Plasm Capture

By Sam Black

Sam Black is a Platinum Pro Player and longtime writer for StarCityGames.com. He is a respected deck builder and took over Daily Decks for the first half of 2013.

The card Mana Drain is absurd. At twice the mana it still seems extremely powerful. While it's possible to build a deck around exploiting eight+ mana spells with Plasm Capture as a supplemental ramp spell, I think it's better to take advantage of the mana offered by Plasm Capture to allow a deck to do something it wouldn't normally be capable of doing, to avoid flooding on redundant accelerators.

To do this, I've build a deck that can cast all of its spells while playing a normal game of Magic but that can use Plasm Capture to do something bigger than it could otherwise do or cast a threat while leaving mana up. It functions as a kind of strange, delayed-blast Rewind, if that makes sense.

This deck is designed to play as much as possible at instant speed, and especially to make any turn when I pass with four mana particularly difficult for my opponent, as I could counter his or her spell, play a 5/5, or do both if I have Rewind. Ætherling will often be the best thing to do with mana from Plasm Capture, which will allow me to put it into play with mana to protect it, and it should be able to win races pretty easily from there.

The sideboard offers Trostani against aggressive decks, which can populate tokens from Advent of the Wurm, Thragtusk, or the Voice of Resurgence that I'll bring in to block early. Voice of Resurgence also makes things extremely difficult for my opponent if I play against another control deck.