Battle Royale is something interesting and fun I had been watching with an amused eye, watching “pro” players like RidiculousHat… I mean Ben Goodman… take on their fellow StarCityGames writers in a limited-resources gimp fight. Budget deckbuilder extraordinaire Chris Romeo lost to Richard “LCDCow” Feldman in the first round, and Feldman in turn lost to the Hatted Menace in the Snakes mirror-match for round 2. Ben then made the critical mistake of touching Red cards for round 3, losing to Murray the Skeletal Vampire in the hands of Talen Lee, shuffling it up from down under with a considerable time lapse… one player was playing Friday night, the other Saturday morning, how bizarre, how bizarre. Talen then beat down on Joshua “X” Claytor, who then went on to tear up the Premiere Events with his Battle Royale deck, enough to catch the eye of Frank Karsten and the curiosity of many.
Talen bowed to Craig, the “this here edits this here site guy”, who lost to Evan Erwin in all of his orange glory. Evan lost to Billy who didn’t even show up, with Rich Hoaen filling the hobo-suit long enough to kick Evan’s Red deck to the curb. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat their mistakes… so we have learned three things, yes?
1. Do not suddenly decide that burning the opponent out with Red cards is going to mysteriously work this time. Having an aneurysm is no excuse for playing a bad deck, and as fun as lighting the opponent on fire can be, it’s not usually the right thing to do.
2. DO NOT, under any circumstances, name your deck after your opponent. This is in fact the cardinal rule of Battle Royale, it’s right up there like “don’t split up the party” and “when running from a hungry lion, you don’t have to be faster than the lion, just faster than the person next to you”.
There are forms to be obeyed, and losing after you name your deck after the opposition is the form that will be obeyed. However, your deck must have a name, and preferably a clever one. If you don’t have cleverositudinousness yourself, borrow someone else’s… call the deck Flores Winner Winner Chicken Dinner, unless you are playing against Flores (obv).
3. Play enough lands for your deck to work, and pay attention to color balance and mana fixers. You don’t get a two-hundred dollar budget just for your manabase. It’s Signets and Karoos and Coldsnap tap lands, and basic land the rest of the way. Even Tendo Ice Bridge is over two tickets, and that eats into your “spell” money really quickly.
I for one wanted to do something somewhat amusing, while also playing a deck that had a fundamentally sound theory behind it. Sensei’s Divining Top is good, and Sensei’s Divining Top combo is better yet. Heartbeat of Spring.dec =/= 25 tix or less, yet, so SomeOtherTopCombo.dec it is. Two Tops must be better still, of course, and the Top has to be good without the other half of its “combo”… so shuffle effects and Counterbalance seemed the way to go. The other half of your combo must be good by itself as well (most 5/5 fliers are), and work with other cards besides the Top if there’s other stuff going on (any spell will do ya, and Sosuke’s Summons better than most).
And the deck name is both classic and obvious, because if Billy doesn’t show up this time, I’ll be declaring victory without him, not letting someone else climb into the hobo suit to be my undoing. But aside from deck-name, when I was consulting RidiculousHat as to whether this deck seemed reasonable or at all clever he pointed out something reasonably obvious: if the cute cards don’t show up, I’m still playing a Snake deck, which is pretty good. Not to mention Meloku can save many a lost game, like a good fairy godmother.
