Ugh. Koff-koff
I’m not feeling the best at the moment. My devoted – koff-koff – acolytes from Bradford decided it would be a good idea to infect me with their new variant of hominid flu, and I’ve spent the last few days in bed. I’m impressed they had both the wherewithal and courage. In fact, I’m so impressed I don’t know whether to promote them for their independent thinking or gruesomely kill them for their insolence.
Koff-koff.
I know, I’ll promote them and then have them gruesomely killed. Maybe sawn in half, the bad way. The simple solutions are always best.
Plus I also have this promising new strain of flu I’ve sampled from my sweaty discharges. All it takes is to nudge an amino acid here and another one there and I’ll have a plague to exterminate the entire human race!
Apart from those who pay me a modest fee, of course.
Bwahahaha – koff – hahahaha – koff-koff – haha – koff-koff splutter-splutter – ha. Ow, that hurts. Someone fetch me some Lemsip, please.
I suppose it’s time to continue my look at the new Planar Chaos cards with some possible (and horribly flaky) deck ideas. It will be the usual drill. I’ll go through the cards of merit, then throw out some ropey decklists that you guys won’t discuss at all in the forums.
Actually, it won’t be the usual drill. A comparison of the rare prices between the various colors put Blue dead last. For all those whiners, you won’t hear this very often so get ready to treasure it: Blue just ain’t no Green. After the yummy “just about every rare has a home somewhere” splendour of Green last week, we get Blue… and it’s nothing but lean pickings (for Constructed), as far as I can see.
By way of example, here’s the pre-Planar Chaos listing (taken from Karsten’s deck-o-pedia) of what is probably the best deck in Standard at the moment, Dralnu du Louvre:
Creatures (5)
Lands (24)
Spells (31)
- 4 Rewind
- 1 Last Gasp
- 4 Remand
- 4 Repeal
- 1 Seize the Soul
- 3 Spell Snare
- 1 Commandeer
- 4 Rune Snag
- 4 Mystical Teachings
- 1 Sudden Death
- 4 Think Twice
Sideboard
For anybody that hasn’t played Standard in the last few months, this is a very strong counterspell control deck much in the style of the old “draw go” decks. The deck never wants to tap out in its own turn, instead choosing to play everything at the end of its opponent’s turn wherever possible.
Basically, whenever you aren’t forced to counter something you either draw cards with Think Twice or tutor for something with Mystical Teachings. Teferi forces your opponent to play at a speed that suits you (no baiting with Char at end of turn to hit them with the big haymaker in your turn), and is probably one of the most important cards in Standard at the moment.
Dralnu du Louvre has been so successful online it’s almost forced a warped metagame. The one deck that appears to bash it (from what I’ve heard) is Mono-Green Aggro. Now we appear to be in a weird equilibrium, where Mono-Green Aggro feeds off the Dralnu decks to climb to a high enough proportion of the metagame that more rounded decks (Dragonstorm, anything with Wrath) suddenly become viable again, and are then in turn bashed by resurgent Dralnu.
And now with Planar Chaos coming in I present – fanfare please – the all-new Dralnu listing:
Creatures (5)
Lands (24)
Spells (31)
- 4 Rewind
- 4 Remand
- 3 Repeal
- 1 Seize the Soul
- 2 Spell Snare
- 1 Commandeer
- 4 Rune Snag
- 3 Mystical Teachings
- 1 Sudden Death
- 4 Think Twice
- 3 Damnation
- 1 Extirpate
Sideboard
To be honest, I’m not even one hundred per cent sure Damnation even goes in this deck, as it requires you to tap out in your turn, but I’ve included it as it should theoretically give the deck a lot more game against its hated matchup in Mono-Green. I say “more game,” but I suspect what’s going to happen is you’re going to tap out to cast Damnation and then they’re going to follow up with more threats, with Giant Solifuge being the most terrifying.
