Milking an Interaction for All it's Worth

My Cow Discarding Obsession

Lately, I've been obsessed.  I can't stop thinking about one Limited interaction and it's driving me crazy.

Discarding Bartered Cow.

All I ever want to do in Limited is to get something for nothing.  Free spells are my jam.  Cantrips? Love 'em.  Mulligans? Hate 'em.  Bartered Cow reminds me so much of Madness, particularly Basking Rootwalla, which merely asks you to discard it to get it into play for free.  Bartered Cow itself should be left to pasture, but Merchant of the Vale and Thrill of Possibility are both great cards.  Imagining a deck where I've got a pile of ways to Discard cards, I can most easily rationalize jamming a bunch of uncastable Hill Giants into my Red decks.

A Reason to Jump Through Hoops

Instead of the classic "Chicken vs. Egg" problem, here we have a "Cow vs. Food" one.  Make no mistake, the entire point of this exercise is to see if it can be done.  As with every wacky Limited idea I've ever had, the point isn't to win more often but to test my creativity and have fun.  While I often intend to use this to become a better Magic player as a process, the primary drive comes from "What if?".  Back to our bovine friend, it's obvious to see that with multiple common enablers, discarding Bartered Cow is as easy as losing when you've mistakenly cast it. 

Our question once we've decided to explore this interaction should be, "Why bother"? We aim to find a point for our pointless exercise, some synergy or small interaction that gives us a reason to want to discard Bartered Cow for value.  As Red is lacking a single Food pay-off card, we'll have to look into another color.

Pay-offs

Living the mono-Red dream requires Elite Headhunter, and as we're interested in building our entire deck around this interaction we want more than one.  Getting two copies of a specific uncommon will be quite the stretch, although this one's mediocre and difficult for most players to cast, so less difficult than at first glance.  I've explored every color in my quest to include Bartered Cow in decks that can't cast it, and Black seems to have all of the pay-offs we can use.  Syr Konrad will ping our opponent whenever we can discard a Cow, but Bog Naughty is the real pay-off as it allows us to kill something for every Food we make.  It's much more compelling to make free Food when it's actually free copies of Terminate.

R/B is the most obvious and most probable path we can take, as it's got all of the best cards that can discard cards and the Food card we want.  It also gives us access to Elite Headhunter, meaning we're likely to find multiple pay-offs for our free Food engine.

Fleshing it all Out

Cauldron's Gift shares Bartered Cow's incentive of wanting to discard, and our deck as is won't contain enough cards.  As much as I'd like it to be worthwhile, we'll never return Bartered Cow with this, so we'll need some big idiots to discard.  We already want to play a bunch of enablers for reanimation, so putting 1-2 copies of a weak spell like this won't cost us much.  If we've got the card selection, we can always play the Harmonious Archon or Feasting Troll King we first picked, continuing our theme of putting cards in our deck not to cast them.  Much more often, we'll return Reaper of Night or Prophet of the Peak, cards well worth it with an extra +1/+1 tacked on.

While there's no real way of knowing if this is actual way to build R/B yet, it would be cowardly if I didn't try it.

Until next time,
Kevin
@sealedawaymtg on Twitter