get Lattice & Karn into play together with some open mana and suddenly there's a lot of very nervous lands. It's pretty much a repeat of Kamahl/Fist's interaction with White Crovax: "{G}, destroy target land" except we're paying {1} and we've got lots and lots of {1}. When you animate a land and give it a P/T equal to its casting cost (0, as lands have no cc) it dies once state based effects are next checked. That's a pretty low move this deck can make. Is it as bad as repeatable Disk activations? Probably. It's a bit sad for Karn though, who's a total pacifist. <- That's the flavour bit. Picture Karn animating these little artifacts only for them to die straight away. OOOooooooh, I feel like Volrath!!

Not an instant, Marc!

One of my playgroup runs a pretty extensive artifact destruction package. You know he's got one as he starts checking out exactly what's going on over my side of the table. He claims his biggest problem with the deck is that there's almost never a "right" target to destroy, or rather, there's always too many "right" targets. If he destroys Mycosynth Lattice or Master Transmuter, which is are enablers, all the pointy bits that actually do things to players are still on the table. If he takes out a pointy bit, the enablers are still there to enable something else absurd. If he declines to take out a mana source, he runs the risk of an Eldrazi. It's actually quite stunning to see how fast this deck still can be if it draws well especially considering how much slower it is now that Tolarian Academy is no longer in the format. The obvious drawback to "fast" is the afforementioned "occasionally slow" but that's not such a big deal because it's actually a good thing for the deck to get beat up from time to time. Overrun as an instant is, of course, the obvious exception, Marc.

The rest of the list is pretty much standard fare from the cards I have available to me. I don't have a Mishra's Workshop yet (nor am I likely to get one any time soon) though I fully expect Scars of Mirrodin to spew out a whole swathe of cards that will make the deck tick even faster including, dare I dream, a Karn - Artifact Planeswalker ......