#grapeshot

Grapeshot

Mages often seek to emulate the powerful relics lost to time and apocalypse.

I really don't understand why the National Guards used the wrong purposed shots to the barricade. First, they fired just roundshot, which only got stucked from the structure of the barricade in 5.1.7.

Normal roundshots are like modern APC shells or specificily APFSDS shells, which only penetrate the target only with physical so it's no use in soft targets like barricade. So they changed the projectiles, but this time, it's grapeshot.

It's buckshots for cannons and its main targets are infantries, like modern APERS shells. In <Napoleon 2023> they even showed how to use.

Still though, it's for human or horses at that time, not on the structure. If the National Guards tried to break the barricade away, they should have used Shrapnels or Explosive shells instead.

These wooden containers, found packed with flint, are canister shot, which would be loaded into the ships guns and fired, fragmenting and sending sharp shrapnel towards the enemy, destroying rigging and seriously injuring personnel.

These represent the three types of canister shot recovered from the Mary Rose and were made before 1545:

Cylindrical lantern shot: Manufactured in a similar fashion to lanterns, panels mounted to discs at either end.

Cylindrical canister: a single piece of wood cut in half lengthways and hollowed out to provide a central container, led together with string.

Conical lantern shot: Tapering staves are bound together to form a cone. A separate top is pegged to the ends of the staves.

In the course of the 18th century, these shots developed into the canister shots and the grapeshots

Artillery shot-canister for a 12-pounder cannon from the US Civil War era

Canister shots now have a metal canister and are filled with round lead or iron balls that are packed with sawdust to give the mass more strength and cohesion and to prevent the balls from crowding each other when fired.

Stool of Grapeshot, 1800-24

Mages often seek to emulate the powerful relics lost to time and apocalypse.

On the 10th of February, 1722, Welsh pirate Captain Bartholomew Roberts was killed in battle at age 39 by the British Royal Navy near Cape Lopez. Previously on the 5th, his ships, Royal Fortune, Ranger, and Little Ranger were currently undergoing careening when Captain Chaloner Ogle of the HMS Swallow happened across them. The Swallow pretended to be a merchant vessel and enticed the not-yet careened Ranger to pursue. After opening fire unexpectedly, the Ranger was gunned into submission and forced to surrender, with the rest of the crew being captured. 

On the 10th, the Swallow returned to Cape Lopez after dropping off the prisoners, surprisingly to find the Royal Fortune still there. Roberts had just captured the Neptune off the coast the previous day, and with most of the crew intoxicated from celebrating, they believed the HMS Swallow approaching to be the Ranger returning to regroup. Roberts was having breakfast with the defeated Captain Hill of the Neptune when he was informed it was not in fact the Ranger. According to ‘Charles Johnson’ he: “...made himself a gallant figure at the time of engagement, being dressed in a rich crimson damask waistcoat and breeches, a red feather in his hat, a gold chain round his neck with a diamond cross hanging to it, a sword in his hand, and two pairs of pistols slung over his shoulders.” The plan was to flee. But it would involve sailing past the Swallow, exposing themselves to a broadside, but if they could weather it, they would escape. The helmsman however failed to keep the Royal Fortune on course, allowing the Swallow to deliver a secondary broadside. Roberts was killed instantly by grapeshot striking him in the throat while standing on deck. The crew immediately fulfilled his wish to be buried at sea and weighed him down and cast him off the ship mid-battle with all his arms and ornaments (a request he’d repeated multiple times).The battle continued for two more hours without Roberts, until the Mainmast fell and they were forced to surrender. In total, Bartholomew Roberts and two crewmen had been killed. A total of 272 pirates were captured from the Royal Fortune, Little Ranger and those left on the beach. Of those captured, 54 were later condemned to death by hanging, the 65 African crewmembers were sold into slavery, 17 were taken to the Marshalsea Prison, and another 20 were put into indentured servitude by the Royal African Company. Others were taken to Cape Coast Castle or died on the voyage after capture.

Welp, here it is! Sorry for the long wait, I hope this makes up for it a little. Decklist is not complete, treat this post as more of guide on how to approach a Cheerios style EDH deck and what to keep in mind while building it. 

What is Cheerios? No, we aren’t talking about the delicious breakfast cereal when we reference “Cheerios” in MtG! The deck archetype “Cheerios” is named such after the fact that the main win con of the deck is 0 mana costed artifacts, which resemble the O shape of a Cheerio!  Now that we’ve defined Cheerios, how does it win?  Cheerios win thru a few factors but primarily by taking advantage of an old boogie man mechanic called Storm! With most Cheerio combos we cycle thru loops of free casting 0 costed spells, gaining a huge storm count and then casting one giant spell (like Grapeshot) to one shot an opponent! Cheerios can also utilize EtB and LtB effects but they’re not as common. Why Jodah as our Commander? Wouldn’t Breya be a better Commander? While normally yes, I would agree that Breya is one of the best toolbox artifact commanders and would deff be a great fit for the archetype Cheerios, I don’t usually do meta, and Breya is very linear and boring to me. Don’t get me wrong, if you have Breya I fully encourage you to run her! She’s an AMAZING artifact commander, just not one I want to run in this deck. Jodah gives us access to all 5 colors of Magic, and this can be very powerful and very limiting at the same time. But that’s what makes this deck exciting! I’ve tried to work a few smaller combos and support cards into the deck to help us smooth out the rough edges that come with running 5 colors. Let’s dive right on in.

