Old School 1997 BRG Call of the Wild Deck (Standard)

This deck uses the same card pool as the august 1997 magic world championships - 5th edition, ice age, homelands, alliances, mirage, visions, and weatherlight. At the time, nothing in Standard was restricted and Zuran Orb was the only banned card. Necropotence wasn't restricted.

I wanted to try to build a deck around Call of the Wild that was good enough to compete against the 4 decks that made it to the finals of the 1997 World Magic Championships. Originally I was thinking that I'd just put big creatures into play, but what I ended up with was a weird combination of call of the wild with lots of utility creatures and discard. I concluded that a Call of the Wild deck can really only work if it can operate independently of Call of the Wild, which this one does.

The benefits of using Call of the Wild are:

-Draw a card and put it directly into play for 2GG
-Creatures are instant speed and uncounterable
-You can blindly activate Call with an almost 50% chance at getting a creature
-Creatures don't have to be in your hand to cast
-Able to cast any creature with green mana

The deck uses only two cards to stack the top deck for COTW: 1 Sylvan Library and 3 Gravebane Zombie. Otherwise you can just activate COTW blindly. I didn't want to depend too much on stacking the deck with creatures because if you don't get COTW into play, which happens extremely often, it's not useful to have a bunch of Brainstorms, etc.

Nevinyrral's Disk is there because this deck is quite slow, so you can wipe everything if you get really behind. Also it's likely to be the target of counterspells, which can make room for COTW to resolve.

Abyssal Specter is mostly useful because it's bigger than Frenetic Efreet. Same with Catacomb Dragon.

Stupor is in there because this card pool is absolutely rife with counterspells and other cards that create a quick card advantage. I use stupor to try to knock out force of will, etc, before i cast call of the wild or sylvan library.

I used Birds of Paradise instead of Dark Ritual because it's a creature, so I can draw it with COTW if necessary. Wall of Roots is also in there because I needed early defense and it can give you a little extra mana in a pinch. Most of the cards in the deck cost 4 mana so it needs a lot.