Magic decks I have made recently

[jack]

Pyromancer's Ascension

For a long time I had a couple of copies of pyromancer's ascension (whenever you play a red instant or sorcery spell (a) if it has the same name as a card in your graveyard, put a counter on this (b) if this has two+ counters on, duplicate the spell), and eventually put them into a deck.

The trouble is, the obvious deck is four copies of as many decent red burn spells as possible, especially those you can play multiple times with flashback or retrace, plus the ascension, and Chandra Ablaze (cast all instants and sorceries in your graveyard for free). Which is not a bad deck, though I put in a couple of ruinous minotaurs to block or squeeze through damage. I don't think it's that efficient, but it's reasonably satisfying, and about half the time it goes "pyromancer's ascension, burn a creature for 2 damage, burn for 2, burn for 2, burn for 2, burn for 2, burn for 2, burn for 2, burn for 2, pyromancer's ascension is active, spire barrage you for 9 twice"

The first trouble is that if you win at all, you feel you would probably have won just as well if you simply played more burn spells instead of the enchantments, which sort of ruins the point.

The second point, is that while it's somewhat fun to burn for 18, it's not actually that interesting.

The white-blue artifact deck and the 10-land artifact deck

I wasn't playing magic when the previous artifact block Mirrodin came out, and have never played competitively. This means I didn't experience overpowered cheap-artifact decks. However, cheap artifacts are very fun. Which led to trying to build something interesting from affinity.

What I wanted was something with _no_ lands in, that would rely entirely on affinity making spells cheaper to play spells for 0. What's not to love? Alas, it's not plausible, as the vast majority of affinity cards need coloured mana as well. So I tried with 10-12 lands.

I put _in_ the on-colour artifact lands, as they're the only thing that makes this at all plausible, even though they're banned in most relevant formats, but resolved to concentrate on winning by attacking with medium-sized creatures, and leave out anything else associated with affinity decks (disciple for the vault went in as an experiment, but came out, I didn't even consider skullclamp or ravager, etc).

The ideal play is: Turn 1, dump 6 0-mana artifacts onto the table and play Myr Enforcer, Salvage Titan, Somber Hoverguard or Cranial Plating. Turn 2+: attack.

The trouble is, this is great when it works, but is destroyed if the opponent plays a 4-power creature, a creature removal spell, an artifact removal spell, or a wall. Thus, it does quite well in standing up to my other fair strong decks, but doesn't stand out among them.

The creatures are all blue (or blue/black). The other similar deck is white/blue with many esper creatures and (I think) no banned cards.

However, I've some friends who play magic mostly casually, and some friends who play magic mostly competitively, and my decks all fall somewhere between. Thus, regardless of whether it's technically legal in any non-legacy format, my strongest decks (eg. the vampire/zombie deck, the allies deck) are comparable to but still below actually competitive decks. Whereas almost none are as fun as some of Alex's "you do WHAT?" decks :)

And so, maybe this archetype is doomed, because it will never be standard-competitive, even if it were standard, but simply playing any creature which counts the number of artifacts in play produces cries of horror from people who have casual, quirky decks, because it quickly becomes overwhelming.