Magic Online can be such a tricky system. I’ve been using it since Kamigawa Block for leisurely in-home drafting, where I can play any number of 4-3-2-2’s not because I distrust my skill at Limited but because sometimes, just sometimes, while I’m in the middle of a draft I decide to go do something else like go out for ice cream with my girlfriend. I’d rather not feel tied to the computer for another hour if a better leisure activity appears (… like staying in with my girlfriend…) when I’m trying to have fun, and it all remains enjoyable because largely my use of the program pays for itself in winnings.
While my MTGO usage is surprisingly casual, over the past six months I’ve put quite a more focused bent on my play at the PTQ level, and with the advent of Magic Online as a qualifier series for Worlds, one would have to assume that with one Worlds “PTQ” a month online that I would eventually commit myself to actually playing in them. For the Season One championships, I started racking up points in the early season because I enjoy drafting, but then stopped actually trying when I realized that the event was scheduled against my monthly LARP weekend. (The moral of the story is that I should learn to look at a calendar, because Saturday morning and Sunday morning are not the same thing.) For the Season Two championships, I got about halfway there and then decided I was going to fly to Seattle for the Grand Prix that weekend instead, and thus never bothered to complete the “get fifteen points” problem and playtested Standard instead.
For Season Three… I had some new and rather interesting difficulties. I’d racked up three points in the week following the Season Two championships playoff, just for the joy of drafting, three draft wins in a row that saw me riding high and rocking the Esper shard in triple-Alara Reborn draft. It may have been dumb but according to the leaderboards, it counted… even if my deck was about six or seven cards, all with the numbers “2,” “3,” or in one case “5” in front of them. This is (in-context) the best draft deck I have ever had:
5 Ethercaste Knight
2 Esper Stormblade
3 Esper Shieldmage
4 Arsenal Thresher
3 Glassdust Hulk
2 Crystallization
2 Thopter Foundry
2 Ardent Plea
1 Fieldmist Borderpost
8 Plains
8 Island
I didn’t lose a game, it wasn’t close, and I tried to repeat this as often as possible for the next few drafts, figuring the only cards I wanted that other people seemed to care about were Esper Stormblade and Crystallization. This left me with tickets and packs to spare, and I was a very happy little drafter. I considered myself at least somewhat serious about qualifying for the Season Three championships, and well-positioned to make a run at fifteen points despite the fact that I don’t have the collection to support any Constructed events or really the time to commit to PE’s. Magic Online really does seem to be a younger man’s game, even moreso than paper Magic, because you can chase the PE schedule round the clock but not if you have to work in the morning. The last PE I played in was a playtest PE (covered in an article here) and involved Ohran Viper in Constructed. That was also, I believe, the first PE I played in. The fact that a PE Top 8 was worth three points was grand, but just not relevant to me. About four points a week would qualify me for the Season Three Championships, and I was well on my way towards that just drafting merrily.
And then disaster struck. (Okay, maybe not ‘disaster’. But definitely ‘viruses’.) I spent most of the next week fighting viruses on my PC, viruses that were stopping many programs from working and starting to choke shut my internet connection entirely instead of just my MTGO. This was something new and insidious that my antiviral programs weren’t yet aware of the existence of, but it was clearly corrupting bunches of software and spreading all over the place… so I spent much of the following week uninstalling and reinstalling software, including my antiviral programs, as it turns out it wasn’t an especially new virus but it had corrupted my antiviral software before my software realized it existed. I’m not very good at computers, which is why back in the 90’s my handle on #mtgpro (when I wasn’t banned by PTR for the fun of it) was Mennenite. (Part humor in the flavor of “why are the Amish on the internet?” and part humor in wondering how long it would take people to realize I’d intentionally mis-spelled Mennonite. No, they never did. Instead they decided that I liked Men, NE Nite. Awkward.) My not being very good at computers cost me a week chasing the leaderboards, and suddenly I went from being a bit ahead of the chase and comfortable that I was on target to way behind in my goals.
