“The low antarctic sun of midnight peered redly from the southern horizon through rifts in the jagged ruins, and the terrible age and deadness of the nightmare city seemed all the starker by contrast with such relatively known and accustomed things as the features of the polar landscape. The sky above was a churning and opalescent mass of tenuous ice-vapours, and the cold clutched at our vitals…”
—H.P. Lovecraft, “At the Mountains of Madness”
In this black and blue pack, we aim to keep the opponent at bay with the Rimebound Dead and wintery shades until we can manage to release Thing in the Ice or Marit Lage. That’s it. That’s the strategy.
Advent 11: The Thing in the Ice
| Creatures (6) 1 Blizzard Specter 1 Chilling Shade 1 Thing in the Ice 1 Frozen Shade 1 Rimebound Dead 1 Zombie Musher Artifacts (1) 1 Arcum's Astrolabe Spells (4) 1 Dead of Winter 1 Deathmark 1 Marit Lage's Slumber 1 Aether Snap | Lands (9) 1 Frost Marsh 1 Dark Depths 3 Snow-Covered Island 4 Snow-Covered Swamp |
Unfortunately, executing the strategy is not easy. Marit Lage’s Slumber requires a lot to go right as we move toward landing ten snow permanents. This pack contains 14, and so synergizes best with other packs containing snow permanents (including lands). If we can’t get to 10 permanents or four instants or sorceries, there’s always Aether Snap to suddenly remove all counters and break these ancient horrors free from their icy prisons. Can our opponent handle what secrets lay hidden beneath the ice?
“Wearily resting the outfit-bags to which we had instinctively clung throughout our desperate flight, we rebuttoned our heavy garments for the stumbling climb down the mound and the walk through the aeon-old stone maze to the foothills where our aëroplane waited. Of what had set us fleeing from the darkness of earth’s secret and archaic gulfs we said nothing at all.”
—Lovecraft, “At the Mountains of Madness”
Jacob Torbeck is a researcher and instructor of theology and ethics. He hails from Chicago, IL, and loves playing Commander and pre-modern cubes.