Creatures (19)
- 4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
- 1 Azusa, Lost but Seeking
- 1 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
- 1 Seshiro the Anointed
- 4 Sachi, Daughter of Seshiro
- 4 Sakura-Tribe Scout
- 4 Tidespout Tyrant
Lands (24)
Spells (17)
Of course, actually getting to this decklist was perhaps going to be a bit tricky, as it looks awfully greedy… that’s a lot of Uncommons, and between the deck and sideboard there’s a pretty respectable Rare count, even if most of the Rares aren’t exactly, well, respectable. Of course, Counterbalance and Sensei’s Divining Top are practically rares as well on MTGO, as they go for more “tix” than most of the Rares you’ll ever actually open in a booster pack. By my exacting calculations, working up a spreadsheet and entering all of the best values I was able to find so far, it calculated at the following:
| Card Name | Quantity | Cost Each | Total Cost |
|
Sensei’s Divining Top
|
4
|
1
|
4
|
|
4
|
0.45
|
1.8
|
|
|
3
|
0.5
|
1.5
|
|
|
3
|
0.05
|
0.15
|
|
|
Sosuke’s Summons
|
3
|
1
|
3
|
|
4
|
0
|
4
|
|
|
4
|
0
|
0
|
|
|
4
|
0.05
|
.2
|
|
|
4
|
1
|
4
|
|
|
1
|
1.67
|
1.67
|
|
|
1
|
0.9
|
0.9
|
|
|
1
|
3.9
|
3.9
|
|
|
4
|
0
|
0
|
|
|
4
|
0
|
0
|
|
|
11
|
0
|
0
|
|
|
3
|
0
|
0
|
|
|
1
|
0.45
|
0.45
|
|
|
1
|
0.45
|
0.45
|
|
|
SIDEBOARD:
|
|||
|
4
|
0
|
0
|
|
|
Nauralize
|
4
|
0
|
0
|
|
2
|
0.1
|
0.2
|
|
|
2
|
0.4
|
0.8
|
|
|
Sosuke’s Summons
|
1
|
1
|
1
|
|
1
|
0.05
|
0.05
|
|
|
1
|
1
|
1
|
|
|
Total
|
25.07
|
So in addition to finding some way to get better deals on this whenever possible, to drive the price under 25 tix, we also have to make sure we don’t run into the problem of leaving fractional ticket credits with vendors that we won’t be able to do anything with… meaning, among other things, we want to try and buy our items in whole-ticket increments whenever possible. After all, your mission should you choose to accept it is to build a deck with a budget of 25 tix, not to estimate the price somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 tix, borrow the cards from your friends and assume everything went to plan. Let us see how well Mission: Impossible worked out… the trading diaries of one Sean McKeown, Magical Hack:
9/14/05 — Just before the stroke of midnight.
Prior to putting actual physical money down for this, I tried liquidating my extra cards for tix. It makes the baby Jesus cry to see that Glares of Subdual only go for one tix, and the same for Ghost Council of Orzhova, especially since I didn’t even win my first round in the 4-3-2-2 in which I had Glare / Council in my G/W/b deck. Still, it’s not like I’m using them for anything, so liquidating everything I have “extra” that won’t kill me to see disappear gives me five tix to work with before having to put the remaining twenty down in Actual Money (TM). The goal for the first evening is to pick up some of the harder things to find at their “advertised” prices above, because they run out of stock quickly or are hard to find at a decent price.
After a lot of shopping around, I settle on two trades: I trade four tix for all four Sosuke’s Summons, since I know those will be around for one tix each but not necessarily in stock, and the bot ……0AllPriceStore has four in stock at one tix each. Four tix spent, still on target.
For the second trade, I visit one of the dealers I had logged who had the best price for Remand, Azorius. I see he is selling them for 0.45 tix each, and has two in stock; I have one extra ticket to liquidate tonight. Two Remands go in my pile, and as I poke around his Uncommons I see he has two Viridian Shamans. He quotes them at 0.05 tix each, meaning I can pick up the two I want for my sideboard to squat on Signets if Billy’s next deck is reliant on Signet mana for his fixing, since I want something easy to cast with an immediate effect that doesn’t have a chance to get killed… even if Trygon Predator is the more powerful card, good old Shaman does what I want faster… and counts as a Shaman, so he may actually boost my deck as well since it’s a Shaman-based trick deck.
This puts me 0.1 tix under my initial projection, so if everything else works out normally I’ll come in under budget by the thinnest of margins, 0.03 tix. A decent start, now I just have to wait for some of the other cards to appear at the prices I wanted to get them at. I go to bed happy, but then there was this cute girl over a few hours before and we shall say no more, except to say that Rizzo is living vicariously through me.
9/15/06 — The mission continues.
One could argue that Joshua “X” Claytor lost the Battle Royale because he didn’t put down nearly enough of his 25 tix in budget. He said he stopped spending at a lower budget because he couldn’t afford to turn more actual money into tickets, and I fortunately do not have the same problem. Just like how Waterloo was won and lost on the playing fields of Eton, actually stretching towards your budget is generally a good goal. Goal for the evening, then, was to pick up the remaining twenty Tix, without buying them from Wizards of the Coast, because while $20 I can handle (it’s good to have a real job), $20 plus tax just insults my intelligence for a non-existent online item that is effectively the same as money. Refusing to pay tax on money, even when justifying it as a currency exchange, I logged into the “Sellers” side of the marketplace and searched for the word “Paypal”. Finding a few, I hunted down a fellow who said he took both tix and Paypal, and prepared to ship him some actual money for some fake online money to continue the adventure.
