This week, my brain arguably melted down. I’m about to tell you that what I built was almost certainly the wrong thing, and by a large margin, and I turned away from a reasonably easy, fattie-based build into something needlessly tricky. But what happened?This week, my brain arguably melted down. I’m about to tell you that what I built was almost certainly the wrong thing, and by a large margin, and I turned away from a reasonably easy, fattie-based build into something needlessly tricky.
But what happens? Read on, my friend. Because it’s late on Sunday, I had a busy weekend, and I have no time to write coherent introductions!
Creatures (44)
- 1 Dauthi Slayer
- 1 Aetherflame Wall
- 1 Amrou Scout
- 1 Bogardan Rager
- 1 Clockwork Hydra
- 1 Crookclaw Transmuter
- 1 Durkwood Baloth
- 1 Durkwood Tracker
- 1 Fathom Seer
- 1 Fledgling Mawcor
- 1 Foriysian Interceptor
- 1 Glass Asp
- 1 Goblin Skycutter
- 1 Gorgon Recluse
- 1 Harmonic Sliver
- 1 Icatian Crier
- 1 Jedit's Dragoons
- 1 Keldon Halberdier
- 1 Looter il-Kor
- 1 Magus of the Candelabra
- 1 Mana Skimmer
- 1 Pentarch Paladin
- 1 Shadow Sliver
- 1 Thallid Shell-Dweller
- 1 Blightspeaker
- 1 Deadly Grub
- 1 Dreamscape Artist
- 1 Fa'adiyah Seer
- 1 Firefright Mage
- 1 Frenetic Sliver
- 1 Giant Dustwasp
- 1 Jodah's Avenger
- 1 Merfolk Thaumaturgist
- 1 Mycologist
- 1 Pallid Mycoderm
- 1 Primal Plasma
- 1 Prodigal Pyromancer
- 1 Ridged Kusite
- 1 Roiling Horror
- 1 Shaper Parasite
- 1 Sinew Sliver
- 1 Stonecloaker
- 1 Synchronous Sliver
- 1 Uktabi Drake
Spells (30)
- 1 Bad Moon
- 1 Resurrection
- 1 Bewilder
- 1 Careful Consideration
- 1 Chromatic Star
- 1 Chronatog Totem
- 1 Dark Withering
- 1 Detainment Spell
- 1 Griffin Guide
- 1 Ground Rift
- 1 Premature Burial
- 1 Prismatic Lens
- 1 Psychotic Episode
- 1 Pull from Eternity
- 1 Restore Balance
- 1 Search for Tomorrow
- 1 Sprout
- 1 Strength in Numbers
- 1 Traitor's Clutch
- 1 Truth or Tale
- 1 Brute Force
- 1 Cradle to Grave
- 1 Dawn Charm
- 1
- 1 Dust Corona
- 1 Fatal Frenzy
- 1 Hunting Wilds
- 1 Kor Dirge
- 1 Reality Acid
- 1 Vampiric Link
White
Solid Playables: Dawn Charm, Griffin Guide, Pallid Mycoderm, Pentarch Paladin, Resurrection, Stonecloaker
Hmm. This is the sort of card pool that I hate to see as a writer, because, well, what can you say aside from obvious fooferaws? I mean, do you need me here to tell you, “Pentarch Paladin is good but really hard on your colored mana requirements, and it often gets killed before it goes active?”
You do? Perhaps I’m overestimating my target audience.
That said, I’m on the fence about Jedit’s Dragoons — it’s a fine blocker, but I don’t know that I’ll always play it. It’s in that nebulous zone between “Card #23” and “OMG FIRST PICK!” And Amrou Scout is a fine girl (she do your laundry, she change a ty-uh), but she’s not so hot when she is the be-all and the end-all of your Rebel chain. Having a 2/1 that can fetch, um, herself isn’t bad — though the sneaky part of me kind of wants to engineer a situation when I play her simply because she’ll draw out early Grapeshots and Feeblenesses and other early-kill shenanigans. But then I’ll draw her on turn 8 and kick myself.
By the way, I’m still not big on Restore Balance in Limited. Or Constructed. Or anywhere. It can be devastating, of course, but then again it has the possibility to be so not.
Anyway. White’s got some solid goodies in it, but not quite enough to convince me that it’s a maindeckable color. Let us wander.
