You know what would make a good Timeshifted card? How about Natural Order? I can almost make Secret Force again already. Print that and I’ll be on my way.
Kthxbye.
Joshie is over and watching me play my Mono-Red Lotus, Dragonstorm, Ritual Ritual Warrens deck. I get out eight Goblins. I click on each one to attack.
Joshie “Don’t you hate having to click on all your guys and choose attack? MTGO needs a button labeled “Wakefield.” It would function in the same manner as F6. It makes all your guys swing every turn.”
A man and a boy are walking through the woods. It starts to get dark and the little boy trembles. “Its getting dark, I’m scared.”
“What are you scared for? I’m going to have to walk back alone.”
Oh! Nasty.
Much testing is going on right now for Extended. Joshie and I go to the May Garden like we do every Friday and slurp hot and sour soup and discuss sideboard strategies for Desire. Man, we hate that deck. In one tournament I was in, I pressed F6, went to the store, came back and my opponent still hadn’t finished jerking it. It was poker night and I got some bad beats and was out early. I entered an 8-man and played against Desire and could leave my seat, go out and watch the poker game and someone would ask me “Aren’t you playing Magic?”
“Yup. Playing right now in fact.”
Then I would sit there for ten minutes and go back and check my screen occasionally. “Hey, I lost.” Or “hey, he fizzled, I get another turn.”
I’ve given up on the G/W 37 creature deck I posted last week. While fun as hell, it’s not competitive enough. Instead I shifted my focus back to making “All in” a viable Extended deck based on what I have learned from Joshie’s G/W and my 37 creature deck. Adding in Loaming Shaman, Chrome Mox, and Gemstone Caverns to my Mono-Green Extended deck. Sadly, I haven’t tested it yet, just built it and meant to test it.
See, I’m not a very good player and I freely admit that. I’m a brute force kind of guy. I build a deck, it might be good, it might suck. I throw it at someone for twenty games and then make changes. Throw it at someone twenty more games, and then either ditch it, revise it slightly, or change the whole focus and try again. I’m not Alan Webter the Evil Genius of Magic who can keep track of what he’s doing, what his opponent is doing, what I’m doing while I play next to him, and still offer advice to the guy two seats away that is playing badly. Hell, I can barely remember to tap my mana first and then play spells. Especially after having gotten up at 4:00 am, still have a Nyquil hangover and just got done a four-hour car ride.
Which is why almost all of my decks require little thought on my part, but run autonomously or by rote from hundreds of play test games. Decks like “All In” or “Garglehaups.” Play a Gargoyle. Play Haups. You have no answer? Good game.
In Extended, where you either play Blue to counter big combos or you just rush your opponent with efficient weenies and burn, I try to look at being even faster than the fast decks. I don’t play Combo because I’m not good at it. I don’t play lock decks and I don’t play Counters. That might change if I plan on doing anything amazing this year and want to take my game to the next level. Which I do.
Josh and I are looking to magic bullets for Extended. For Desire, we spend the entire lunch discussing possible sideboard cards. Orim’s Chant looks pretty good. Wonder what those are going for online. Wow. 94.5 tickets. That seems a little too rich for my blood. Rule of Law? They just bounce it. Gilded Light? They Duress it, or they ignore it and play fifty goblins. What if we moved to Black? Does Underworld Dreams have any effect on them? (Actually no, I just finished a match while writing this where I got a second turn Underworld Dreams, and he took five points from it and then Tendrils me for forty.) What about Leyline of the Void? (Again, same match, next game, got a first turn Leyline and it had no effect on him.)
Cranial? Hmmm, lets try that next.
Here’s an actual game I played this morning before work.
Rychu_PL has won 1 game.
MLGreen joined the game.
MLGreen chooses to play first.
Rychu_PL joined the game.
MLGreen keeps this hand.
Rychu_PL keeps this hand.
MLGreen skips their draw step.
MLGreen plays Swamp.
Turn 1: Rychu_PL.
Rychu_PL plays Tinder Farm.
Turn 2: MLGreen.
MLGreen plays Swamp.
MLGreen plays Chrome Mox.
MLGreen plays triggered ability from Chrome Mox.
MLGreen plays Chrome Mox.
MLGreen plays triggered ability from Chrome Mox.
MLGreen plays Cranial Extraction targeting Rychu_PL.
MLGreen chooses Burning Wish.
Rychu_PL: nice
Turn 2: Rychu_PL.
Rychu_PL plays Sulfur Vent.
Turn 3: MLGreen.
MLGreen plays Hypnotic Specter.
Turn 3: Rychu_PL.
Rychu_PL plays Seething Song.
Rychu_PL plays Chromatic Star.
Rychu_PL plays triggered ability from Chromatic Star.