Finally, I got Magic Online back online. To give you an idea of my sheer tenacity, I realized the “I might want to go and get ice cream instead of play the finals…” argument was thrown out the window, and I was queuing up 8-4’s. It’s funny how much harder it is to try and draft Esper in an 8-4 than a 4-3-2-2, like everyone is aware that it’s the best archetype in one type of queue and happily clueless in the other. In 4-3-2-2’s, I could reliably get Esper decks, and was happy to force it from the first pick by taking a high preference on any Esper card over far better cards for other archetypes, taking Arcane Sanctum over Branching Bolt because I knew I’d get passed the goods if I forced hard enough. In 8-4’s, someone probably better at the game than me, but much more importantly somewhere to the right of me, was actually taking the Esper cards instead of passing me fourth-pick Tower Gargoyles, and I was getting R/G decks instead. I won my first 8-4 with a R/G double-splash Jund and Naya deck, basically the two-color five-color styles of deck that recently brought Zac Hill some success on the Pro Tour and is discussed in depth by Adrian Sullivan here. I was splashing Naya for Realm Razer and Jund for Bituminous Blast, and was able to leverage my very powerful and very swingy cards to get myself out of some sticky situations and pick up QP #4 before deciding to go back to the 4-3-2-2’s where I’d have a higher chance of getting the Esper deck, and thus (in my mind at least) a higher chance of winning the draft. I didn’t have as much success that week, but I did pick up more than my fair share of Maelstrom Pulses, Ajani Vengeants and Elspeths, so at the end of week three of qualifying for the Season Three Championships I limped across the finish line with plenty of tickets and packs in the kitty but only 5 QP to call my own.
Thankfully, this is about when the Magic Online Seventh Anniversary changes took place, and while I had been initially resistant to playing Block Constructed for QPs at a vastly inflated rate, it was clear that just drafting wasn’t going to get me to fifteen points quickly enough to matter. The obvious choice for gunning the 8-man queues would be the Esper deck… you only have to buy Master of Etherium and Ethersworn Canonist and everything else is easy to pick up, all miscellaneous commons and uncommons most of which I have tons of from drafting all those Esper decks. But I just couldn’t make myself happy with the deck, because the mana just didn’t work as well as one might hope, and thus just thinking about playing it I felt it was not the choice I wanted to make… so very much of Alara Block Constructed lives or dies based on its mana, and just like the theoretically luck-based elements of Cascading for victory, assembling the proper colors of mana to let you cast your spells seemed to be more luck than skill. I resolved to work on the problem and think on it some more, to fix the mana on the deck that brought Brian Kibler to another Pro Tour Top 8 in Honolulu, but I just couldn’t get it to work, the balance was always off and ultimately I gave up on the idea of taking crap-shoots on my mana. The Green-White deck was to be my plaything, so long as I could borrow at least some of the cards for it… I could afford to push draft winnings into singles and start running 8-man Alara Block Constructed queues so long as I didn’t have to buy absolutely everything myself.
Also thankfully, I have an online teammate and playtest partner, Jim Halter a.k.a. FacelessButcher. I put together an idea, made what I felt were the necessary tweaks of budget constraints versus card availability, and was thankful to be able to borrow Rafiqs, Dauntless Escorts and two Thornlings from Jim. (I was so budget-conscious in my designing that I didn’t even remember to ask for Noble Hierarchs, I just designed straight without them, which just goes to show I made yet another critical mistake… I already knew Jim was gunning Esper in the queues, and thus not using his Hierarchs if he owned any, but I’d decided to just not ask.) Putting together some pet theories, I assembled the following:
8 Forest
5 Plains
4 Seaside Citadel
4 Fieldmist Borderpost
2 Wildfield Borderpost
1 Island
4 Steward of Valeron
4 Qasali Pridemage
4 Knight of the White Orchid
4 Ethersworn Canonist
4 Dauntless Escort
4 Rafiq of the Many
4 Thornling
3 Path to Exile
3 Celestial Purge
2 Behemoth Sledge
Sideboard:
4 Nacatl Savage
4 Qasali Ambusher
3 Finest Hour
2 Behemoth Sledge
1 Path to Exile
1 Celestial Purge
The sideboard would change various times while playing, as I kept finding my anti-Esper strategies to be flawed, before ultimately realizing that the real flaw was that I was siding out my Behemoth Sledges, when I should be siding in numbers three and four. And I saw quite impressive results over three or four queues… one loss in the finals (6 QP!) and one win in the finals (9 QP!) as I sat at home playing queues on a Friday night, feeling a bit odd that I was playing MTGO instead of going to Friday Night Magic but so far quite pleased at the results. I decided to sit at home Saturday and continue gunning queues instead of going to a Grand Prix Boston GP Trial that Eric Meng was kind enough to tell me about (and then won himself when I didn’t show up to steal it from him, so his kindness was well-rewarded).
