M:tG Precon Decon - Fifth Dawn Part 1: Nuts and Bolts

Nostalgic ramblings about preconstructed theme decks from Magic: the Gathering's history. In this video, I look at Nuts and Bolts from the 2004 Fifth Dawn expansion. #mtg #MagictheGathering

Card images courtesy of Gatherer, I do not own or claim to own any of the art assets used in this video. Decklist format courtesy of TappedOut.

[ReubenAotearoa.]

Hey: Steadfast Guard exists! Vigilance is an upside. But I remember Walking Corpse in Innistrad was heralded as the first bear without downside in black. So yeah, a lot of power creep to come.

A lot of weird card choices in here for sure. I know they did like to seed a few cards to provide an alternative strategy… oh. Yeah. Like you just said now.

I guess they must have had the Fifth Dawn precons locked in before Darksteel was released if Skullclamp is in here.

One copy of each Station maybe so it’s super rare to get it going but when luck goes your way: that’s a story you can talk about with your mates for a long time afterwards. “Remember that time that Dave…”

I don’t think I quite get exactly what this deck is actually trying to do. So it’s hard to decide if I like it or not. Might have to go away and swot up on it a bit more.

There was actually another series of articles by Jay Moldenhauer-Salazar on SCG where he took this deck and gradually tweaked it over a month. I think this actually ended with it becoming a somewhat powerful standard archetype: whether this was inspired by Jay’s columns or others developed similar independently I’m not sure. I might chuck something up on /r/PreconstructedMagic about it. I found it interesting even without much knowledge of this era of the game.

[NateBullock-owon]

I never thought about fold into aether played like that. Nice call!💯

[jasoncheung]

This deck was featured when Wizards banned skullclamp back in 2004. According to the article explaining the ban, they didn't realize what a monster skullclamp was until they were playtesting this deck, which by then was far too late to fix anything. Sadly, the original article page appears to be down but those of us who played through that era remember :)

[Shadow]

This deck feels like it's being pulled in two separate directions. I guess alot of the artifact search could just be to get Skullclamp into play. Not sure why all teh equipment when it could have been more spell bombs. This is a deck that feels like it was supposed to have been a Deck focused around cycling your spell bombs out of the graveyard. BUt they chickened out part way and decided to make it more equipment focused.

I agree with teh other comments one of each of teh 4 stations would have been a pretty good addition and actually make the deck feel like it's doing something.

This is probably the deck I would have bought had I bought a deck from Fifthdawn unless one of them had a Bringer in it I really liked the Bringer cycles

[Alniarez]

I have this deck from primary school (I was 9 years old I think). Played for a few months on recess with other kids.

I recently started playing again, I swapped some of the white creatures (the equipment ones) for white enchantments to try to make some of the other available creatures a bit stronger.
I also exchanged the equipments (except for skullclamp) for more some spellbombs.
It is fun to play casually.

[Hetapapa]

I had this one. Looking through it for the first time was rather underwhelming. As a kid, playing around with 1-mana artifacts did not seem very exciting. But...I changed my mind quickly after playing it once, reusing the spellbombs over and over was awesome after all. At the time I did not value carddraw as much as I should have, so scullclamp wasn't used to its full potential, but just thinking about it: equipping myr moonvessel, draw two cards, bring the myr back with auriok salvager...essentially repeatable draw 2 for 2w, quite strong imo.

Auriok-windwalker was very underwhelming as a rare, I was so dissappointed by it, I traded it for a bonesplinter and few other common/uncommons if my memory serves correctly.

I agree, cutting down on some creatures or equipments to slot in more stations and bolts to truly inspire that factory-feeling would have been even better. But as it stands, the deck certainly was unique and fun as is. Plus, the centurion made an awesome boxcover!