Blue
Solid Playables: Careful Consideration, Crookclaw Transmuter, Dreamscape Artist, Fathom Seer, Fledgling Mawcor, Jodah’s Avenger, Looter il-Kor, Shaper Parasite
Let us discuss the differences between an experienced player and Timmy.
Timmy: “Jodah’s Avenger! Good! It can be so big it will no doubt rule this game!”
Experienced Player: “Hang on there, Timmy. The Avenger is awesome in certain kinds of matchups (and especially when your opponent is playing Red), but it’s not nearly as invulnerable as Morphling. It dies a lot to Black removal, and it can get punked by White’s neutralization, and dumb players go on autopilot with the “Shadow, Double-Strike, attack” and forget that there’s a freshly-cast shadowy chump blocker in the way to steal all your tempo. (I don’t know how many times a Zealot en-Vec has saved me from four points of damage and given me a turn to draw another answer, but they’re all probably playing against your brethren.) It’s good, but not crazy bomb-good.”
Timmy: “Here’s Dreamscape Artist! It sucks!”
Experienced Player: “So thinning all of the lands out of your deck in four or five activations isn’t worth it so that you can draw nothing but gas from then on?”
Timmy: “But you sacrifice lands! And cards!”
Experienced Player: “It’s not something you wanna do all the time, or even in the early game, but there are more than a few matches I’ve won simply on the basis of throwing all of my excess lands at Dreamscape Artist and taking a few points of early damage while I set up to ensure that I draw nothing but gas. It’s good, at least in Sealed deck.”
Timmy: “How can a 1/1 be good?”
Experienced Player: “Go read Sunday School, chief. Just… Trust me.”
Anyway, this is pretty decent Blue — I like having both removal and considerable card drawing — and thus, I’ll probably maindeck this.
Black
Solid Playables: Cradle to Grave, Dark Withering, Dauthi Slayer, Gorgon Recluse, Kor Dirge, Mana Skimmer, Premature Burial
Is Roiling Horror any good? Wow, I don’t know. It’s one of those “Win more” cards in that drawing it cements what’s most likely to be a victory… Although there’s been at least one situation where it kept the tempo for me. See, I was ahead eight life but my board position had deteriorated, and I was about to start falling prey to a Battering Sliver combined with a Fury Sliver. But hey, an 8/8 Roiling Horror staved off the beats from the Fury Sliver, giving me a little time to set up!
That said, a creature that’s flat-out DOA if you’re behind is not good. And yeah, you can get a mini-Syphon Soul every upkeep, for three black mana. That’s a lot. I’m not so sure, but it can be good in certain decks, I’m sure — which is every writer’s cop-out, really, isn’t it?
Kor Dirge, on the other hand, is phenomenal. The ability to redirect damage is so nice that I’ve used it quite often in multiplayer decks (back when it was Kor Chant), and there are some devastating situations you can set up with this. My favorite?
“I attack into your Gorgon Recluse with my Fury Sliver and Battering Sliver, and when that’s dead I’ll attack for the win next turn with whatever’s left.”
“Cool! I’ll redirect the damage from your Battering Sliver to your Fury Sliver. My Recluse is still alive, but both your Slivers are dead. And so are you!”
Okay, that was a really fun game. But not for him.
Red
Solid Playables: Aetherflame Wall, Brute Force, Bogardan Rager, Goblin Skycutter, Keldon Halberdiers, Prodigal Pyromancer
This is pretty weak for Red. The individual cards aren’t bad, but they’re at odds; you have a Brute Force with no real good targets for it, you have a Pyromancer and Skycutter without other weenies to back it up, and you have Aetherflame Wall without any offense. It just doesn’t gell.
Even as a splash, it’s pretty weak. I mean, Pyromancer and Brute Force are good in the late game, but they’re also not exactly backbreakers, either. I think this is pretty much useless.
Oh wait! Apparently Dead / Gone is in this lineup! But I don’t know that right away because even though both halves are Red, it’s still not counted as a Red card on MODO! How many times have I damn near overlooked it? Too many.
Still. Even though it’s a good card, I don’t think it’s enough to pull me into Red.