Tragedy was bound to strike. And not simply because I was choosing to play Little Kid Green/White in a Constructed format; I was racking up points and putting myself well within range of qualifying, and it wouldn’t be an interesting story if I was allowed to just get there. Yes, some tragedy struck because I was playing Little Kid Green/White, but really that wasn’t the entire story… I lost two queues in a row in the first round on Saturday after I was finally up after sleeping in on a Saturday morning, but more importantly I lost two hours at the start of the morning to dealing with fallout from my other hobby, live-action roleplaying. I’ve been under investigation in that hobby for suspicion of cheating on a laundry list of charges that would make me sound like Mike Long with fangs, because in my keeping to my personal code of striving for a higher ethical standard I called out a rather persuasive and certainly bloody-minded girl on her too-obvious political machinations, and when she was threatened with an impending punishment as I filed against her, she filed against me first and threw the kitchen sink at the wall. Five months of angst later, and to the point where if I had an ulcer I would name it Rachel, the investigation has found me more-or-less innocent of all the crap she flung at the wall in hopes that something would stick to me, but got called out on being too harsh against her on a public list when I caught her rumor-mongering, and was myself punished for rumor-mongering… a nebulous charge and one I’d not even been allowed to defend myself against, so I spent Saturday morning trying to back that truck up and properly defend myself.
Stupid hobby, eating into my other hobby-time…
The tragedy that actually mattered, however, was again related to the virus issue on my computer. I’d gotten things more manageable but things were still obviously far from perfect, and after dealing with some tech support folks I was able to make enough headway to actually clean my computer of most of the viral load I’d picked up… and that insidious virus that gets into everything and mungs it up had gotten into some rather critical bits of software. Cleaning the virus was great and fixed a lot of problems… but created some new ones too, as I found my wireless card had been rendered useless and unrecognized, a lump of plastic that didn’t even have a blinking light anymore. Saturday, originally conceived of as the day I would play enough Block Constructed to get to fifteen QP for the season, was now to be spent backtracking and trying to even get Internet access again. Talk about crap. I was barely able to make any headway at all, finally managing to reinstall the wireless card entirely to replace the now-deleted drivers properly, but doing so also cleared the year-plus of networking oddments that let me connect error-free to my secured wireless router, and it only became clear to me how little I knew when I had to try and caveman my way through Internet repairs. I threw my hands up in frustration around 5:00, having to get ready for my evening plans and just kind of peeved at my computer, wishing I had a nice new laptop that was virus-free and had modern antivirals out the ying-yang instead of a four-year-old desktop dinosaur that basically just sits there inviting viruses over for tea.
Sunday, no change. I was able to make some of the needed progress, but my Internet connection was only stable for five-minute intervals, reliably shutting itself down and needing maintenance after five minutes without fail. Poking around didn’t fix this problem, and so Sunday got dedicated to far less frustrating things than trying to club my computer back into working order. I had enough Internet to potentially reinstall new and updated drivers from online, and by the end of the night I’d made some significant progress, but nonetheless lost the day as well and thus the weekend.
Thankfully, Monday brought progress… because I was clearly running out of time. I’d managed to navigate all the pokey bits of reinstalling my network connection, and found the check-box that was automatically checked as a default but sorely needed to be unchecked to solve my router problems, and gotten in a queue or two, losing one in the first round and another in the second. It was clear to me at this point however that something had to change, because I was eating too much splash damage on the Esper decks… as one might expect, the most frequent opponent is a Jund deck, and since I had Ethersworn Canonists of my own my opponent was sideboarding in Vithian Renegades to kill my Canonists. Unexpectedly, however, instead of killing my Canonists I just kept getting Stone Rained back into the Stone Age, with Borderposts dying left and right and me unable to play spells in my most-common matchup. It was time for a change, and thus I secured the conspicuously-absent Noble Hierarchs from another occasional playtest partner, Dan Olmo, to get the ‘no, this is actually a deck’ decklist instead of a budget option to try and run the queues with.