Actually, that’s the simplified version. In fact, what will probably happen is you cast enough disruption so that they don’t quite kill you, and then use the Damnation with counterspell backup on whatever slipped through in the early game. The disadvantage Green has is that it has to go through the red zone and attack you with creatures to actually kill you. This means you can let your life total drop to as low as one if need be before wiping the board (although Stonewood Invocation is very scary). This means you don’t necessarily need to blaze away with Damnation on turn 4, and can instead wait a little longer to try and set it up.
Extirpate probably finds a home in the main as a tutor target. I suspect a lot of mirror matches will be decided by a Sudden Death on Teferi followed up with Extirpate.
Aside:
Note that this doesn’t mean I’ve actually had a Damascus-style conversion and have now been sucked into the cult of Extirpate-hype. In this case there is actually a legitimate call for it within the game plan. Fortunately, I managed to open a couple in limited events. I feel sorry for the idiots who’re going to have to shell out $15 or so for a single narrow-use tutor-target in their deck.
Hold on. I’ll need them online as well.
Nooooooooooooooo!
Look all you people out there. It isn’t worth the hype. Trust me on this. You’ll thank me when you beat the poor chump who didn’t listen and cast three copies of Extirpate in the same game that did precisely nothing, while you battered him to death with little men and burn / pump spells.
Now do the sensible thing and leave it at a reasonable price so that those of us who have a perfectly valid reason for…
You’re not listening are you?
Sigh
End aside.
The point I’m trying to make is that I’m talking about new additions from Planar Chaos to the dominant Blue deck, and none of the new cards is actually Blue!
When you’re intending to write an article about the applications of the new Blue cards, only none of them are good enough to actually make the cut in the best Blue deck, this doesn’t bode well.
So in the interests of actually having enough material to make an article this week, I thought I’d touch on Two-Headed Giant briefly, mainly because I actually got to play it for the first time this weekend ever.
The tournament was a Grand Prix trial for Amsterdam held in Bradford (where I was infected – don’t trust judges I tell you) and my team-mate for then, and in Amsterdam coming up, is Keith Spragg.
Who?
Ah, I suppose I should warn you. You see, Spraggle may look perfectly innocuous and mild mannered, but if he ever misses a meal then he instantly turns into a stone-cold raving psychopathic killer. So for Amsterdam I will of course be keeping him locked in a cage for the week beforehand. You have all been warned.
As a 2HG virgin (so to speak), I thought the format was a lot of fun. Even though each match is only a single game, that game can take a long time as the board gets ever more clogged and complicated.
Hint one. Play quickly, real quickly.
For our GPT we were lucky to get 8 teams. I know that doesn’t sound a lot, but GPT’s aren’t very popular in the UK as British players rarely travel to Grand Prix tournaments. The thing that caught virtually everyone out was how fast the time goes. In the first round our opponents probably cost themselves a win by not playing quickly enough, although both teams were guilty of not playing quickly enough early.
So although you only get to play one game, that game can last a long time. With that in mind you should aim to do the basics as fast as possible. Some people naturally dawdle through parts of their turn like untapping or drawing a card, mainly because it provides a natural mental break between one phase to another. You should avoid this in 2HG, as otherwise you’ll never get a chance to finish a game. The same is true of the early turns. Play your land and say go. Enough of your time will be eaten up later in discussion when the board gets really complicated that you don’t want to be wasting time checking the obvious stuff with your partner in the early stages.
Hint two. In Sealed, play all your bombs.
We were actually very lucky with our sealed pool, and were able to build two very solid decks. One was a solid Red/White deck that could do unpleasant things involving Momentary Blink, Whitemane Lions, Triskelavus, and Firemaw Kavu, or just batter people over the head with Pardic Dragon and Magus of the Arena.
We had Vorosh in the other deck (his ability the worst of all the new “wedge” dragons? – gentlemen, welcome to the land of 40 point life totals) and I crafted a mainly Black removal / madness concoction that took Green for fixing. I was quite proud of the deck as it had a lot of nice synergy. One of the best parts was demonstrating that Billy Moreno is indeed right, and that Fa’adiyah Seer can actually become the lynchpin of certain types of deck. [30 point life totals now… so many changes these days. – Craig.]