Rychu_PL plays Channel the Suns.
Rychu_PL plays Darkwater Egg.
Rychu_PL plays Cabal Ritual.
Rychu_PL plays Cabal Ritual.
Rychu_PL plays Chrome Mox.
Rychu_PL plays triggered ability from Chrome Mox.
Rychu_PL plays Mind’s Desire.
Rychu_PL plays triggered ability from Mind’s Desire.
MLGreen: unreal
Rychu_PL plays Chrome Mox.
Rychu_PL plays triggered ability from Chrome Mox.
Rychu_PL plays Chromatic Star.
Rychu_PL plays triggered ability from Chromatic Star.
Rychu_PL plays Seething Song.
Rychu_PL plays Mind’s Desire.
Rychu_PL plays triggered ability from Mind’s Desire.
Rychu_PL plays Darkwater Egg.
Rychu_PL plays Chromatic Star.
MLGreen: and there’s the tendrils.
Rychu_PL plays Channel the Suns.
Rychu_PL plays Chromatic Star.
Rychu_PL plays Chrome Mox.
Rychu_PL plays triggered ability from Chrome Mox.
MLGreen: DEAR WOTC PLEASE BAN DESIRE
Rychu_PL plays Tendrils of Agony targeting MLGreen.
Rychu_PL plays triggered ability from Tendrils of Agony.
I shouldn’t actually ask them to ban Desire. That’s not the problem. The problem is, was, and has always been access to insanely fast mana. What is the point of banning Dark Ritual when you see it’s a problem, and then printing Seething Song and Ritual of Flame?
That was the second round of an 8-man this morning. My first round opponent was also playing Desire. I won the first game with a second and third turn Hippy. Game 2 he tried to go off on third turn and fizzled. So I smashed him in the face and then immediately lost in two quick ones in the next round.
Black is looking pretty good to me right now. Not a whole lot of people (zero) playing Protection from Black creatures. This is the current build.
Creatures (20)
Lands (21)
Spells (19)
Notice the Gemstone Caverns and Chrome Mox. Luck factors. If you’re like me, you have to play cards that might make you lucky, and accept when they make you unlucky. Adding Gemstone Caverns and Chrome Mox to a deck is like playing Affinity. Everyone’s ready for Affinity. Shattering Spree. Kataki. Moment’s Peace. And yet, there are games where it draws an Ornithopter, two Cranial Plating, and a Shrapnel Blast to smash you in the face for twenty before you can even blink. And then there are times where you draw like crap, your opponent plays Kataki and you sit there and die.
(Have you noticed I say “smash you in the face” a lot? It was almost the title of this column.)
For those of us not Finkel, one of the best things to hope for is a deck that’s risky as hell but sometimes you get lucky and get a Hippy down turn 2 and turn 3, resulting in you effectively Hymning them and Lightning Blasting them every turn until their hand is empty and their life at zero. It’s tough for any deck to recover from that. Joshie’s G/W deck is based on the same principal.
“First turn Soltari Priest, second turn Armadillo Cloak. Whatcha gonna do now Boros? Oh!”
“Hey look a Jitte, just concede [insert any creature deck here.]”
“Hey look, Worship, just concede now Affinity.”
“Oh. Desire? Yeah, I’m done. [insert random whining and trash talking here.] Good game. Loser. Hey Wakefield, Magic blows. This game is stupid.”
I’m sure we all have days where we can relate.
Anyway, those are the decks and sideboards and meta-plays Joshie and I are working on right now. Extended PTQ on the 17th in Montreal where we put it all to the test.
Montreal? Yeah, return to the land of infinite hotties for the Planar Chaos prerelease yesterday. Michelle and Hilary want to honor Marilyn by going.
“We’re getting the band back together!”
Rather than my usual crew, this time it’s the venerable, vulnerable… Hold on…
Alan Webter just called to talk about our prerelease excursions and wanted to give me a quote for the article.
“Dismal Failure is the best counterspell ever printed in Limited” — Alan Webter.
Oddly enough, I know just what he means. Nothing like trying to play a Havenwood Wurm, having it countered, and having to discard a card as well. Talk about kicking a man when he’s down. I conceded right after that.
Rather than my usual crew, this time it’s the venerable, vulnerable, august Team Quarterstaff. Sadly, Doug has worn out his Team Quarterstaff shirt and we are required to wear our Pro Tour 1 T-shirts so we can all match. Also sadly, Rodney cannot make it.
I find my Pro Tour 1 shirt in the bottom drawer of my bureau where I placed it over five years ago, with my four other pro tour shirts. (That’s right b*tches, I am a scrub. But I’m a scrub with ten hard fought pro tour points!) In the drawer is also a rabid horde of dust bunnies and, surprise surprise, my lucky Superman underwear. Which is so torn and filled with holes Mare wouldn’t let me wear them any more. I pull them out and put them on for luck. I had totally forgotten they were in there. I used to wear them to almost every PTQ. It’s going to be a good day.