4 Seaside Citadel
4 Ancient Ziggurat
6 Plains
10 Forest
4 Noble Hierarch
4 Ethersworn Canonist
4 Qasali Pridemage
4 Steward of Valeron
4 Dauntless Escort
4 Rafiq of the Many
4 Thornling
3 Path to Exile
3 Celestial Purge
2 Behemoth Sledge
Sideboard:
4 Rhox War Monk
4 Nacatl Savage
3 Finest Hour
2 Behemoth Sledge
1 Celestial Purge
1 Path to Exile
This is the ‘if I was actually going to play a serious event’ decklist I reached, and I would like to think the deck I would have actually played at Pro Tour: Honolulu if I qualified and playtested for the format instead of losing in the finals on tape for the Magic Show. Some of the card choices are a little peculiar, especially since the format was originally thought of as the Battlegrace Angel format, so her absence in this list is conspicuous. The deck has a very high power level, and excellent mana consistency. I’d had some colored mana consistency issues when I was playing Knight of the White Orchid as I would get stranded on that second White mana far too often. In this current design I never need to string two White together in the same turn, just a lot of Green or maybe a White and a Blue at the same time, and I have tons of dual land mana since I kicked the Martial Coup end-game out of bed and picked up Ancient Ziggurat for my 28-creature deck. Adding Noble Hierarch changed the power level of the deck dramatically, both with the added Exalted power and the ramping, and it was an immediate and dramatic change now that I wasn’t cluttering up my two-drop with sixteen creature spells.
The format is all about Cascade. This sort of stinks because I’m obviously not Cascading, but the ramifications of the format being all about Cascade is that the most common opponent is a polychromatic deck with far too many colors, and one that plays only a limited number of spells before the fourth turn, and never anything before the third. (Some stand-outs include Path to Exile and Terminate that a few opponents had, but they were far from common, and just as uncommon would be actually having the mana for them on turn two.) But if the format is all about Cascade, the deck that quickly attacks the opponent to take advantage of the fact that they don’t cast a lot of early-game spells and play a lot of comes-into-play-tapped lands is the one that can reliably be advantaged, so long as you get everything else right.
Case in point: this is one game I played against a Cascade deck:
Me: Forest, Noble Hierarch.
Opponent: Crumbling Necropolis.
Me: Plains, Dauntless Escort.
Opponent: Rupture Spire.
Me: Ancient Ziggu#rat, Rafiq of the Many, attack you for ten.
Opponent: Exotic Orchard, Sprouting Thrinax.
Me: Path to Exile your guy, kill you turn four.
This is something my ‘budget’ version could never dream of, but also shows some of the strengths of choosing this archetype over the more powerful Bloodbraid Elf that is clearly at your disposal should you want it instead of Rafiq. But far more of my games ended this way:
Opponent: Sitting behind two 0/8 Walls with a bunch of cards in hand.
Me: Attack with Thornling, get +1/+1 from Exalted.
Opponent: Block with my Wall.
Me: Wall dies to Thornling; I leave up plenty of mana to become indestructible.
Opponent: Repeat this process.
Me: Kill you with Thornling.
Not every game is won fast. In the games where their Bloodbraid Elves and card advantage actually get to come into play, you very quickly get outclassed as they get free threats and free removal spells, you get Maelstrom Pulsed and Blightninged twice, and your only hope of this not happening was your Ethersworn Canonist that was just a lightning rod for their plentiful removal spells. But even outclassed, there is an end-game: outclass them harder. And that is what Thornling does. We used to say that Morphling was the Terminator, that he just kept coming and coming and would not stop until you were dead… but in actuality that is Thornling, who attacks for seven tramply power by himself and is Indestructible to boot, surviving everything in the format save for Bant Charm, Oblivion Ring or Path to Exile. With a little help from anything in this deck, it is Exalted and able to take down 0/8 Walls that are a corner of the metagame, and I learned over by now literally dozens of Jund matchups that building your deck with the maximum number of Thornlings and playing that matchup with the sole goal of sticking a Thornling with untapped mana was even more effective against their board control plus card advantage plan than the ‘hoser’ of Ethersworn Canonist.