Had a conversation with the person I was buying tix from, and found out he sells them at $.85 per tix, so instead of $20 plus tax we’re talking $17 no-tax. Of course, somewhere in there it became apparent that I had actually mis-clicked and was talking to the person whose seller ad was just beneath him, as became apparent when he asked who referred me to him and I said I saw it in his ad, which was clearly untrue. Hilarity ensued, as it became apparent that in my quest to find the perfect seller I had failed my dex check, and messaged not someone entirely different, which was good for a laugh… and who conveniently did in fact do exactly what I was asking for, and at the best price you’re likely to find on MTGO. So embarrassment was instead a resounding success, and it all worked out well enough so no need to be e-shamed. A fine accomplishment before breaking for dinnertime, and an evening spent being dragged out to a chick-flick I haven’t heard of… but these are the prices men pay to spend time with, well, chicks. Better than Friday Night Magic, right? The adventure shall continue anon, in just a paragraph’s space for you intrepid readers…
9/17/06 — “And on the Seventh Day, the Lord sayeth thou shalt trade…”
After an unsuccessful bout of enjoying a pleasurable afternoon drafting RGD on MTGO, in which I double-mulliganed on the first and came up short when I land-flooded and foolishly kept a one-land, Signet hand that turned on with a second land when on the play. Cleverly I did in fact draw the necessary second land… and cast my Signet… but his next play after the turn 2 Vinelasher Kudzu that was destined to eat me alive was a Tin-Street Hooligan, sending me back to Frown Town. Attempts at continuing to play, like casting Ghost Warden and what-not, were met with Pyromatics. And thus I disconnected, but the polite way… by pressing “concede,” because I clearly wasn’t winning that one with any combination of cards in hand or anything I could possibly draw, if I also had to draw the proper mana while I was at it.
Of course, I was the donkey who decided six lands and a one-drop wasn’t good enough game 1, and who decided not to mulligan a one-lander in the second. I was also the one who drafted R/W in pack 1, waffling in pack 2 to see if I was Izzet/Azorius or Orzhov/Rakdos, not really deciding until pack 3 with Windreaver and Sky Hussar. Sell-Sword Brute made the cut again, and I played eighteen mana sources (two Signets plus fourteen basics and two bounce-lands). Fate had help in not working out… after all, figuring I had plenty of lands, I could keep that one-lander was a decision that had to have come from somewhere. This, kids and kidettes, is why we have DraftCap to tell us what we’ve done wrong.
Trading began in earnest, then, and I picked up a Meloku for 3.5 tix from Dragoran20, again dropping us below the running tally needed. To shave the difference between 3 and 3.5 tix, he took a rare I wasn’t using, so I’ll endeavor to pick up the Chord of Calling I wasn’t using again at the end of this if I can, but otherwise consider its existence as having been a useful place-holder to negotiate the difference between three tix and four. I picked up 4 Tidespout Tyrant for 1 tix each from the bot pro_serge, figuring “hitting par” is an acceptable thing when everywhere I look I can’t see them for any fraction of a tix less. I then pick up 2 Counterbalance for 1 tix, not so easy to find when people are trying to sell them for 2 tix each, and having bought those two from sky_seller I noted I could pick up Remands at 2 for 1 as well if I couldn’t get the other two I needed for .45 each, as I’m running that extra little bit under the wire so far and have a bit of margin to give if I need to.
Next up I pick up my Seshiro the Anointed at 1.67 tix, (3 for 5, from the bot .WOW1). It takes two of my tix away, and gives me a .33 credit for other SuperBot sellers. Poking around to try and get some use out of that “money,” I found other SuperBot sellers (.aeea_selling_cards_1) had three Tops to pick up at 1 tix each. Those get added to the pile. I found a copy of Azusa for .75 tix, but to buy it I’d have had to pick up some of my other Uncommons at .1 tix instead of .05, and accept the loss of .05 tix as a shortfall… so my “benefit” of dropping Azusa by .15 tix had an opportunity cost of .15 tix, so I kept looking.
