Insert Column Name Here - Playing In Real Life? What The Heck?

I always play slightly better in real life than I do on MODO. I don’t know why that is.

It may be that the people I run into in real life are, on the whole, a little worse than MODO. After all, anyone can show up at a tourney in real life, but Magic Online requires a certain level of commitment — you download the software, you pay the money, you take the time to enroll. So maybe the competition is slightly higher.

It could also be that I pay better attention when the cards are real. In an article two weeks ago, I missed Gathan Raiders as a card because the MODO client helpfully sorted it into the “Red” pile and I never looked back; that was a mistake that I never would have made in real life, but I’d already thought of the Red as Red as dismissed it as a color. But Gathan Raiders? Not Red, not really.

I pay better attention when I’m holding actual cards. I can’t misclick, and I don’t get as impatient when there’s a guy across the formica from me. Which is odd.

Or it could be that I’m good at reading people — heck, that’s my whole claim to fame in multiplayer — and maybe I can tell what they’re up to more. I dunno. In any case, I’ll use MODO because it’s convenient and I can play it at any time, but I don’t know how much better I’ve gotten because of it.

Which is why I was glad when David came to town.

David’s someone I met through my friend Dmitri. Dmitri is a ball of enthusiasm and fun, but Dmitri is also the kind of guy who balks at paying money for cards. He likes Limited — kinda — but actually getting him to cough up a sawbuck for the packs involves a crowbar and the moon being in the right phase.

David, on the other hand, likes to play. And Limited is his favorite format. So when I asked, “Say, you wanna get together on Monday and do some Sealed?” he was all too happy to join. He brought the packs (and Dmitri, spurred by the novelty, came along, as did my friend Kat), and we played some.

Here’s what I opened:

Sealed Deck Pool

Ferrett Steinmetz

Test deck on 06-17-2007

Time Spiral Limited

Creatures (40)

Lands (2)

Hmm. Lotsa good cards, but can they gel together into an actual, you know, deck?

White
Solid Playables: Blade of the Sixth Pride, Cloudchaser Kestrel, Fortify, Griffin Guide, Judge Unworthy, Pallid Mycoderm, Zealot il-Vec

In every set, there is one card where I look at it and go, “You know, that has the outside chance of being better than I think it is.” But it’s risky enough that I never bother playing it maindeck, and then no other Magic author mentions it as “Hey, this is better than you’d think,” and I spend the rest of my days with a 95% certainty that this card sucks but not knowing.

This card in Future Sight? Saltskitter.

We also have Divine Congregation, which isn’t that good, but it’s definitely something to consider in these days of endless and nigh-uncounterable Sprout Swarms. But even then, all it’s going to do is buy you a turn or two, so probably not. But I might try it if I was feeling whacky.

My ranking of Fortify has fallen recently; it’s still a good card, but the opportunities to attack with massive critters seem to have fallen out of favor lately. It’s great in W/G, but in everything else it’s merely pretty good. I won’t not play it, but it’s not the pull it used to be.

All that said, we have a couple of really good combat tricks and some mild creatures. It’s possible that this might be a support color, but I don’t see it as a main.

Green
Solid Playables: Durkwood Baloth, Essence Warden, Harmonize, Herd Gnarr, Nessian Courser, Riftsweeper, Spike Tiller, Strength in Numbers, Thrill of the Hunt, Uktabi Drake, Utopia Vow

A lot of good Green here. I’ve enjoyed Nessian Courser more every time I’ve played it (and hated it a little more every time it’s played against me) — it trumps almost everything else on the third turn, allowing you to build some nice tempo.

That said, what are we lacking? Well, we’ll need a solid commitment to Green if we go this route, since a lot of the colors require double-Green. And Herd Gnarr isn’t nearly as bombtastic in this deck thanks to the lack of any Thallid action going on here, meaning that we don’t have the usual means to gum up the ground.

Red
Solid Playables: Coal Stoker, Flowstone Embrace, GATHAN FRICKIN’ RAIDERS, Lightning Axe, Subterranean Shambler, Sudden Shock, Undying Rage

The Red here is excellent as a support color, with a lot of removal and some ways to make other guys better, but I don’t know that I’d run it main. That said, between Lightning Axe, Flowstone Embrace, and Sudden Shock, I can get rid of a fair amount of creatures.

Black
Solid Playables: Death Rattle, Gorgon Recluse, Midnight Charm, Sengir Nosferatu, Soul Collector, Urborg Syphon-Mage

Ugh. The Black is pretty damn light, but at the high end we have two capital-B bombs in terms of Soul Collector and Sengir Nosferatu. A lot of Sealed revolves around getting huge bombs to outclass the other players — and while Soul Collector isn’t quite as nice as, say, Sengir (it can’t protect itself), it’s still definitely worth aiming for if you can have both.

But Black, as usual, demands as steep price. How many Black mana do I need to get these damn things out? Double-Black every time?

Eesh.

Blue
Solid Playables: Bonded Fetch, Crookclaw Transmuter, Erratic Mutation, Fathom Seer, Looter il-Kor, Piracy Charm, Shaper Parasite, Snapback

In case you haven’t got the memo yet, Bonded Fetch is nothin’ short of amazing. It’s not a first-pick or anything — but in the slower Sealed format, which is often a race to see who can get to their bomb first, filtering through your deck at lightning speed is nothing to be sniffed at. I’ve liked this more every time I’ve played it, since opponents are loathe to waste a removal spell on a measly 0/2 — but if they don’t, I’ll outdraw them in no time at all.