The other decision I was pleased about was to squeeze a Serra Sphinx into a Green/Black deck where most of the Black cards required double mana. I’d already managed to shoehorn Vorosh in there and a random Mystic Enforcer, so why not?
My thinking was that the Sphinx was just too powerful not to find a home for, and that there would probably be time to assemble the mana to cast it. I knew I was being greedy, but having not played the format before I was only guessing this was the correct thing to do, and as it happened it was. Sort of. Basically, in the first game Fa’adiyah Seer flipped the Sphinx on turn 3 and I reanimated it turn 4 with Dread Return.
We still only drew that game though, as Mangara / Lion tricks dealt with most of our offence and Keith never really came out of a sustained flood (thirteen land to ten spells).
We won the remainder and I got to also draft for the first time, where I foolishly picked up a warning for picking up our cards too quickly on multiple occasions. Too many casual drafts in Geneva the weekend before, combined with flu coming down on me.
Hint three. In draft, no one’s the beatdown.
I didn’t have a draft strategy other than take the best two cards, taking into account you can’t be the beatdown.
This means that all those okay filler cards like Blazing Blade Askari are basically garbage. Our opponents in the semis discovered this as they knocked us down fairly early… before we stabilised and started dropping enormous Havenwood Wurms on them. Instead of Benalish Cavalry and the like, you want to be taking Walls as your early drops.
We lost in the final in an interesting game where we worked out very early they were trying to sandbag Damnation. While we managed to get that played at a time that suited us, they just had a bit more gas to follow with including ways to kill both Tolarian Sentinel (with Mangara in play and a Reality Acid in hand) and Havenwood Wurm. Although it still means I don’t get the full 2 byes, on the other it means another team gets to go to Amsterdam.
Although it didn’t happen, I was very frightened of one team assembling a monstrous Storm or Sliver strategy. It will be very interesting to see the top drafters in the world do with the format at Grand Prix: Amsterdam, as I suspect it’s a lot more skill intensive than my feeble “take the two best cards” (or rather take the two cards that aren’t Black – there are so many good swampwalkers currently that you should need a very strong incentive to risk putting Swamps in your deck.)
But anyway, I’m running late in my feverish state. Back to those Blue cards.
In Planar Chaos we have:
Rare
Aeon Chronicler
Body Double
Braids, Conjurer Adept
Chronozoa
Dichotomancy
Magus of the Bazaar
Serendib Sorcerer
Serra Sphinx
Spellshift
Uncommon
Auramancer’s Guise
Dismal Failure
Frozen Aether
Jodah’s Avenger
Ovinize
Pongify
Riptide Pilferer
Tidewalker
Timebender
Venarian Glimmer
Common
Aquamorph Entity
Dreamscape Artist
Erratic Mutation
Gossamer Phantasm
Merfolk Thaumaturgist
Piracy Charm
Primal Plasma
Reality Acid
Shaper Parasite
Synchronous Sliver
Veiling Oddity
Wistful Thinking
Starting with the rares, let’s kick out the dead wood first, in this case a couple of Planeshifted cards.
Sorceress Queen never broke out of casual circles, and the same is true of Serendib Sorcerer. Okay, he teams up pretty well with Merfolk Thaumaturgist, but that’s unlikely to do anything outside of the kitchen table.
Next to go is our pin-up for those furry fetishists out there, as poor Serra Sphinx finds that the definition of a monolith for control decks has evolved to protection from Red and Black, trample, haste, vigilance attached to a 6/6 body.
I’m also tempted to kick out Aeon Chronicler, mainly because I still haven’t figured out that cycle at all. But it is a suspend card, and as suspend is now sort of linked with fading vanishing we can throw in Clockspinning, dig up two new cards, and have us a new control deck:
Creatures (10)
Lands (23)
Spells (27)
Yeah I know. Dralnu or Tron would murder it, but come on, look what I’ve got to work with.