The point of the deck is to get a lot of damage across the table quickly, but also important is the fact that it has a lot of internal synergy, with most everything able to work better with any friend than you’d see from the usual deck. But the key in my mind was realizing that in the presumably-common Esper matchup, I was not the beatdown, as I wanted to sideboard in everything but the Finest Hours and use pinpoint removal and Lifelink effects to control the flow of the game and limit the opponent’s power cards from dealing ridiculous amounts of damage to me. It was a difficult realization, because in every other matchup I was clearly the beatdown, which is probably why I was losing so many of my Esper matchups with my previous build: I was taking my faux Armadillo Cloaks out after sideboarding, not bringing in the last two and beating my opponent to death.
This brings us to Tuesday, the last chance to get my QP’s if I want to play in the Season Three Championships… and after battling computer issues for most of the month, I was determined to go at it with my vicious little beatdown deck. I took the first queue in just under an hour — beating down against a pair of Jund Control decks, getting in early damage and grinding out the long game (if it even came to that) with 4 Thornling on my decklist. The change to the deck by adding Noble Hierarch was dramatic and immediate, and I was left wondering how I managed to actually win a queue with my Knight of the White Orchid pet deck with bad mana, but Thornling is just that good that he actually powered me through an entire queue despite the rest of my deck being intentionally de-powered. I wondered this as I attacked for ten on turn three and killed my opponent on turn four after Exiling the first creature he played, my first three drops intentionally protecting the turn-four kill from a removal spell since the Dauntless Escort could protect the still-lethal Rafiq from removal if his turn three play was Maelstrom Pulse, not Sprouting Thrinax. I split the finals against an Esper deck, now a favorable matchup, collecting the win and bringing us up to 12 QP. And after that, well, the evening got long.
Jund matchups can be a drag, but it doesn’t help when you screw up your land drops and skip your turn-two play because you played the wrong land by accident. Then there was the game where I kept a one-land plus Noble Hierarch and Steward of Valeron hand, with every intention to Path to Exile my turn-two Qasali Pridemage to get a second land and crawl out of my mana-screw… but my opponent killed my Hierarch before I could play my Path, and I never drew another land before I was being hit by Broodmate Dragons. The scary thing is that even with one land I was in this thing, attacking for three a turn while he made land drops but not plays. Then there was the time I got to the second round only to get Cruel Ultimatumed three times running… and it took the third one to actually secure the game for him, as I was viciously defending a Thornling that had every potential of breaking the game wide open in my favor if I could just protect it. And then there was the time I accidentally jumped in a Standard queue by accident, I’m still not sure how, and got to play the Block Constructed versus Standard Elves matchup… I can’t say it went in my favor, and there went six tickets for nothing.
Midnight loomed and then finally came, with me breaking even on product but having run four straight queues with no QPs to show for it. I learned how to play the G/W mirror against Matt Boccio, if by ‘learned’ we mean ‘learned how stupid Behemoth Sledge is,’ and also got a reminder of how I was playing at a much higher power level since I a) was gaming with the full four Thornlings, and b) stretched my mana for Rafiq. Behemoth Sledge on a double-striking Thornling brought me up to 47 by hitting for 22 a turn after all the pumps and Exalted triggers, and it needed to because he had his own Sledge on a Battlegrace Angel. I was wearing him down, keeping him in the low single digits and eating his spare creatures, when he drew Qasali Pridemage for my Sledge to turn this back into an actual game, and then the following turn I drew a Pridemage for his Sledge to bring this back into a blowout in my favor. Double-striking trampling Thornlings are a problem.