We have some quite nice Blue here, with everything that I like — solid combat tricks, a Looter, some air support, and outright removal. We could use some ground defense, but I’m sure we’ll find that in another color.

Artifacts, Gold, and the Rest
Solid Playables: Chromatic Star, Kaervek the Merciless

Double-ugh. Kaervek is a definite bomb — expensive, but once he’s on the table there are a lot of decks that just can’t deal with him at all. Thus, I want to have a deck that features multiple Black cards, and has Red as a support color, and whose main color can last the early game.

The Deck
There’s a strong case to be made for Green. But Green has no mana-fixing, and it also requires a lot of effective double-Greens in the form of Uktabi Drake and Harmonize and Spike Tiller and Durkwood Baloth (either you have a way early Green on turn 1 to suspend him or you have the two later on), and that’s going to be difficult. In addition, Green really has little defense in the early game (aside from Nessian Courser), and we need to be able to get to the late game.

Thus, I went a different route: I decided hell, if my mana’s going to be ugly, I’m going to go with tons of card drawing… And given that Blue has a lot of draw-and-discard effects and I have two Madness spells (and both Black and Blue have early small-critter kill and/or stall), I’m gonna run it to try to draw cards until I fetch my bombs.

1 Shaper Parasite
1 Crookclaw Transmuter
1 Coal Stoker
1 Death Rattle
1 Midnight Charm
1 Urborg Syphon-Mage
1 Fathom Seer
1 Undying Rage
1 Gorgon Recluse
1 Sengir Nosferatu
1 Kaervek the Merciless
1 Chromatic Star
1 Sudden Shock
1 Pit Keeper
1 Nightshade Assassin
1 Soul Collector
1 Snapback
1 Gathan Raiders
1 Bonded Fetch
1 Subterranean Shambler
1 Piracy Charm
1 Lightning Axe
1 Flowstone Embrace
1 Molten Slagheap
1 Looter il-Kor

How’d It Do?
“For a heap,” I said afterwards, “It did surprisingly well.” David had an very strong card pool, with a lot of broken rares and strong commons. Witness!

Draining Whelk
Magus of the Disk
Verdeloth the Ancient
Rift Bolt
Faceless Butcher
Fathom Seer
Might Sliver
Necrotic Sliver
Ichor Slick
Castle Raptors
Mangara of Corondor
Momentary Blink
Boldwyr Intimidator
Stonecloaker
Dead / Gone
Conflagrate
Lucent Liminid

But though he built not one, but three variations of his deck against me (U/W, if I recall, then a heavy-removal W/B, then something packing all the removal), his decks were all slow, giving me time to set up. And the more time I had to set up, the more time I had to draw the land I needed, and that allowed me to drop the elbow. He kept reconfiguring his deck, as I said, but I went something like 7-2 against him… And we’re roughly equivalent in play skill.

(I also beat Dmitri 2-1, who was packing a very destruction-heavy B/R deck, but that was all play skill; there was one game where he should have flat-out beaten me, but he didn’t want to play Ghostfire and then discard his last card to Gathan Raiders to wreck my board because…. Well, he couldn’t actually say why, but it was clearly the correct play given that I was down to one card in hand. I think he just hates topdecking wars. He also gave me two extra turns to live in the game when he did beat me because he was a little extra-cautious with his Boldwyr Intimidator against my three guys, so there ya go.)

My deck died awfully when I couldn’t get land. But the four morphs helped, and as David noted, “Every morph needs to be respected.” So he’d have to risk a removal spell upon my face-down 2/2 in case it was a Soul Collector, and whoops! Gathan Raiders. Or he’d attack in, and discover a Shaper Parasite waiting. It made things ugly.

In addition, he learned about the power of Bonded Fetch, particularly in this deck — my whole goal was to cycle into my big guns, and lo, that’s just what I did unless he shot it down ASAP. (Later on, when it came out and Dmitri was playing me, Dmitri asked David whether he should burn a Tendrils of Agony upon the Fetch, and David commanded, “KILL IT.”) It may be okay in many decks, but in this one, where I routinely discarded Nightshade Assassin to first-strike something out of oblivion, it was good. (Plus, I got to Lightning-Axe-into-Gorgon not once but twice, which is a surprising amount of fun.)

I never, however, got to flip up a Fathom Seer. Two Islands in play? At the same time? In this deck? It is to laugh.

It was a fun night. We also tried two rounds of Two-Headed Giant with the same decks; it worked well when I was on David’s side, but when Dmitri and I — the two B/R decks — went up against Kat and David’s Thallid-tastic-and-double-Magus-of-the-Disk-packing decks, we died an ugly death after a long stall.

Ah well. Them’s the breaks.

The Weekly Plug Bug
Last week, Tanner decided to enter his “Time Machine,” spurring a nonexistent love of the Transformers by dressing in Garanimals and eating a huge bowl of Sugar Smacks while watching Transformers on an old Magnavox VCR. This week, the silliness continues….

Signing off,
The Ferrett
TheFerrett@StarCityGames.com
The Here Edits This Here Site Here Guy

Insert Column Name Here – Playing In Real Life? What The Heck?

Creatures (40)

Lands (2)

Spells (32)