Pulse of Murasa is Still Misunderstood
Pulse of Murasa is a card with a bright future. It is not yet fully understood, or widely enough played.
Patrick and Michael start in a strange place… A Grixis deck that won a recent PPTQ in the hands of Zak Elisk:
Zak Elisk Grixis
2 Duress
3 Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet
3 Murderous Cut
3 Painful Truths
2 Rakshasa’s Secret
2 Ruinous Path
1 Tasigur, the Golden Fang
1 Dig Through Time
4 Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy
2 Kolaghan’s Command
1 Pulse of Murasa
2 Chandra, Flamecaller
4 Fiery Impulse
2 Goblin Murk Dwellers
2 Roast
4 Bloodstained Mire
1 Cinder Glade
1 Island
2 Mountain
4 Polluted Delta
2 Smoldering Marsh
2 Sunken Hollow
2 Swamp
4 Wandering Fumarole
4 Wooded Foothills
sideboard:
2 Rakshasa’s Secret
1 Transgress the Mind
3 Disdainful Stroke
2 Dispel
1 Exert Influence
2 Pulse of Murasa
2 Kozilek’s Return
1 Roast
1 Sarkhan the Dragonspeaker
It turns out this is a Gerry Thompson deck from a recent article! (which is probably part of the reason Mike likes it so much to begin with)
… But they end up in an unanticipated place.
Pulse of Murasa is sweet, right?
Pulse of Murasa v. Renewed Faith
Renewed Faith
Renewed Faith was, once upon a time, a tournament Staple. It was awesome and flexible. It could cycle you into a land, or get your six life. It did everything a control deck might want…
Pulse of Murasa is kind of like both halves of Renewed Faith. For one more mana than a cycled Renewed Faith, Pulse of Murasa is both halves. You get six life, and keep the land!
One of Mike’s ideas is to run Pulse of Murasa in a conjectural sixty-four card deck. Keying in on the Ben Rubin strategy of playing a bigger deck in order to accommodate more fetch lands as tutors, Mike posits hybridizing with a further [real] tutor engine of Bring to Light. An additional tutor theme will further pay off a larger deck size.
Patrick responds with an interesting question:
Why not sixty-eight cards?
If you’re going to play Five-color Bring to Light anyway… What about 20 + 5 + 5?
Patrick points out that by playing even more cards than BR did you can play all five colors but have better mana than a sixty card deck with twenty-seven lands!
Patrick presents a hypothetical mana base of:
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Flooded Strand
4 Polluted Delta
4 Windswept Heath
4 Wooded Foothills
1 Forest
1 Island
1 Mountain
1 Plains
1 Swamp
1 Canopy Vista
1 Cinder Glade
1 Prairie Stream
1 Smoldering Marsh
1 Sunken Hollow
… THIRTY lands [in a sixty-six card deck]
Each of the fetch lands is effectively a “quad land”. You will draw a lower percentage of battle lands and a lower percentage of basics; and a greater percentage of the fetch lands that can each get four of the five colors!
This is a mana base that maximizes the ability to hit more, different, colors and a huge percentage of your lands will enter the battlefield untapped!
Bloodstained Mire
- Cannot get white
- Can get black via any Swamp
- Can get blue via Sunken Hollow
- Can get red via any Mountain
- Can get green via Cinder Glade
Flooded Strand
- Can get white via any Plains
- Can get black via Sunken Hollow
- Can get blue via any Island
- Cannot get red
- Can get green via Canopy Vista
Polluted Delta
- Can get white via Prairie Stream
- Can get black via any Swamp
- Can get blue via any Island
- Can get red via Smoldering Marsh
- Cannot get green
Windswept Heath
- Can get white via any Plains
- Cannot get black
- Can get blue via Prairie Stream
- Can get red via Cinder Glade
- Can get green via any Forest
Wooded Foothills
- Can get white via Canopy Vista
- Can get black via Smoldering Marsh
- Cannot get blue
- Can get red via any Mountain
- Can get green via any Forest
What follows is a truly Innovative discussion of a new approach to deck design, plus a rundown of all the current top Standard archetypes.
You simply can’t miss “Pulse of Murasa is Still Misunderstood”