Then at 1am I made it to the second round of my queue, and didn’t drop my match to yet another Jund deck, Jund deck #12 or so for the night if I don’t miss my guess. I lost the first game, when his Bloodbraid Elf was great for me so long as it didn’t turn up a Blightning, and it was in fact a Blightning that knocked the Thornling out of my hand that I was going to deploy and protect the following turn, and the card advantage he naturally accumulates let him dominate the board because my trump was gone. I win the second because I am on the play and am very fast, even if it’s not turn-four-kill fast he finds himself on the wrong end of a Rafiq and I’m able to keep a board presence around his sweeper spells because I have learned to sideboard in Rhox War Monks in this matchup (over 2 Pridemages and 2 Warhammers) as it is a durable threat that survives his post-sideboard mass removal spell. He does have an Infest, but I get to keep two things that live through it, and while he kills one of them the next turn, he’s too far behind and the last threat plus a fresh Exalted creature off the top takes him down. And then for the third game, he stumbles a bit on mana, not playing a fourth land. Since I have a Dauntless Escort already, I tap out turn four for a Thornling, and it turns out that Thornling is all he wrote. He draws his fourth land immediately and Cascades, Blightning eats the rest of my hand, but that Thornling eats every creature he plays while it eats him as well, and I’m in the finals.
My opponent is yet another Jund deck, I win the roll and game one goes favorably. Turn one Noble Hierarch is such a beating in this format, and while Hierarch into Pridemage into Escort into Thornling is no turn-four kill, it is a pretty clear sign that the writing is on the wall, since my opponent takes five before he makes his first play, has a Blightning as his first play that again doesn’t really matter to me, and then is at ten life facing down a protected Thornling (and friends!). He may still have ‘all these’, but it’s his life totals that I’m after, not his cards, and two swings of the Thornling leaves him at zero despite the fact that he Bloodbraids up pretty stiff resistance two turns in a row to try and stop me from killing him. Since I’m playing for points, and he’s not, we end the match there with a prize split down the middle and the win for me, as he’d rather play the next queue than face the aggressive Thornling deck. I could have played it out, but why take chances? It’s 2am and I want to go to bed. That’s worth a pack, right?
15 Qualifier Points, and a much better understanding of the Block Constructed format. It is in fact what I expected for Pro Tour Honolulu, and there are ‘answers’ to the metagame besides the random chance of Cascade. One answer is to Cascade only for distinct value, taking out the less-good three-drops and Blightnings, knowing you will Cascade up a removal spell or 0/8 Wall that might as well be a removal spell every time you Cascade. Another is to not Cascade at all, and prey upon the fact that to gain an edge in the Cascade-deck ‘mirror’ one has to slow down and get bigger rather than faster, which is why Mike Flores went on record as saying he would have PT’ed with not just four Broodmate Dragons but at least one Karrthus as well. Unsurprisingly given my recent attraction to the Kithkin tribe and my previous fascination with the Goblin, if there is a reasonable attack deck that preys upon this tendency for slowness by being faster than they have equipped themselves to deal with, that is a deck I want to take a realistic look at.
Of course, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. My Internet conked out again this morning, so if I needed to try and run just one more queue before the scheduled downtime that ends the third season of points-hunting, I’d have been entirely out of luck. I don’t know why my computer thinks it doesn’t have a wireless card anymore, but at least I have until Saturday to figure it out. And of course I get to play the Season Three Championships thanks to doing well at Block Constructed, and wonder at least a little bit on the inside just what the story might have been if I had won that finals instead of lost it… if nothing else, the story wouldn’t have been “swine flu at the Pro Tour”, as apparently that is my fault for not beating Jimmy when I had the chance. The irony was, at the start of last week I was certain I’d picked it up after the 300+-player Philadelphia PTQ, coming down sick after driving a coughing Josh Jacobson home and realizing that if I died because of this, none of it would have happened if I’d just won that match.
It’s certainly no Pro Tour vacation on a tropical island. It’s rained for two weeks straight and been clammy and gray, no risk of a suntan never mind a sunburn, and qualifying for the Season Three Championships wouldn’t have required a massive rallying of the Block Constructed format if for example my computer didn’t pick up viruses as a part-time job. But having played through an awful lot of matches, and playtested a deck from inception to completion, I figured out a few things about what makes the format tick… and how you can attack it without having to Cascade like everybody else. The accomplishment of making Day Two, or making Top 8, was obviously locked away from me when I failed to successfully accomplish attending in the first place… but getting to play the Season Three Championships despite what felt like overwhelming odds is an accomplishment I’ll take.
And now I get to go back to drafting. It’s fun, and I can pretend I’m “playtesting” for this weekend. Once I can get my computer to remember it’s a computer and not a hunk of slag, for the third time this month…
Sean McKeown
s_mckeown @ hotmail.com