Fun with crap-rares: Brass Herald

[jorael]

2-3 years ago our small playgroup loved tribal decks. Cards like Strength of Night and enlistment officer were awesome. And of course brass herald was too. A lot.

Artifact Creature - Golem (6)
As Brass Herald comes into play, choose a creature type.
When Brass Herald comes into play, reveal the top four cards of your library. Put all creature cards of the chosen type revealed this way into your hand and the rest on the bottom of your library in any order.
Creatures of the chosen type get +1/+1.
2/2

Everyone played with it, because if your decks contained enough creatures, it was a great card drawing engine and a poor man's crusade (actually, shared triumph) combined! Elves, soldiers, zombies, merfolk, drakes. They all had Brass Herald to back them up.

Then Onslaught came, and all was good for a while. Tribal decks got a firm boost and Brass Herald was still included in a lot of decks by a lot of players. But as the tribal decks got more and more other tribal-oriented creatures to work with, Brass Herald slowly but gradually dissapeared. He just didn't make the cut.

After tribal block, magic went to artifact land. Tribal? Schmibal. Artifacts became THE thing and noone cared what kind of type creatures were. His younger cousin brass man saw even more play. Apparently, sucking up to trinket mage helped, but Brass Herald refused to do such a thing. He tried to become friends with the new Golems on the block and suggested to become a tribe together. Oh he tried, but every Golem just laughed at him. "What, no landaffinity? Poor chap". They even ripped out the eye of his twin brother Ur when his brother suggested that the Golem tribe could use it's own kind of gauntlets...

The year went by and his owner Jorael kept ignoring him in his tradebinder. Then, three days ago, as his page got turned, he saw Jorael actually looking at all the old brown-colored artifacts. Could it be? Would he finally get some action? He dared not to hope, but alas! What was that in his hand? Bone Harvest! Just when he wanted to scream "I can combo with that!" Jorael picked him up and he got sleeved. Sleeved! Oh the extacy! At last, after all those months he was put into a deck. The tribe wasn't the most friendly one around, but it didn't matter, he did his trick and strengthened the tribe, just as he was supposed to....

Black Knight, Big City

24 Swamp

3 Bone Harvest
3 Expunge
3 Contagion
2 Wail of the Nim
2 Nightmare Lash

4 Fallen Askari
4 Black Knight
4 Cadaverous Knight
4 Dauthi Mercenary
4 Order of Yawgmoth
3 Brass Herald

 

[jorael]

Got a bit carried away there.....

I just wanted to ask, does anyone use Brass Herald these days? Did you play with them at all? This card has always been the alternative to Coat of Arms in our playgroup. Heck, there used to be soooo many tribal decks running rampant that Brass Herald would have been the better card to use. Pumping up an opponents tribe isn't that great...

Brass Herald has that nostalgic feeling for me. So I want to make some decks with it again. Any ideas? Has anyone succesfully made an actual golem deck?

 

[orgg]

If the Herald cost five, I'd run him much more.

I do occasionally utilise him online, though. He works very well in my Golem Discard tribal deck.

 

[Killerbob]

I play a lot of tribal, but this guy is soo overcosted, so I never used him.
Anyway, he will of course fit with the stuff that fits with the other "ringleader type" creatures:

Black: bone harvest
blue: ancestral memories
green: sylvan library/mirris guile
red: cant think of other than the recruiters
white: reinforcements

Maybe an elf deck could benefit from him. They can pay 6 mana, and would very much like to get +1/+1.

 

[jorael]

Orgg, The golem discard deck sounds interesting. could you post your decklist?

 

[Istanbul]

He's a lot of fun with Conspiracy, too.

 

[Limited]

I use the heralds in my samurai deck.. They may have honor, but they suck at drawing cards..

 

[Spiderman]

I tried using the Herald in my Barbarian deck about a year ago... but never really concentrated on it to improve it, so it probably wouldn't be much help.

 

[jorael]

Brass Band of Brothers
4 Volcanic
4 Mirrodin's Core
16 Island

4 Battered Golem
4 Junktroller (originally Rusting Golem)
4 Spire Golem
4 Brass Herald
4 Bosh Iron Golem

4 Ideas Unbound
4 Thirst for Knowlegde
4 Bone Harvest
4 Cryptic Gateway

I finally made a deck that really uses Brass Herald (I thank Orgg for giving me the idea).

When playing this deck deck, you just start drawing cards and ditch all the golems to the graveyard (yes graveyard removal kills this deck). After you have enough mana sources, you can ditch lands to obtain more threads. You play some early blockers and hopefully get a Gateway. Then you use Bone Harvest to put a bunch of golems on top and fetch them with Brass Herald. Battered Golem is surprisingly useful at that stage: with him in play you can drop all the golems at once (each of them untaps Battered Golem when it comes into play and you'll have 2 untapped golems again to use with the Gateway).

Bosh is a real killer. I added him for creature removal, but often it is more useful to throw your heavy costed (heavy) metal buddies to an opponent's head. Thanks to Bone Harvest you'll have a guaranteed supply of them, even late game. Junktroller is a try-out. I previously used Rusting Golem: early beats/defense, but the graveyard ability is often useful in multiplayer.

It's a fun deck. Nothing compared to a well tuned Sneak Attack deck, but that's ok IMO. Casual beats indeed.