Lands:
1 Academy Ruins
1 Ancient Den
2 Cascade Bluffs
4 Flooded Strand
1 Great Furnace
1 Hallowed Fountain
1 Island
1 Mountain
1 Plains
1 Polluted Delta
3 Rugged Prairie
2 Sacred Foundry
2 Steam Vents
1 Tolaria West
1 Windswept Heath
1 Wooded Foothills
Creatures:
1 Body Double
3 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
3 Kitchen Finks
4 Pestermite
2 Reveillark
3 Trinket Mage
Other Spells:
1 Chalice of the Void
1 Chrome Mox
2 Engineered Explosives
1 Firespout
3 Gifts Ungiven
4 Mana Leak
1 Pithing Needle
1 Pyrite Spellbomb
1 Resurrection
1 Sunbeam Spellbomb
3 Thirst for Knowledge
1 Wrath of God
Sideboard:
1 Duergar Hedge-Mage
1 Ethersworn Canonist
1 Firespout
1 Gilded Light
1 Hurkyl's Recall
1 Kataki, War's Wage
1 Pact of Negation
1 Rule of Law
1 Shatterstorm
1 Sower of Temptation
1 Stifle
1 Tormod's Crypt
1 Trickbind
1 Volcanic Fallout
1 Wrath of God |
  Kiki-Jiki
ges Friki-Diki 2009 Extended.
Description of deck by Mike Flores @ www.wizards.com
(quoted):
Jonathan Loucks, one of the designers behind
last year's popular Makeshift Mannequin deck, was the actual winner of
the Seattle PTQ where Bill Stark made Top 8. In a star-studded Top 8,
Jonathan defeated former Magic Academy writer and Grand Prix Champion
Jeff ""ffej"" Cunningham in the finals.
So how does this cool new deck work?
In essence it is a hybrid combo-control deck. The
""obvious"" combination is Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker + Pestermite. Kiki-Jiki
copies a Pestermite, a Pestermite token comes into play, untapping Kiki-Jiki.
Rinse and repeat to set up essentially infinite damage (you can just
keep untapping Kiki-Jiki with incremental Pestermite tokens so you are
not limited to 20 damage as you are with some combo decks).
The hybrid wings work like this: Notice the power on
Kiki-Jiki and Pestermite? That's right. They are just powerful enough to
hang with Reveillark. Reveillark (and the numerous strategic singletons)
also work well with Gifts Ungiven. Now imagine we live in a dream world
where the opponent would do what I am about to describe (for
illustration's sake).
You play Gifts Ungiven and find Kiki-Jiki, Mirror
Breaker, Reveillark, Pestermite, and Body Double. The opponent buries
the combo pieces, leaving you with Reveillark and Body Double. You can
untap, play your fifth land and the Chrome Mox, evoke Reveillark, and go
ahead and kill with your combo.
On top of all of this, Jonathan's deck is also a
Trinket Mage deck, and a pretty good one; Spellbombs, Explosives,
Chalice of the Void, and so on are easily available. The Trinket Mage
can even go Civic Wayfinder, grabbing Great Furnace for red mana, or
Ancient Den for white (remember: if you are using Trinket Mage to fix
your mana, you probably already have a blue source).
So why play this kind of a deck over some of the
faster, harder-to-counter combo decks such as Elves or Storm? The reason
is pretty simple .... This is a two-card kill that you can actually
cast. Imagine just running out a Pestermite on the opponent's turn, then
untapping, playing Kiki-Jiki, and winning on the spot. While a bit
little slower than Elves, and a little more open to interaction than
Storm, the sheer ease of this combo makes it attractive in a deck that
can also play a ""regular"" game of progressive card advantage.
My inclination was—at least originally—to make this a
faster, more consistent, combo deck. I was going to cut the Kitchen
Finks, but ....
Kitchen Finks, while seemingly out of place in this
build, offers an important backup plan. Unlike many combo decks, this
one can actually present problems—and ride card advantage—even when its
most flamboyant way to win has been cut off. In the finals, Cunningham's
modified Bant deck played Cranial Extracion taking Kiki-Jiki out of the
equation. Jonathan was able to regroup and win with Kitchen Finks
beatdown (after landing Pithing Needle on Umezawa's Jitte of course); it
was just Finks, Trinket Mages, and Reveillarks in the red zone, winning
essentially a fair fight—but one where Loucks had all the routes to card
advantage.
All in all, I feel like Jonathan's is one of the most
inventiveand surprizingly flexible – PTQ winners to have come out this
season. It is a rare deck that both has a potential turn-four kill and
can play essentially The Rock-style Magic well enough to win an ordinary
long game against decks that either don't demand a fast combo or are
sitting on a Mogg Fanatic. |