The next best deal I was able to find was for the Kira, Great Glass-Spinner and Oboro, Palace in the Clouds I really wanted, picking them up at 1.3 and 1.7 tix respectively. They are both pretty important, and if I can’t make up for it with any of the room left so far I can always cut the Sway of the Stars and Okina, as they are “fun” but less important. Azusa was “still” 0.9 tix, and I picked up him and two Time of Need for the remaining .1 tix, trading 4 tix for those cards and noting that the deck and sideboard may need to give a little in order to compensate for increased costs incurred while trading. While trawling around looking for a better deal, I found a bot trading 25 for 1, and found a Sosuke, Son of Seshiro for .04 tix instead of .05, for a mighty savings of the teensiest tiniest fraction of non-existent money, doubly so since it was a SuperBot and thus took some of that .33 tix away. .01 tix may not mean much, but it’s still agnostically better even if it is somewhat irrelevant. Having to stop for dinnertime, then, my mission so far has yielded:
11 Forests — free
3 Islands — free
4 Tidespout Tyrant — 4 tix
3 Sosuke’s Summons — 3 tix (7 tix)
3 Sensei’s Divining Top — 3 tix (10 tix)
2 Counterbalance — 1 tix (11 tix)
2 Remand – .9 tix (11.9 tix)
2 Time of Need – .1 tix (12 tix)
1 Meloku — 3.5 tix (15.5 tix)
1 Oboro — 1.7 tix (17.2 tix)
1 Seshiro — 1.67 tix (19.87 tix)
1 Azuza — .9 tix (20.77 tix)
Sideboard:
1 Sosuke’s Summons — 1 tix (21.77 tix)
1 Kira — 1.3 tix (23.07 tix)
1 Sosuke – .04 tix (23.11 tix)
2 Viridian Shaman – .1 (23.23 tix)
Still to buy: 2 Remand, 1 Counterbalance, 1 Top, 1 Time of Need, 4 Sachi, 1 Okina, 2 Sway of the Stars.
Oh, and I have to find all the commons somewhere, and since they are “free” I can in good conscience borrow them from anyone… something I’m loathe to do for the Uncommons and Rares, because it’s one thing to say you “can” get four Counterbalances for your deck at two-for-one or pick up Tops at one per, but another adventure entirely to actually do so without going over budget. Considering how greedy the deck is for tix, hitting right up to the glass ceiling of Battle Royale, I think that extra bit of attention to detail as to building “your” deck within budget on MTGO is necessary… something I wouldn’t do if I were four tix below the limit and had plenty of breathing room, but originally I’d clocked in just that wee bit over budget so “deus ex StarCityGames writer” is not something I wish to invoke and just tell you magically that everything worked out under budget.
Considering I have basically 2 tix left to work with, it’s likely I’ll just pick up the rest and something won’t be able to make the cut… which means I have between now and when the article is due on Tuesday to decide which is more valuable, the Oboro in the main or the Kira in the sideboard, or perhaps something else shaved off. With the remaining dealers I am interested in working with tapped out of the few remaining resources I need, and a decision to be made, I’m done for the night and have some contemplating to do, plus some IRL shuffling and testing to see just how relevant getting a second Blue out of a lone Oboro is… 1.7 tix worth, when I’m going over budget?
And if I can get it all in there, but not cram in Sway of the Stars as well… well, it’s a fun card and it might be rather useful if Billy tries a Counterbalance-based board control deck again, but it’s not exactly something I expect will pull its weight out of the sideboard. Ben Goodman Stasis-Snake tech may make it into one of those spots if I have tix left and no Sways, and we’ll just have to see how it actually works out. My assumption that I would be able to find an Oboro at a decent price seems to have been sorely misguided.
Craig Stevenson, our esteemed editor, lent me the commons that are supposedly “free” for Battlers, though the Blue-based Karoo he had four of was not Izzet Boilerworks but Azorius Chancery. An inconsequential change, as the things are there to help ramp up to 8 mana with “only” 24 lands, and had to be Blue because the deck needs as many of its Green sources as possible coming into play untapped. Much more consequential is the problem of figuring out how to jigger this back down under 25 tix, and I’ve resigned myself to getting the remaining cards and seeing what the final tally is, then shaving some of the acquisitions out until it fits at 25-or-fewer tix. The assumption that I could get an Oboro for the same cost as an Okina was a killer, and for no good reason I can readily determine.
9-19-06 – “Welcome to the Caribbean, love.”