My old college roommate and current housemate Doug is a vegetarian on the path to enlightenment. He strives to be at peace at all times. He seeks harmony with the universe. In similarity, I’m a man with general anxiety disorder who struggles to remain calm at all times, and doesn’t let little things bother him. I strive to live in the moment and avoid stress through various mental exercises and counseling.
We have an hour and a half drive to Hilary and Michelle’s, and this is how our conversation starts out.
“Why do people buy a Nissan ‘Titan’ truck with a V-8 and then drive ten miles an hour under the speed limit when the wind blows a little snow over the road?”
“Look at this idiot. He buys a gigantic SUV and then slows down to twenty miles an hour to go over a small bump in the road. What is the point?”
“What the f*** is wrong with you people; it’s just a little snow! God! Drive!”
“It’s 9:09. We have gone 19 miles in 31 minutes. What the f***?”
“This is going to be a long day.”
We’re not very good at what we do…
I have bought a handy little digital voice recorder to keep notes on. Funny little stories and match replays. Things like that. I don’t read the directions of course, and assume that you have to hold down the red record button to take a note, and then release it when you are done and it will stop recording. So, Doug and I are riding up and I’m trying to record the above notes about our bad attitude and acting very un-enlightened, but the recorder keeps saying “Full” when I press the record button. That has to be a bug. I record a few more notes, ignoring this warning and then try to play back the notes I’ve recorded. But only the first one plays. What the Hell?
Hey, wonder what this stop button is for?
Turns out to correctly use the recorder, you press “record” once to talk and take a note, and then press “Stop” once to cease recording. Huh. How about that?
My first note was taken yesterday. It is 30 seconds of talking and 6 hours, 59 minutes, and 30 seconds of dead air.
Alrighty then.
Having mastered all two buttons on my recorder, it performs without a hitch the rest of the day.
We show up to get Hilary and Michelle and they’re not home. The babysitter tells us they’ve gone down to their store to get some stuff before the tourney. Doug has summer tires on his car and we get stuck in their driveway and it takes twenty minutes of rocking and pushing to get out him out.
We get down to their store and thank them for calling to tell us. Michelle tells us they called and left a message on Doug’s cell phone. Doug realizes he hasn’t turned his phone on yet this morning. (My cell phone got lost over the holidays and I have not bought another one. See, the strange thing is, Verizon isn’t a global company. If you want a cell phone in Spain, you have to get a contract with a Spanish telecom. So if I bought a new cell phone, I would use it for all of two months and then have to buy another one in Spain. Wendy has two cell phones for just this reason.)
I ask Hil for my massive bag of comics and he takes ten minutes to add them all up. Then Doug and I are starving and Doug goes next door to get us some breakfast wraps from the cafe. Fifteen minutes later he’s back and we’re ready. But wait. Doug has a stick shift and can’t drive and eat at the same time, so we go back inside the store to chow down our food. In the middle of this I ask Hilary if he knows the way. “To Carta Magica? Yeah.”
“It’s not at Carta Magica. It’s at a church basement.”
“What? Really?”
“Yeah, good thing we stopped to eat, can you get directions? I forgot to get them before we left.”
For some reason this takes another 20 minutes.
Not a good day for remaining calm.
I read some comics.
We finally get back on the road and head towards the city of infinite hotties.
Michelle “We went up to Montreal for New Years and it was great. We smelled pot everywhere though. It smelled like a dorm room through the entire hotel.”
Hilary “I think that’s they’re new marketing slogan. “Come to Montreal — It’s North America’s dorm room!”
I laugh and pull out my recorder to remind myself of this little quip and start talking into it.
Michelle “Who are you talking to?”
“It’s my new digital recorder. I use it to take notes.”
Hilary “Cool. Can I see that?”
“Sure.”
“Is this an iPod?”
“No.”
Michelle “It’s his phone.”
“It’s not a phone! Or an iPod. It’s just a digital recorder!”
Hilary “It only does one thing? How primitive.”
We get to the site after much trial and tribulation and laughter. It is nut shrinking cold outside and the wind rips through us like we’re being hosed down with ice water every step. We have to park three blocks away and the walk is glacial.
We get inside and the place is packed. There are hundreds of people here. We head up to the front and Mauro says “Jamie, I have a shirt for Alan, can you give this to him?” Sure can. We sign up for the next flight and find a seat. I crack open some comics get some pizza and chillax for 20 minutes until our flight starts. Sitting across from me as I open my packs is a very nice kid who speaks English and French fluently. We have some friendly conversation about the cards and I build a nice Red/Green deck. We play a game for practice and I smash him. This is what I played.
