by Mishra Planeswalker

Created on: January 27, 2009

The Esper shard in the Magic: the Gathering expansion, Shards of Alara, has given new hope to artficiers across the wide Multiverse. Whether or not these new, coloured artifacts will reign supreme as did their affinity brethren before the is yet to be seen. Today we'll look at the incredibly diverse blue-black-white deck that promises to become an efficient fighting machine to contend with the top tier Standard decks.

What's terrific about the current Standard environment is the amount of artifact recursion that is available. We have Treasure Hunter, Sanctum Gargoyle, and the all-powerful Sharuum the Hegemon. This means that our new deck can easily use artifacts that must be sacrificed, because we can bring them back to our hand (or in Sharuum's case, to play) with relative ease.

Some powerful cards that require sacrifices are the new capsules from Shards of Alara. The black capsule allows us to destroy a nonblack creature, while the blue one will net use two extra cards in the process. The white one is the worst of the three, only allowing use to kill an artifact or enchantment. because these capsules are so inexpensive mana-wise, we can most times return them to our hand and play them back down on the same turn.

Scourglass is another one-shot artifact that can be abused with our recursive tools. It has the potential to be a one-sided Wrath of God (assuming that we have no treasure hunters in play). Due to the slow speed of the scourglass, we'll only include a pair of them in this deck.

The big beaters we're going to use in this deck are Master of Etherium and Salvage Titan. These two can be brought out quickly and must be dealt with if your opponent wants to escape unscathed.

To finish off the main portion of this dekc we'll use some multipurpose cards, like esper charm, tidehollow scullers, etherium sculptors, and Razorman Masticores. These are just to round out the deck and give it a bit more oomph when bringing the artificial smackdown to your opponent.

After adding an appropriate mix of lands, we come up with the final decklist.

Esper Recursion - 60 cards

4 Treasure Hunter
4 Sanctum Gargoyle
4 Executioner's Capsule
3 Courier's Capsule
2 Scourglass
4 Esper Charm
4 Master of Etherium
3 Sharuum the Hegemon
2 Razormane Masticore
2 Salvage Titan
4 Tidehollow Sculler
3 Etherium Sculptor
4 Reflecting Pool
4 Arcance Sanctum
2 Mystic Gate
1 Sunken Ruins
2 Caves of Koilos
4 Underground River
4 Adarkar Wastes
1 Swamp
1 Plains
1 Island

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