This one has some fun with Clockspinning at least. Against control, you get a permanent (well, until they counter your Clockspinning anyway) one-sided Howling Mine with the Chronicler (and probable Godzilla-sized finisher in any case – Oh wait, they appear to have got Teferi down, looks like the Chronicler will actually be arriving some time around never). Against beatdown you get infinitely replenishing Arrows. Or, of course, you can have some real fun and let those Chronozoa get dividing (until they cast Damnation in any case.)
Timebender probably shouldn’t be in there, but if you’re lucky they might think it’s a Vesuvan Shapeshifter and waste a removal spell on it.
Actually, I really like the concept and flavour of Chronozoa. There are too many other good creatures available for Blue decks at the moment, plus the whole eight-Wrath thing, to make it really good, which is a real shame. Maybe in friendlier times…
Next, another couple of cards to punt.
I was going to put up a “Walk the Aeons”-type deck with Dichotomancy, but then I actually read it properly and saw “nonland.” Next!
Next is Spellshift, which is currently maligned as the worse card in the set, from what I’ve heard.
Remember that, clutch it close to your heart, and then prepare to weep when they counter their own Ornithopter and reveal the Bogardan Hellkite…
What?
Instant or Sorcery? That sucks.
Hold on. I’ll start again.
Remember that, clutch it close to your heart and then prepare to weep when they counter their own unsuspending Rift Bolt and flip over… Eternal Dominion (oh I don’t know – I’m trying here. Wildfire? Plague Wind? Isn’t there something in Black that destroys all their monsters and you draw a card for each one? Ooh – Mind’s Desire! Yeah, baby… we still got it!).
Body Double is actually pretty decent once you think of it as a Blue Zombify that doesn’t get fizzled and can effect either graveyard. Turn 4 (or 3) Careful Consideration followed by a Body Double on either Akroma (the White one) or Hellkite might be strong enough to see block play. A Standard deck might look like this:
Creatures (13)
Lands (24)
Spells (23)
But probably won’t, as there were Blue/White decks floating around that did this with Resurrection for a while before the metagame moved on.
So what are we left with? In my plagued state I’ve noticed the red light is blinking which means my deadline is approaching.
Ah we have Braids, lovely….
Oh my god, what have they done to you, my former once-lovely, crazier-than-a-loon, stab-someone’s-eyes-out-for-fun, psycho-bitch?
I’m better now.
They’ve destroyed you! *sob*
But I see the beauty in creation, and wish to help everyone fulfil the beauty of creating their dreams. See, look at that lovely Red drag… AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
It was a mercy killing really. Yes, the ability is pretty neat, but with the big bad Red dragon lurking in too many decks at the moment, all that’s going to happen is Braids is going to get blow-torched – you’ll take three and then have to deal with an angry 5/5 flying dragon with a hand full of overcosted junk you were hoping to cheat out with goody-two-shoes Braids.
I think this just leaves us with Magus of the Bazaar. I’m going to cry “Too Fragile” and run away like a coward. I’ll have a look at him later when I actually try building madness / very weird dredge decks. There probably is some nasty combo with him involving dredge and Dread Return, but I’ll need more time and better health to examine it thoroughly.
Unfortunately, now I really am at my deadline.
Dismal Failure is good, but not better than Rewind.
Ovinize may have a role in decks using Serrated Arrows (hey, maybe I should have used this guy in the other list rather than Timebender. And while I’m here, I also made a note to throw Tidewalkers in the same type of deck – d’oh, I hate being ill).
Riptide Pilferer might be a nice foil in the mirror match, but unfortunately he dies to Desert.
Venarian Glimmer is something for the Vintage crowd (where I imagine they might be quite excited about discarding an opponent’s Lotus for one mana at instant speed)
Dreamscape Artist plus Flagstones of Trokair. Now that’s acceleration.
Anyway, got to go. I’ll leave you with a Reality Acid deck that still needs a lot of work but I imagine will be very popular in the casual rooms. Reality Acid plus Cloudstone Curio – now we’re talking filthy.
Creatures (11)
Lands (24)
Spells (25)
Until next time, I’m off for a cup of warm cocoa while I plot just exactly how to take revenge on those blasted flu-carriers of Bradford.
Prof