by John Cletus

Created on: August 20, 2010

Playing online in Classic has become much more enjoyable as more older sets have come online and as more sets have rotated out of extended. What was originally a cut throat play area with most kills occurring in the first four to five turns has now relaxed into a casual environment.

Some people dream of attaining vast wealth or popularity. I have a dream that’s very similar and very different; I dream of the day when I can combine a series of otherwise simple and direct Magic cards in a new way to win games. Cleaning out my desk drawer, which was filled with equal parts scrawled drivel and old bill statements, I found one such past deck list based around one old card that is both near and dear to my heart: Ravenous Rats. With the recent plummet of some duel land cards, namely Watery Grave and Drowned Catacombs, I decided to take the opportunity to live part of my lifelong dream and assembled Rats’ Realm.

Ravenous Rats is a simple creature that was, until recently, an ongoing part of Core sets for some time and was also reprinted in a Portal expansion and Invasion. For two mana you get a 1/1 body and your opponent has to discard a card. It’s a pretty basic and unexciting ability, if it hits just once. Rats’ Realm combines Ravenous Rats (and it’s second cousin, Rotting Rats) with blue bounce spells to keep as many creatures off the field as possible, and each time you replay Ravenous Rats, your opponent will have to discard an additional card. Once your opponent has no cards left in their hand, and the board is stalemated, Possessed Portal comes down to lock down the game. If you opponent has no answers to remove the Portal, they will most likely be unable to get any, and if you can bog damage to your life for a few turns, then the Portal will erode your opponent's defenses. The key to not losing to your own portal is by using cards that return from the graveyard back to your hand: Death by a Thousand Stings and Exile into Darkness.

Here’s the deck list:
Creatures (12):
4x Ravenous Rats
3x Rotting Rats
1x Akuta, Born of Ash
4x Riftwing Cloudskate

Spells (27):
1x Ponder
1x Preordain
1x Raven’s Crime
2x Elsewhere Flask
2x Sword of the Meek
4x AEther Burst
3x Peel from Reality
2x Oversold Cemetery
1x Buried Alive
3x Recoil
2x Mutilate
1x Exile into Darkness
1x Death of a Thousand Stings
1x Evacuation
2x Possessed Portal

Land (22):
4x Drowned Catacomb
2x Tainted Isle
4x Watery Grave
6x Island
6x Swamp

There are a lot of singleton inclusions here, a symptom

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