Perhaps you scallywags may feel at this point that I am the worst deckbuilder and trader you’ve ever heard of… but you have heard of me. The main difficulty for the evening is to loot and plunder whomsoever sails within our purview, to pick up the remaining booty and not pay a lot for it. The remaining Top is easy to pick up for a tix, putting us up to 24.23 tix. Thanks to Special_Ed, we don’t have to use the last bullet we’ve been saving for ourselves and actually pay more than $1 in actual money for an imaginary Divining Top. A jolly good fellow, he, the best of sorts a pirate could ask to deal with. Azorius turns up again for the remaining two Remands for .45 each, pushing us over our limit to 25.13 tix and we’re still missing some things. The parrot on my shoulder notes that I’m a lucky son of a… well, you can’t print it on a family website… as you’ll see when the countin’ is done.
An hour of my life is wasted hitting up each and every bot I can manage to in search of a Counterbalance for some reasonable price. (It is also after midnight, so “Talk Like A Pirate Day” is officially over, and thus so too goes away my pirate-speak.) At this point, my testing has shown that Oboro, Palace in the Clouds is going to be asked to walk the plank, and Sway of the Stars isn’t that impressive either… if I am going to spend ten mana, and presumably more if I’m to float mana to play spells out of my hand, I might as well just win the game or something instead… and I can do that with Blaze. Blaze x2 is .3 tix, and the same seller (Azorius again) gives us the last Time of Need and four Sachi for .05 tix each as well, so that’s another .55 tix (25.68). And unfortunately that last Counterbalance costs a full ticket, from Special_Ed again, after an hour of my life is wasted trying to remember who it was that had them for .65. That’s 26.68 before we tell Oboro to walk the plank, and Okina just isn’t worth more than a Forest to me. It also means the Chanceries are turning back into Izzet Boilerworks, and we have to pester Craig again for that… or pick them up at cost to me, but “free” as far as the decklist is concerned.
Total cost: 24.98 tix
Creatures (19)
- 4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
- 1 Azusa, Lost but Seeking
- 1 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
- 1 Seshiro the Anointed
- 4 Sachi, Daughter of Seshiro
- 4 Sakura-Tribe Scout
- 4 Tidespout Tyrant
Lands (8)
Spells (33)
And just like that, it’s a deck. I don’t know exactly how good of one it is, but it does some very interesting things and cranks out Tidespout Tyrants (and takes advantage of it with Sensei’s Divining Top, which is a “free” bounce every turn and if you get two it’s Capsize with Buyback for one colorless mana) or “settles” for an awful lot of tokens from Meloku each turn. The Legend sub-theme gives us consistency (many Sachi, pretend we can afford four Meloku) and can help do interesting things out of the sideboard, and lets us buy multiples of good Legends at reduced-ticket prices. The deck has the ability to play aggressively with Snake attacks or hold defense behind Counterbalance/Top, can be annoying as heck to exhaust (see: Counterbalance/Top, and also Sosuke’s Summons), and sometimes just gets “that” draw and goes crazy with Tidespout Tyrant. The eight bouncelands help get to eight mana, three of which is Blue, especially thanks to the Scouts and Azusa, Lost but Seeking a Home in my Deck… and help to make sure I’ll have enough mana to power my spells, so long as I don’t draw too many bouncelands and no real land to go with them.
I will miss the two Legendary lands, but the Green one was good if I could sneak it in, and the Blue one never once returned to my hand for its effect in order to get double-Blue for Counterbalance or triple-Blue for Tidespout Tyrant… and the only thing I’m not certain of is that a Forest can be spared to fit in the Mountain, to fetch with Elder for those games when I just want to light Billy on fire if it comes to that. Blaze for your life total shouldn’t be counterable by Counterbalance, and the sideboard of Naturalize + Leak can help if that’s the kind of fight Billy wants to pick again this week… in addition to being overall well-suited to a variety of problems, and can help allow me to switch towards a more aggro-control bent than my current “snakes combo” configuration.
And regardless of anything else, it’s something interesting and offbeat, and I’m sure I’ll murder Billy Moreno to prevent him from shamefully matching Talen Lee two-match record starting with a ‘free win’ in which Rich Hoaen jumped in the hobo suit have fun.
[The Battle takes place on Friday 22nd September at 8pm EST, in the Anything Goes casual room of Magic Online. Be there! — Craig.]