Green
Solid Playables: Durkwood Baloth, Durkwood Tracker, Giant Dustwasp, Hunting Wilds, Search for Tomorrow, Strength in Numbers, Thallid Shell-Dweller, Uktabi Drake
Well! That’s a nice package. You’ve got exactly what you want in Green: creature-pumping, land search, and big fatties. It’s solid.
Which is why it’s such a shock that I went another way with it! Film at 11.
And The Rest
Solid Playables: Chromatic Star, Clockwork Hydra Prismatic Lens
Well, you can’t say we don’t have enough to go fetch whatever the heck it is we want. And we have a lot of land-thinning, so we’re clearly going to go U/G/w, white?
Okay. I didn’t. But at least I know the reason why.
See, I’ve read a book recently called “Stumbling On Happiness,” which deals with why humans are so bad at decision-making. And one of the things that people consistently do wrong is to weight recent problems as being much more significant than they should be.
Which is to say that if you’ve been bitten by a dog recently, you will be far more cautious of dogs than is reasonable. Furthermore, you’ll be more likely to assume that you won’t like dogs in any given future situation. Once bitten, twice shy, as they say… And last week, I’d opened what I thought was a stellar U/G pool and gone a dismally embarrassing 0-5 with it. I mean, I really thought this was a good deck by everything I knew about Planar Chaos, and I got thrashed so severely that I realized that I am totally struggling with this new format. I was okay in Time Spiral, but something about Planar Chaos has frotzed me in toto.
So when I had the opportunity to go with another U/G pool, even though this was lighter on card drawing and heavier on fatties, I recoiled instinctively. I figured that even though it looked good on paper, it’d probably fall apart in real life just like the last one.
But I didn’t think that explicitly. This is how the brain usually works; we decide what we’re going to do somewhere in the bowels of our subconscious, and then we rationalize the choice. For me, I looked at the U/G when I put it together and said, “Yeah, I dunno. It’s got fatties, but does anything have evasion? It’s decent, but all it does is attack. There are no tricks.”
Which is patently not true. But tell that to my subconscious!
So instead, I went mad. No, really; I looked at the madness spells here and said, “Well, we have two solid Madness spells and a bunch of outlets, so can we put them together into a card-sifting nightmare?” The more I looked, I realized I could develop an aerial U/B/w beatdown deck that shot whatever was blocking us out of the sky and won a long game of attrition!
And lo! Look at what man hath wrought!
1 Dauthi Slayer
6 Island
4 Plains
1 Resurrection
7 Swamp
1 Careful Consideration
1 Chromatic Star
1 Clockwork Hydra
1 Crookclaw Transmuter
1 Dark Withering
1 Dawn Charm
1 Dreamscape Artist
1 Fathom Seer
1 Fledgling Mawcor
1 Gorgon Recluse
1 Griffin Guide
1 Icatian Crier
1 Jodah’s Avenger
1 Kor Dirge
1 Looter il-Kor
1 Mana Skimmer
1 Premature Burial
1 Primal Plasma
1 Prismatic Lens
1 Roiling Horror
1 Shaper Parasite
This was a heavily sideboarded build; depending on what the opponent had, I’d sideboard out a lot. The Cradle to Grave went in against decks that had no Black (I was worried about having a ton of dead cards against Black decks), and the Stonecloaker usually came in if it wasn’t a fast deck.
But it wasn’t a deck for a quick win. There are no huge fatties to be found here, so usually it takes a long grind to pull any kind of victory out with this. It’s a complex deck, as opposed to when you just dump a Dragon onto the table and win.
How’d it do? Well, surprisingly, it broke the long losing streak I’ve had, going 4-1 in matches, losing only when I mulliganed to an autoloss five and then got outcarded in the final match. So while I’d argue that it’s not the optimal build of this deck, it’s not as bad as it could have been. Plus, second-turn Dauthi Slayer, third-turn Griffin Guide is usually a pretty fun play.
The Weekly Plug Bug
At last! It’s been three months since we started our tremendously-long storyline “The Beast,” but today it all ends! And today answers the question that’s been on everybody’s lips: “What happened to Ann, Tanner’s crazy stripper ex-girlfriend, after the possum shredded her skin to bits?” The answer will surprise you….
Signing off,
The Ferrett
TheFerrett@StarCityGames.com
The Here Edits This Here Site Here Guy