The Breakfast Cereal Combo

First off we need a creature or permanent (in this case mostly creatures) that lets us draw cards when we cast our 0 mana costed artifacts. For this purpose I enlisted Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain, Sram Senior Edificer, and Puresteel Paladin for their help. With an Artificer’s Assistant out we can filter our draws more when we cast our artifacts to get the good stuff faster.  Now for the big problem we run into with running a Cheerios deck in EDH: the 99. We have a lot of cards to filter thru and cast to kill someone with 40ish life. Good thing we have a lot of 0 mana costed artifcts, to list a good few: Accorder’s Shield, Bone Saw, Chrome Mox, Claws of Gix, Dark Sphere, Darksteel Relic, Everflowing Chalice, Fountain of Youth, Kite Shield, Lodestone Bauble, Herbal Poltice, Mana Crypt, Memnite, Mishra’s Bauble, Ornithopter, Paradice Mantle, Phyrexian Walker, Mox Amber, Mox Opal, Shield Sphere, Spellbook, Spidersilk Net, Tormod’s Crypt, Urza’s Bauble, Welding Jar and Zuran Orb.  That’s a fairly long list, you don’t have to use all of them but redundancy is key in EDH. Some of them also provide a nice toolbox effect with cards like Tormod’s Crypt to hose graveyard, the Moxs and Paradise Mantle to fix mana, and Spellbook to let us hold onto our big draws. We have a base for our brew!

Tutoring Effects

Generally I know that tutors can be frowned upon in certain playgroup, but for this combo, we need to assemble our pieces. For creature tutoring I’m using cards like Time of Need, Primal Command, Birthing Pod, Jarad’s Orders, Brutalizer Exarch, Eladamir’s Call, Fauna Shaman and Eldritch Evolution. I’ll explain why we run cards like Birthing Pod, Fauna Shaman and Eldritch Evolution here in just a moment, but with these cards we can tutor up most of our combo creatures or utility creatures whichever fits our need at the time. 

With artifact tutoring we have Trinket Mage, Trophy Mage, Treasure Mage, Fabricate, Artificer’s Intuition, Enlightened Tutor, Tezzeret the Seeker, Whir of Invention, Sphinx’s Summoner, and Reshape. Some of these spells require the sacrificing of artifacts but fear not, we will have ways to recur them back! In EDH, only in exile can things find eternal rest. 

Tutoring for the rest we run cards like Spellseeker, Mystical Tutor, Mystical Teachings, and Merchant Scroll to get our instant/sorceries and you know about black tutors like Vampiric and Demonic, I hope I don’t have to explain too much about them to cover the rest. Transmute is also an amazing ability we can’t forget about!

Now that we’ve covered all the tutors, let’s talk a bit about the utility of our permanents that tutor. The Mage trio (Trinket, Treasure, Trophy), Brutalizer Exarch and Spellseeker are good examples of why we run cards like Birthing Pod, Eldritch Evolution and Fauna Shaman. On EtB we get our tutor effect but once the creature is in play it’s done its part. We are a toolbox deck and everything has value to us in one way or another. By running Birthing Pod we can sacrifice the Trinket Mage to search up Teshar, Ancestor’s Apostle and thus bringing us to our next segment. 

The Teshar Combo

This deck runs a lot of artifacts and smaller creatures, so we can take advantage of that using cards like Teshar, Ancestor’s Apostle (I’ve been trying to find a way to break Teshar so badly!). Using the Birthing Pod  method we can sac Trinket Mage to the the Pod to fetch up Teshar and begin some shenanigans. You will need a free creature sac outlet (such as but not limited to: Phyrexian Altar or Ashnod’s Altar) to really keep the combo going.  We can try this combo: 1) Have Ashnod’s Altar out on the field with Teshar.  2) Cast the Trinket Mage, go fetch a cheerio to hand.  3) Sacrifice the Mage to the Altar to get 2 colorless mana. 4) Play the cheerio we fetched for free to trigger Teshar, bringing back our Trinket Mage to go get another cheerio.  5) Loop as many times as needed until all your 0 and 1 mana costed artifacts are out of your deck and you have an excess of colorless mana to spend however you want.  If we sacrifice Teshar to the Pod however, we can use it to go tutor up a Phyrexian Delver, and use Delver’s ability to return to our bird friend to play with the small expense of a few life, then continue to chain the Delver into bigger threats like Sun Titan and  Brutalizer Exarch. 

So what do I do with all this nonsense?

Win with the jankiest combos possible. I’ve shown you how the basics work and how to enable your combo, now you need to win! 

Burn them to death with Molten Nursery and Grapeshot, amass an army of Golems with Golem Foundry. If you need a higher spell count, Hurkyl’s Recall and Retract can bounce your artifacts to give you more spell casts. Don’t forget about Aetherflux Resevoir either. 

(After post edit: Birthing Pod and Prime Speaker Vannifar are interchangeable or run both for redundancy!)