Born to Bounce

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
I've decided to go through my collection and build casual decks of various flavors. I might eventually turn this into a real project with some goal or something, but right now I'm just messing around. Some of the decks that I build will be totally scrubtastic and others will be overpowered, perhaps with some in between.

This is a callback to my old "Retrieval" deck. I originally built a bounce-oriented deck in 1999. I used things like Cloud Spirit and Rishadan Airship alongside Unsummon and Word of Undoing, slowing opponents down while swinging with flying attackers. It was probably a pretty terrible deck, and I certainly didn't have a lot of cards back then. I don't remember what all was in it, but one of my favorite interactions was to put Essence Flare on a Thran War Golem, something I thought was really good back then for some reason. After Invasion came out, I took the deck apart and rebuilt it as a blue/black deck, including Phrexian Infiltrator, Urborg Emissary, and Recoil, among other things. A few years later, I took that apart in order to make "Neo-retrieval." This was monoblue again, but had some better cards in it, such as Evacuate, Black Vise, and Temporal Adept. I think it stuck around until I pooled my cards with Al0ysiusHWWW, at which point he scrapped all of my bad decks for parts.

If I really wanted to, I could build a bouncy-themed deck that is fairly strong, at least for a casual deck. That's not what I set out to do here. Instead, I sifted through my collection, pulled stuff out that looked like it fit, sleeved some of it up with some islands, tested it against the BFZ event deck, got trounced, then edited it to fix some of the more glaring weaknesses. As I build more decks, I'll go bigger budget and/or actually buy cards to fine-tune them, but this was really just going with what I had lying around. I'm inclined to make some further adjustments, but it's close enough to where I want it that I'll post my list here...

4x Cloudskate
3x Man-o'-War
3x Serendib Efreet
2x Stormbound Geist
2x Somnophore
4x Æther Burst
4x Snap
3x Peel from Reality
3x Lost in the Mist
2x Undo
2x Pulse of the Grid
2x Crush of Tentacles
1x Snapback
1x Mana Vapors
1x Cyclonic Rift
1x Evacuation
22x Island

Somnophore doesn't bounce anything, but I really wanted to use the card in a deck. Opening up the "Tombstone" precon with Somnophore as the box art was a sort of turning point in which I finally started piecing together how to build coherent Magic decks, rather than just random piles of cards. I should eventually find a better home for the little guy. It probably just gets hit by kill spells in many games, but it's great for outpacing opponents that don't or can't answer it. This is pretty aggressive for a scrubby blue deck, but cards like Lost in the Mist and Crush of Tentacles can keep me from being overtaken by a midrange deck, potentially.

I'll mostly be moving on to my next creation, so I won't give the deck a lot of attention. That means suggestions are very welcome. I'm discontent with the deck right now anyway, since I can't tell whether it wants to be more aggro than it is or more control than it is...
 
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