Durkwood Baloth
Keldon Halberdier
Essence Warden
(My very hot turn one plays.)
Needlepeak Spider
Strength in Numbers
Prodigal Pyromancer
3 Brute Force (Tip — If you get three of something, show it to the person sitting across from you as you open them so you have someone to back you up that you didn’t add them later.)
Reflex Sliver
Foriysian Totem
Lightning Axe
Battering Sliver
Two-Headed Sliver
Goblin Skycutter
Uktabi Drake
Havenwood Wurm
Dead / Gone
Citanul Woodreaders
Aether Membrane (MVP)
Blood Knight (just plain cool.)
Hammerheim Deadeye
Prismatic Lens
Fungal Reaches
8 Mountain
8 Forest
Some nice elimination. Some nice fatties. No tricks whatsoever. My favorite way to play!
My relevant sideboard cards consist of
Squall Line
Seal of Primordium
Krosan Grip
Wormwood Dryad
My first opponent is Pete Baron. Another Vermonter.
In the first game, I get some good cards. Particularly Aether Membrane. He gets some better cards. Those of note being Sarpadian Empires, Vol. VII and Gaea’s Anthem. He goes a long time without attacking because of my Membrane, but eventually, with no maindeck way to deal with either, I concede.
I side in Krosan Grip and Seal of Primordium.
He gets the same quick start. Luckily I have the answer to his Empires and eliminate it. I also draw the answer for his Gaea’s Anthem, but, oddly enough for me, wait to use it until he blocks with two guys. I Krosan Grip his Anthem, saving my guy and killing two of his. I win the second.
In the third game he gets some land and no creatures. A lot of high casting cost creature elimination spells like Dark Withering and Phthisis. On the other hand, I get the weenie creature rush with Keldon Halberdier, Blood Knight, Needlepeak Spider and a couple Brute Force.
He doesn’t get a way to force Madness or enough time to suspend Phthisis, and I roll him in five turns.
Michelle comes back in with coffee. “Oh my god is it cold out there! While walking back, I was hoping to get hit by a car so I could get put into a nice warm ambulance.”
Round 2 is… distressful. I am playing the guy that Hilary lost to last round. Hilary told me about thirty minutes ago that his opponent’s deck was like a Constructed deck. He had seven zombies, the zombie master, the zombie warlord, the zombie war chief, the zombie king, the zombie lord and the zombie God.
I find out he has a lot more than that. He also has Looter il-Kor, Damnation, Cancel, Cradle to Grave, Midnight Charm, and Dismal Failure.
He rolls me like a fat chronic blunt in two quick ones that are so one-sided I leave the table feeling like a prison b*tch. I need a shower.
Hilary tells me after the match “I thought he just had a Constructed deck. Turns out he has a Constructed net deck!”
Yeah, I have to admit, I did wonder how legal his card selection was. I don’t think I have a Constructed Extended deck that could beat what he played in “Sealed.”
My last opponent has played three Team Quarterstaff members in his rounds.
In the first game he shows me the Vindicate Sliver, and the judge watching the game and I discuss how utterly broken that card is. I tell him I’m going to build a deck with Mortify, Putrefy, and Black/White/Green slivers, and be able to handle anything that hits the board. No creature, artifact, enchantment, or land will be able to resist me! God I love decks that can handle everything. Too bad they roll over to counters and Dragonstorm and Desire and Wrath and …
In the first game he gets out Phthisis, Timebug, and Curse of the Cube, smashing all my permanents.
In the second game he was land screwed and I rolled him in five turns.
“Turn my guys sideways? Good game.”
In the third game, he gets out a Basalt Gargoyle and puts Pentarch Ward for Red on it, and flies in for seven turns and kills me. All my elimination is Red.
Hilary is determined to get a Timbermare for me and asks 30-40 people if they have one. Only one person does. These things must be rare as gold. No one in our 16 person flight gets a Timbermare or a Groundbreaker.
“Another flight?” Hilary asks.
“Well, maybe, but it’s six o’clock now, we probably won’t get out of here until ten p.m. and you wanted to go to the clubs for your birthday…”
Hilary asks the judge hanging around chatting with us how long until the next flight and he says “Tomorrow. We’re done for today.”
Alrighty then. We brave the cold and head back to the car.
Next week I’ll regale you with the hilarious story of our lesbian waitress, Michelle attempting to show off her French and ordering a “Potatotini” instead of the “Appletini” she was looking to drink. We also have a fun discussion about global warming, the electrocution of elephants, and a trip to the strip bar… with pictures! Oh yeah, and there might be a review of Planar Chaos Green cards and more Extended decks if I can fit that in too.
Go forth and smash face.
Jamie