With a dog by your side and an empty soda bottle in hand, prepare to survive Magic: The Gathering’sforay into Fallout’s alt-history radioactive wasteland with help from brand-new armor, auras, and other junk.
The latest addition to Magic’sUniverses Beyond, the ongoing series of product crossovers that feature characters from other popular franchises, ports the lore and characters from 26 years of Fallout games in a brand-new collection of preconstructed Commander decks and supplementary collector boosters. One of these new Fallout-themed decks is Scrappy Survivors, a red, white, and green mana deck that explores the popular “go tall” strategy of deck building, colloquially referred to as a Voltron deck.
Go-tall decks are designed around “building up one big, resilient creature to swing in for a bunch of damage,” according to Annie Sardelis, senior game designer for Magic: The Gathering,in an exclusive interview with Polygon. Unlike “go wide” decks, which deploy many creatures to overrun an opponent, the Voltron-style approach can close out games with just one threat that’s difficult for opponents to block or destroy.
Central to go-tall decks, and where they get the Voltron nickname from, is the suite of equipment and aura cards that attach to creatures for extra abilities, power, and defense. Like in Fallout, where your character levels up over the course of a story, the creatures in your deckare getting stronger with practically every card you play.
“I view this strategy as top-down to how your player character gets more and more powerful throughout the game, getting better gear and new perks,” Sardelis said. “We expressed many perks as auras, and iconic weapons as equipment, so you can go all in buffing up a creature with those cards.”
“The card Idolized showcases the strategy — encouraging you to attack with just one creature and in return giving it a huge stat buff,” Sardelis added.
One of the new equipment cards being introduced with this set is Fallout’swearable computer, the Pip-Boy. Like all Magic equipment, the Pip-Boy 3000 is an artifact with two costs — one mana to play the card to the battlefield, and two more mana to equip it to a creature. Though the specific costs of different equipment may vary, the multiple costs seen here to cast and equip are typical for equipment cards.
What makes the Pip-Boy 3000 particularly noteworthy are its three different functions, which provide its controller flexibility at different stages of the game. Where many equipment might just add a single buff or effect to a creature, the Pip-Boy 3000 gives players the choice of three very different effects — one to make the creature bigger, one to draw extra cards, and perhaps most interesting, one to untap lands. It essentially gives players two extra mana to use per turn on other spells or effects.
Go-tall strategies have a couple common pitfalls that make them vulnerable to opponents who have ways to destroy creatures. Scrappy Survivors introduces some new solutions to this situation, using creatures to keep your power-ups in play, along with the new junk mechanic to help you keep drawing cards. That’s further reinforced by Scrappy Survivors’ face card, Dogmeat, Ever Loyal, which has a built-in ability to search the Wasteland — that is, your graveyard — to get back cards that were previously removed from play.
“One weakness that ‘go-tall’ strategies have is that they are very all-in. You invest a lot into a single creature, and if this creature is removed, you can be set back a lot,” Sardelis explained. “We wanted to leverage the graveyard to recoup your lost resources. As other players answer your one big threat, your graveyard will inevitably have a bunch of auras in it (and possibly equipment as well). There are a few cards in the deck that help get back cards from the graveyard in addition to Dogmeat, Ever Loyal. The reason Dogmeat mills five cards is to give you extra selection if you cast him early in the game before your graveyard has a bunch of cards in it.”
One of the other new cards in the deck, Cass, Hand of Vengeance, works alongside your tallest threats to mitigate the setback of creatures dying after you’ve invested cards and mana to attach equipment and auras to them. Like Dogmeat, Cass makes good use of the graveyard to keep the Voltron deck resilient to removal effects, as long as there’s still a creature on the board to gain those power-ups.
Another exciting addition to the go-tall archetype is Mister Gutsy, a new robot soldier who effectively benefits from the buffs you play for other creatures.
In games where Mister Gutsy is on the battlefield alongside another creature, he gets his own +1/+1 counters whenever you play equipment or auras for the other creatures under your control. While he might not get additional perks such as flying or deathtouch, which certain buffs might provide, he can still become a tall threat on his own without having to use cards or mana on buffing him directly. And, in the event that Gutsy is also destroyed, he leaves some extra junk tokens lying around to keep the game going.
The introduction of junk tokens, an added piece of material that enters with various cards across the Fallout release, is another way to help players go through their decks for additional creatures or power-ups.
“‘Go-tall’ strategies rely on drawing and playing cards in a specific order,” Sardelis said. “You don’t want to have a hand full of auras and equipment with no creatures to attach them to. However, your deck is full of these non-creature spells, so being able to filter through them with additional card draw should help the consistency of the strategy a little bit.”
Magic’sfour new Fallout commander decks and premium collector boosters go on sale March 8 online and at your local game store.
